Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the

leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

He has consolidated power to a level

very few people ever expected. And under

his rule, China has strengthened

technologically, diplomatically.

>> He's a man I respect greatly,

>> militarily. It is now widely understood

to be an industrial juggernaut on a

scale the world has never seen, and a

way the world does not quite know how to

respond to. But Xi Jinping's ambitions

for China go far beyond that. In the

long term, he wants China to be the

preeminent world power. In the near

term, he wants it to control Taiwan.

You cannot understand modern China, what

it is now, and where it is going without

understanding Xi Jinping and the power

he wields and the ideology that drives

him. My guest today is Kevin Rudd, who

has had a unique way of trying to

understand that ideology from many

different angles. Rudd has this kind of

amazing biography. Began as an

Australian foreign service officer

serving in China. He's a fluent Mandarin

speaker

who rose to be prime minister of

Australia in the late 2000s.

Along that rise, he got to know she

personally in a way very few other world

leaders have. Then after serving as

prime minister, Rudd went on to pursue a

doctorate at Oxford and he wrote his

dissertation on Xiinping's ideology,

reading everything that has come out

under she's name, which is quite a lot.

He's published that in a book on

Xiinping. He's also the author of the

avoidable war. He recently served as the

Australian ambassador to the US and he

is now the president of the Asia

Society. And so he has a really rare set

of perspectives. He has an academic

perspective, a diplomatic perspective, a

political perspective on China and

Xiinping and the US China relationship.

He's really an amazing person to get to

talk to about this. As always, my email

esrainshow@ny times.com.

>> Kevin Rudd, welcome to the show.

>> Thanks for having me on the show.

>> So, before we get to she, I want to talk

a bit about your career. Not that many

people go from being prime minister of a

major country to getting a PhD and being

a grad student again. So, tell me a

little bit about your path.

Yeah. Well, I seem to have this

permanent um appetite for career

demotion. So, I was prime minister, then

foreign minister, and then did a PhD, uh

became ambassador, and now I'm running a

think tank. So, um it's one steady slide

for me. Why did I do a PhD? A lot of

folks uh in the world and particularly

my former counterparts as international

political leaders would ask me this

question. Hey Kevin, you're a China guy.

What does Xiinping think?

And I thought I knew pretty well the

answers to that until I began to have

doubts myself about the authenticity of

my answers. So I decided to um force

myself to read everything that this guy

had ever written. And I thought the best

way to force myself to read everything

this guy ever written was to enroll in a

defill at Oxford at the age of 59.

And uh that's exactly what I did. And

the principle at play was this

uh the male vanity principle which is it

would be too humiliating and too

embarrassing having enrolled in such a

program to then withdraw because you'd

lost enthusiasm.

>> It's a commitment device.

>> Yeah, that's right. It was a

>> But you also had a history on China. You

had begun your career working in the

foreign service. Do I have that right?

>> Yeah. No, as a kid I um started first

year university with modern Chinese

language, classical Chinese language and

Chinese history. And so um I'd done four

or five years of that. And then because

I was essentially unemployable in the

1980s,

uh found that the only place that had an

interest in taking on my talents was the

Australian foreign service. And

eventually I ended up in Beijing as one

of their better Chinese linguists at the

time. They did send me to Sweden first

just to make just to make sure I would

lose my language.

>> What year were you in Beijing at that

time?

>> Uh in Beijing from 84 through until

virtually the beginning of 87. So

>> So what was it like then?

>> It was China at its most dynamic. It was

China opening up to the world for the

very first time where all things were

possible under heaven. And so this was

um almost the high days and hol dayss of

China's uh international uh engagement

and it was fully 2 years before Tanman

which was the first great Leninist

wakeup call

>> and when I think it's after this period

but when do you first come across Xi

Jinping?

>> Well it's interesting uh when I was a

junior woodchuck in the Australian

embassy at the time.

>> Is that a a official term? uh

increasingly yes. And so basically the

guy does the photocopying. So when I was

there, our prime minister was visiting

at the time, a guy called Bob Hawk.

And uh Bob uh wanted to go to places

other than Beijing. So we organized for

him to go to one of the newly opening up

cities, what they called a special

economic zone at a place called Shaman.

So I went to Shaman to do the advance

work and I met with the then vice mayor

of Shiaaman who was a guy by the name of

Shei a given name Jinping um and um

that's where we first met. Did was it a

long and extensive uh you know boozy

dinner? No. Um but it was the first time

I met the guy.

