Talking Past Each Other: Pallavi Aiyar on India, China, and the Case for Cognitive Empathy

**Kaiser Kuo** (0:09)
Welcome to Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Beijing, though not for once from my home, but from the home of my guest at a dining table, where in recent months I have enjoyed wonderful meals and delicious wine in great company, all due to the hospitality of the guest I'll introduce to you momentarily. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at cinekapodcast.com. I know there are tons of sub-stacks out there, including one beautiful one I subscribe to written by my guest. They start to add up, I know they do. This one really does deliver value for money, with great content from wonderful partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project, so please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more.
Today on Seneca, I am delighted to welcome the writer Pallavi Aiyar. Pallavi first came to Beijing back in 2002, if I'm not mistaken, taught at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade here as a correspondent for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country, chronicling China's rise for readers back home in India. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors, her wonderful memoir of those years, which remains, I think, one of the very few sustained attempts by anyone to look at China through Indian eyes and India through China-habituated eyes. In the years since, she's turned that same gaze on Europe, on Japan, places where she's lived for good stretches as the wife of a diplomat.
More recently, she's turned the gaze inward in her latest excellent book, Travels in the Other Place, Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts.
Last year, Pallavi and Julio, her husband, moved back to Beijing after some 16 years away. Long years, agonizing years for me. Just months before my own return, which I count as just really one of the great blessings of my move back. The two of them have been convening some genuinely memorable evenings, and they are simply put enormously fun to be around. But the real reason she's on the show is her writing, which manages a balance that I think is actually fiendishly difficult to strike, combining deep sensitivity toward both of the countries she knows best and everywhere else she writes about, combined with an almost brutal candor about each of them. She writes this substack which I mentioned called The Global Jigsaw. I recommend that without reservation. Please go subscribe. And over the past year and a half, she's published a remarkable series of essays there and elsewhere on India and China as the twin nations of the exam. We'll talk about that a bit. Both of them are very much driven by notionally meritocratic exams.
On the near impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders, she's published a serialized interview with the Chinese India watcher Mao Keji of the National Development and Reform Commission. And the piece that we're going to build much of today's conversation around an essay for Noema Magazine, published by the Berggruen Institute, arguing that the deepest problem in the India-China relationship isn't the border or the trade imbalance, but actually the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other. We're going to be talking about both of those lenses, about cognitive empathy and its lamentable absence in the relationship, about how her answer to the question that she posed back in 2008, would I rather be born Indian or Chinese, has changed, and about what it's like to come home to a Beijing transformed. Pallavi Aiyar, welcome to Sinica.

**Pallavi Aiyar** (4:16)
Hey Kaiser, it's so great to be on the show.

**Kaiser Kuo** (4:19)
We're so long over, I mean, it was a long time ago, we've spoken mirrors, that was the last time we had you on, right?

**Pallavi Aiyar** (4:25)
It was, I think it was during COVID, and that was in the context of Anand Krishnan's book, about India and China, and I was on there as a discurrent.

**Kaiser Kuo** (4:35)
Oh, that's right, that's right. Yeah, you were on with Anand, another lovely human being, who will be joining us again on the show, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. But let's talk a little bit first about, you know, where you started back in 2002, Pallavi. You guys arrived in Beijing, you arrived to teach English initially, like I said, at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute.