I read about this joke in a book about the stock market. The moral of the story, as the author tells it, is that you can pick the right stock for entirely wrong reasons. You just luck out, though you can always pretend to be a genius.

Put another way, this one more epistemological, there is no way you can really know for sure that you pick the right stock for the right reason. In the same way, you can’t really know for sure the boy who was supposedly daydreaming didn’t know the answer and just blurted out the right one serendipitously. Maybe he really did know the answer and had a didactic sense of humour, who knows?

As a lifelong student of philosophy, I believe it was thinking about deep issues like that joke and losing money in the stock market which led philosopher and psychologist William James to come up with his brand of pragmatism, America’s greatest contribution to the Western philosophical tradition.

James thinks many of our beliefs, especially those deeply held moral and religious ones, are impossible to determine, objectively, to be true or false.

So, it’s far more useful – and here he is putting his money where his mouth is – to try to determine whether a particular belief is useful or not, for a particular purpose or goal. How a belief is used, its practical consequences, are the sum total of its meaning (usefulness) or meaninglessness (uselessness). An example for the former is, Jesus is our saviour, and the latter, the moon is made of cheese.

Reading about President Xi Jinping and Taiwan yesterday made me think back to all those fruitless years in graduate school and that time when I lost my shirt in the stock market.

A report in the Financial Times this week has gone viral. It says Xi told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen face to face in April last year that the US was trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait.

He warned such a conflict with the United States would destroy many of China’s achievements and undermine his goal of achieving the nation’s “great rejuvenation” by 2049.

I don’t know why the report attracted so much worldwide attention. Many Chinese including yours truly think that way about the Americans. If you visit the Chinese blogosphere, it’s practically conventional wisdom on the mainland.

Cui Tiankai, the former Chinese ambassador to the US, said exactly that back in January.

“They [the US] will supply military assistance, they will supply weapons for proxy war, and the Chinese will be killing Chinese. We will not fall into that trap,” he told an audience at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington.

I see little reason not to believe Xi and many in the upper echelon of the Chinese government hold such a belief.

But, is that belief true or false? Or rather, is it useful?

The FT piece then quoted some China expert from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank.

“If Xi genuinely believes that the US actively seeks conflict with China over Taiwan, then concerns that Xi has created an information vacuum or is otherwise getting poor counsel from subordinates are, worryingly, true,” Jude Blanchette was quoted as saying.

I find his comments funnier than the pronoun joke. Blanchette is either extremely ignorant or terribly cynical. I suspect the latter, considering who actually pays the bills at the CSIS.

Given all the endless US provocations, military and diplomatic, and constant billion-dollar sales of weapons, and stationing of US special forces within swimming distance of the mainland shores, and the new and ongoing military bases encircling Southeast China, and the US naval hardware stationed in the region – given all that, you don’t need to be an “expert” like Blanchette – in fact you need to be not like Blanchette – to think this is looking a lot like the O.K. Corral.

And how many times did President Joe Biden come close to denying the “one China” principle, a long-professed red line for Beijing? I count at least four times.

At the very least, it’s not unreasonable for the Chinese to think a cross-strait armed conflict is a perfectly acceptable outcome to US policymakers, even if that is not the only primary goal they seek to realise.

The US rarely sees a war it doesn’t want to fan the flames for, so long as it’s in someone else’s territory. In 2022, there were 46 active conflicts around the world, and the US supplied weapons to one or more parties in 34 of them, according to the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Ultimately, though, no one can really know what Xi thinks the Americans think about Taiwan, and so it all boils down to an endless guessing game.

Perhaps far more useful is to follow William James, and consider whether the belief attributed to Xi in the FT report is useful.

It’s surely a good thing that Xi and other top Chinese leaders believe a conflict with Taiwan would be a trap set by the US, and they must do everything to avoid falling into it.

Whether he is right about the Americans, that belief, true or false, is terribly useful and should make us all sleep more soundly at night.