>> I've met uh a lot of politicians in my

time for for my sins. Sometimes you run

across somebody and you can feel the

gravity of history warping around them.

Right. First time I met Obama, you could

feel the weight in the room.

>> Yeah.

>> It it shifted things. You know, Trump

has this quality. There are people have

them. But but people had him early. I've

met people early in their careers and

they just have that quality.

>> I met other people who don't, even

though they rise quite far. What was she

like? Did he feel different to you than

other mayors and vice mayors and party

bureaucrats? Would you have told me

after that meeting, I just met somebody

and that young man is going somewhere?

>> Because I was a student of uh

contemporary Chinese politics, I knew of

his father, Xi Jun, who was already a

member of the Pot Bureau. But I'd be

fibbing to you if I said to you today

that the room shook for me uh when I

first met him

much later on when I was prime minister

of Australia and he was visiting

Australia as vice president of China and

I remember sitting in front of the

fireplace in the prime minister's

residence in Canra. it was winter and

spending a couple of hours uh over a

glass of Australian red uh talking about

the state of the world uh with him uh in

Chinese. Um

that's when I sensed that this was a man

of history for the simple reason that

all of his references were about his

place in the context of unfolding

Chinese history. So that's the first

time in which I had that sense we were

dealing with something, somebody, some

person uh who was

unique.

>> Say more on that. When you say that he

referenced himself in the unfolding,

what was he unfolding and what was his

self-understood role? Because this was

before he was leader of the party.

>> That's true. And when his position was

still somewhat contested, it wasn't

absolutely clear that he would become

paramount leader. And the conversation,

which as I said ran for a couple of

hours, was free flowing. Um, we didn't

have interpreters. And essentially his

thesis was that China intrinsically is a

great power. Historically was

demonstrated as such throughout a couple

of thousand years of recorded history.

Not the 5,000 that the Chinese often

boast about, but just a couple of

thousand, which, you know, given we're

up to the 250th anniversary of the birth

of this country as a republic, um, you

know, a couple of thousand is pretty

good and certainly measured against

Australia, it's very good. But he saw

that the trend of Chinese history was

China was a great power when it was a

unified and b able to keep uh, foreign

adversaries under control and divided.

uh and China collapsed as a great power

when neither of those propositions held

true.

And so for those reasons uh spinning it

into the 20th century and then into the

21st century when I was meeting with him

he saw the contemporary mandate of the

Chinese Communist Party which is to

maintain China's domestic unity and to

keep it free from external pressure uh

so that it could once again become a

global great power and that whereas he

wouldn't say quote I Xiinping therefore

have a unique mandate to do this on

behalf of 1.4 4 billion Chinese people.

Close quote. For me, the subtext is

pretty clear.

>> So, she's a man with a sense of history

>> and also a man with a very particular

history. You mentioned his father a

moment ago. Tell me his story.

>> His father, Xi Jong Shin, uh is a

fascinating figure in modern Chinese

politics. So in the period of the

party's um crucable which was when they

had to retreat to a place called Yanan

in northwestern China where they hold up

effectively for the better part of 10 or

15 years that's when Xi Jung comes to

the four as a tr trusted military left

tenant uh in Mao's uh system

but Xi Jong also runs uh through a

period whereby by he is repeatedly

criticized and in fact purged by Mao

including during the cultural revolution

uh 66 to 76.

And as we know from our study of human

psychology particularly in authoritarian

states such experiences of purges from

the party center can either have one of

two consequences.

One, it makes you even more loyal to the

party because you have recognized your

errors through this process of criticism

and self-criticism.

Or the second is you turn absolutely

hostile to the party as an abuse of

Leninist power.

Uh Xi Jong Shin Xiinping's father was

very much in the first category. In

fact, he reminds me of that last scene

in Orwell's novel with Winston, uh,

where he realizes as he disappears into

oblivion that he loved Big Brother all

along and the party always comes first.

That's where Xi Jong Shun fits. Despite

being purged, always coming back to the

party because the party knows best. A

true Leninist. I think Americans who

hear that story and given our particular

culture which has a bit less experience

with purges and like stories of people I

was going to when you were saying that I

was thinking about a number of people

who have been purged or nearly purged

from Donald Trump's Republican party and

having watched some of them go down

alternative paths. So I agree with you

so far, but I think we have a somewhat

naive sense

>> that the natural reaction is the second

reaction. Hostility to the party,

recognition of the tyranny, and even if

you have to buckle under for a little

bit, you're always plotting in your

heart. So you imagine being the son of a

person who is purged somewhat repeatedly

whose family in a way is humiliated by

the party

>> and has physically suffered been sent

down to the countryside and lived in

quite um impoverished circumstances for

several years.

>> Xi Jinping was

>> as a young Xiinping was

>> so I think people imagine it would

create a hatred. You're saying for many

people it does the opposite. What did it

do for Xi Jinping and why? Well, my

analysis is that Xiinping uh like his

father Xi Jung concluded ultimately that

the party knows best and that the party

ultimately has the nation's interests at

heart. It's not to say that the party is

infallible, they will make mistakes, but

in the full sweep of history that we owe

our loyalty to the party. And you're

right, most uh Americans would say this

is just nuts. In fact, uh uh all

Australians will think it was completely

nuts so um simply um not within our our

realm of lived experience if you'd been

treated that way. But there's something

about Leninist induction which creates

these um veins of steel in these folks

and Xiginping is of that ilk and so

ultimately unemotional about these

things ultimately absolutely hard-headed

some would say cold-hearted

uh but absolutely resolute that this

beast called the party is the engine

which takes China into the 21st century,

not just as a country barely surviving

against the external predations of the

west or whoever else

but uh on its trajectory to become a

global great power and that's why I

always say to American interlocutors

never underestimate Xiinping never ever

underestimate him. You talked about

Leninism creating I think you called it

veins of steel.

I don't think most Americans are very

familiar with Leninism either in its

initial form, right? How it modifies

Marxism to say nothing of its Chinese

form which is a modification on top of

that. So what is this Leninism of which

you speak Marxism as we know is an

economic ideology and it's all about

creating ultimately an equalian or equal

society through an equal distribution uh

of goods. um but to be achieved uh

through a process of quote dialectical

change. A Leninist party is designed to

accelerate the natural historical forces

of change through the active

intervention of a vanguard party which

accelerates the course of history

through its own violent actions and

therefore it's a history accelerator.

That's as they see it. Of course, when

applied to China's own circumstances,

uh this Leninism essentially has all the

hallmarks of Stalin's party. It's like

Stalinism frozen in time. It is uh an

unrelenting discipline anchored in

absolute loyalty to the leader himself.

And this is rehearsed time and time and

time again in the party's internal

ideological discourse and reflected in

what the party does in practice. So we

talked a bit about how she's father is

purged. He also becomes in certain times

unpurged.

Mao dies. Dung takes over. And I think

this gets into something worth talking

about which is the party. You described

it as a bit like the Stalinist party

frozen in time, but it also is then

because of its feely to the leader able

to make quite radical changes. So how

does the communist party in China and

say and and beyond that China itself

change after Mao? It's gone through I

think uh two big changes. The first

reaction under Dang Xiaoing who

effectively replaced Mao in 78 was

called the great period of reform and

opening and reform meant basically

introducing market disciplines into the

economy rather than state planning and

opening meant um we in order to grow

need to open to the outside world. He

didn't fundamentally change his Leninism

he certainly changed its Marxism. He

changed the economic ideology in a quite

artful way by saying that at this period

of economic history that the uh factors

of production

needed to be fully unleashed

uh in order to pull China out of poverty

and therefore it was necessary to

contemplate and embrace a long period of

inequality while that occurred. And when

asked how long, he said dozens of

generations,

which uh you don't have to be a

mathematical genius to work out that's

hundreds of years. Dozens of

generations.

And that orthodoxy effectively uh

enabled market-based reforms uh in the

economy domestically and engage with the

capitalist world externally which is how

frankly a generation or two of Americans

and Australians for that matter became

familiar with Dung's China Jung's China

Dung's successor and Huenta's China who

was Changamin's successor because the

overriding ambition

was to grow the economy, bring people

out of poverty and make China a global

economic great power effectively for 35

years right through until 2012 starting

way back in 1978.

The second big change after Mao though

is with Xiinping.

uh he becomes general secretary of the

party at the end of 2012 and he has

changed that ideological script again

back to what I would call the Marxist

left a much more stated driven and

partydriven economy and with much

tighter levels of Leninist control. I

want to track how he gets into position

to do that. So I was just doing my

simple math. I think when Mao dies she

is 23 or so thereabouts. Yeah. So what

are the positions he holds?

>> A young guy, he'd been in the

countryside a bunch. His father a

complicated figure. What is his path

upwards and what makes him a figure

>> who keeps getting promoted upwards by

the Chinese Communist Party

>> through this period of reform and

opening

>> which is quite interesting. Um if we've

looked at our Machaveli carefully in the

prince, Machaveli often speaks of the

need to mask one's own ambitions and to

mask one's own ideas while being a loyal

servant of the prince of the time before

you yourself end up in power. So and of

course there are parallel axioms in

Chinese traditional political wisdom

about that as well. So bear that in mind

as we trip through his uh political

career. By the uh late 70s, early 80s,

he lands a position as a private

secretary to uh the then minister for

defense whose name is Gong Bao. And this

was before I met the guy down in Saman.

He spent a couple of years doing that

and he's always prided himself in

therefore having something of a military

grounding or military background. He

then undertakes

prefecture level positions as party

secretary where he often refers to how

much he learned from working closely

with the peasants on the ground as party

secretary in a prefecture. It's to raise

local living standards, to organize,

shall we say, agricultural production,

to ensure that um uh agricultural

surpluses are able to be sold on on

private markets on weekends and so that

you begin to see the emerging sort of a

local as it were semi- capitalist

economy.

>> So kind of technocratic governance job,

>> technocratic governance and it's a

standard pathway to ultimate

advancement. He then is elevated to

become vice mayor of Shaman, which is

one of China's four special economic

zones at the at the forefront not of

just domestic economic reform like in

the countryside, but uh of opening to

the outside world where I encountered

him for the first time. I'm sure he does

not recall meeting me. I'm sure he met a

whole bunch of foreign barbarians at the

time. Um and then um he slowly is

elevated to the point that he ends up as

the provincial party secretary of the

entire province of Fujen. Um he then

ends up for a long period of time as

provincial party secretary of uh the

province of Ja Jang and then he

ultimately goes to Shanghai as party

secretary before he's then elevated by

Jang Zamin uh to the center uh when he

ultimately becomes in 2008 uh vice

president of the country vice chairman

of in time of the central military

commission. So what is his reputation in

this period? The Chinese Communist Party

110 million members, many many many

people vying in various bureaucratic

positions for advancement.

Why is she almost unique among them

moving up and up and up and up? What are

other people saying about him? What is

he considered to be good at? In the

Chinese Communist Party ecosystem,

uh it is invariably advantageous to be

what they call Hongai, which is second

generation red. Um so um because his

father is Xi Jong Shin and his father

has been obviously rehabilitated in the

reform and opening period. Um it is of

no small advantage in your own career uh

elevation. Mind you, his major

competitor for the job at the top, a guy

called Borchili.

Uh he was also the son of another

revolutionary leader called Boy. Uh and

he was on a similar as it were career

trajectory. And for those of us in the

China analytical world, these two

careers were moving towards a point of

collision. uh and of course uh those uh

in and around uh Xiinping and those

otherwise opposed to Borchili dealt with

Borchai.

So that's one element of his

advancement. The other is at a

technocratic level in terms of the

growth data coming out of Xaman, coming

out of Fujen, coming out of Jang and

coming out of Shanghai. He has an

impressive set of numbers to demonstrate

to the party center that he's not just a

political show pony. I think he's

always, as I reflect back on his career,

been um a safe hands sort of guy uh

keeping uh his provinces stable uh while

allowing the private sector to do its

bit.

>> I think sometimes from the outside we

look at the Chinese Communist Party and

don't see politics. we just see kind of

a lockstep

uh organization. Um we don't understand

its internal workings very well, but it

does have politics. It does have

factions. It has a lot of people in it.

Why him? What is his pitch to the party?

And what do his supporters want from

him? What do the other factions fear in

him? like what what is the understanding

of how he becomes a leader and why he

becomes a leader and what it means

>> that he is the one chosen to be the

leader

>> and this is the question that many of us

in the analytical world are least

equipped to answer because we weren't in

the room but let me have a go anyway

the kingmaker at this stage is uh

Jungzamin even though he'd been formally

out of the position for a decade

Jung brings a men wise old bird. I mean

I um met him a couple of times in my

political life. Um and uh who loved to

sing by the way.

>> We once had him in Sydney when he was

mayor of Shanghai himself. He insisted

on performing on stage at the Sydney

Opera House. So we made sure there was

no one else in the opera house at the

time. But he liked it. He was performing

on stage at the opera house. He could

say he'd sung there.

>> Uh good singer.

>> Um uh

The Chinese would say mama hoohoo, which

is Yeah. Okay.

Bit like me in the shower, you know.

>> Sure.

>> A confident singer.

>> A a confident singer. A man who likes to

sing.

>> I admire that.

>> Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It requires um

a limited level of self-awareness um in

order to really enjoy it. Uh but anyway,

Jungamin um

>> or a knowledge you can purge whoever

doesn't like the way you sounded.

>> That's true. Um mind you, uh as a junior

Australian diplomatic official at the

time, I appropriately applauded this

performance at the opera house. That's

kind of what you do.

>> But anyway, you roll the clock along. I

think Jung Zamin has worked out that

there are problems in terms of party

corruption, that there are problems in

terms of in discipline and there are

problems in terms of allowing uh any

further as it were slide in control

given where they ended up in '89.

So against the alternatives that uh they

were faced with at the time, I think

they saw in Xiinping someone who was a

party guy first and foremost uh and

secondly having presided over a couple

of or three heavily reformist provinces

Shanghai, Fujen and Jang

uh which were very much at the um the

cutting edge of um economic progress

that the economic reform program would

be safe. The opening to the outside uh

world's economies would be safe as it

would be safe in terms of party

political control. I think that's why

they made their bet uh with Xiinping and

I think Jung Zamin by the time he died

only a couple of years ago would have

been deeply surprised by how much

Xiinping then set out to change the

center of gravity of the Chinese

political economy in a big way.

>> Why would he have been surprised by

that? because um he assumed that the

economic uh reform program would

continue

>> um that there would still be a lot of

space for the Chinese entrepreneurial

class that China's international

economic engagement would continue that

China would progressively integrate

itself with the global economy and

instead what he saw uh certainly by the

time we get to 2015

is Xiinping turning uh the levers very

much towards the Marxist left greater

role for central planning lesser role

for you as shall we say interim

inequality as Dung had conceived of it

originally and at the center of this uh

Xiinping's rehabilitation of an old

Mauist saying which was along these

lines it doesn't matter whether we're

talking about north south east and west

whether we're talking about the

government the military the academy or

commerce or society

the party leads in all and Xiinping

pronounced that and brought it back with

a certain mauist flourish. That's what

would have s surprised Jung Zamin.

>> The thing that I had heard of him as

being known for was a series of

anti-corruption campaigns. So tell me

about that side of his story.

I think during the period in which he

was party secretary, I haven't seen a

strong evidence uh trail that he has led

at the provincial level uh crackdowns

against corruption.

At the same time, as soon as he takes

over as party general secretary for the

entire communist party at the end of

2012, the first thing he does almost is

to launch a nationwide anti-corruption

campaign. So he has been, I think,

observing,

noting uh seeing how corruption under

his predecessors had moved from uh a

retail level to a commercial level to an

industrial scale.

and he very quickly brought draws out

the analogies with the collapse of the

CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union, and says in effect that the fish

rots from the head. Um, and what happens

when a fish rots from the head uh is

that ideological corruption gives rise

to physical corruption gives rise to the

dissipation of all forms of political

discipline. and he saw that as

fundamental to the collapse of the

Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet

Union has become this sort of long

playing uh training video for various

folks in the Chinese Communist Party of

everything that you should not do. Te

tell me the way as you understand it

because he's written quite a lot about

it. Xi Jinping would narrate the

collapse of the Soviet Union and the the

Communist Party because I think here the

story that is largely believed is the

Soviet Union collapsed under its own

contradictions and Ronald Reagan's

defense buildup and moral leadership. I

think that's not how they see it in

China. So how does Xi Jinping see it?

One remember in the Gobbachov period uh

it was um governed by these dual

disciplines of glnost and peristroka

uh which translated effectively mean

glaznost opening and peristrika reform

sound familiar to reform and opening

under dangiaing so he's got this rolling

around on the back of his head that if

you unleash too much of the capitalist

impulses of the Chinese people like the

Russian people um then ultimately you're

going to shake the inherent uh

disciplinary structures um of the ruling

party. Point one. Point two uh what he

said more specifically particularly in a

remarkable speech he gave I think in

2013

to uh a meeting of funsters otherwise

called the propaganda and ideology

department of the CCP. That should be a

fun conference if every want to go to

one. I've never been invited, but I

think that's where they really get into

their Marxism and Leninism and

propaganda together. Uh, and that's

where he spoke most um clearly about the

uh corrosive uh influence of capitalist

values uh and about the attrition of um

communist ideological values in the last

days of the uh communist party, the

Soviet Union. The third reason he gives

in his uh extensive corpus uh of

writings and teachings um is his wistful

reflection that there was not one single

man prepared to stand up in the Soviet

Red Army to defend the party uh when

things got to extremists in 1991.

Um and so his it has caused him again to

double down in terms of his

determination that the party will always

be in control of the army, absolute

control of the army.

You mentioned being in China not long

before Tanaman Square and I've certainly

read many histories of China where the

sense is that the Chinese Communist

Party's response to Tanaman Square very

different how it's understood in the US

as this moment of horrific crackdown and

barbarity

is in another sense the moment the

Chinese Communist Party decided not to

be the Soviet Union that it was not

going to allow an economic opening.

to lead to

the kind of social rights and discontent

that could shake their power.

Yeah, I was I'd finished my diplomatic

posting by then, but I happened to be

back in Beijing at the time, uh, working

in a different incarnation. And we

arrived in, uh, Beijing on the 20th of

May, uh, which was the day they declared

martial law. And we're already into

those massive uh, set of student

protests within the square. And of

course the um crackdown, the military

crackdown and when all the students were

killed was on the 4th of June. So

because our entire program of whatever

else we were supposed to be doing was

cancelled because of um chaos under

heaven.

>> Um I then went wandering in the square

for a week u to talk to all these kids.

Um and uh and uh it was remarkable uh to

see the spontaneous outburst from kids

from and not just kids, not just

university students, but from uh other

units of the Chinese Communist Party uh

calling out for freedom and democracy.

I remember if you've been to Beijing,

walking to the square for the first

time, coming down across the ceremonial

bridges in front of Ma's portrait

beneath the gate of heavenly peace to uh

look at the square for the first time.

And I'd seen the square multiple

occasions when it's full of the normal

Communist Party paraphernalia.

And this time it was like a massive

comprehensive

uh exercise in iconocclasm.

That is um to the left was the uh

history of the museum for the history of

the Chinese revolution which had one

giant flag planted on top in the Chinese

characters saying Mr. democracy, great

hall of the people, full of big

character posters, as they call them,

uh, calling for the purge of a whole

bunch of people within the Chinese

leadership who are old-fashioned

leftists. And then in front of you there

was this, uh, crowd of, I think on our

particular day, half a million kids in

the middle. It's quite a large

gathering.

>> Yeah, the scale is unbelievable. And

then in front of them as I looked, there

were these parade marshals uh who were

organizing

uh individual um shall I say um uh

protest marchers of various units of the

party. And I looked at to see which ones

they were. Uh one protest group from the

Central Party School, another protest

group from such and such a um foreign

policy academy. Um and so it went on.

And so as I wandered around the square

uh and saw this site for the first time

as a scholar or as a student of Chinese

modern Chinese history in particular but

classical Chinese history as well I

could see the instinctive reaction feel

instinctive reaction of someone like

Dung an old-fashioned Leninist who would

just say this is galwan Chinese

expression meaning creating chaos

and I had this enormous sense of

foroding that the clock was already

ticking. So why did they do it? Um I

think Dung had concluded that unless he

drew parameters around this that the

party would rapidly lose power and

furthermore that you would have this

sort of chaos spread right across China.

And so they acted.

But then through the rest of the '90s

through until probably about 2000, there

continues this internal debate within

the Chinese Communist Party about

whether we could execute a form of

political transition to a Singaporean

style long-term democracy or guided

democracy as they would see it uh in

order to create an exit ramp for the

Chinese Communist Party over time. After

Dung died in 97,

that debate rapidly reached its

conclusion and they said, "No, we're

hanging on for the long term." And

that's where I see the fundamental

changes having occurred. And remember,

that's a decade before Xiinping comes to

power. So, one thing we've seen under

shei is first a lot of consolidation of

power, but also a pretty hard crackdown

on Chinese civil society, rights

lawyers, labor organizers, journalists,

international NGO workers. Tell me about

freedom in China under Xi and why he has

felt the need to do this.

From his first year in office from 2013,

you could already see the directives

going out to

uh pull in on the reigns of uh control

over the exercise of freedom in multiple

domains. religious freedom, for example.

Um the independence of journalists uh to

the extent that they had it before, but

they did have some there was some

investigative reporting underway. Um the

legal system, the independence of

lawyers and also those who had been

engaged in academic level discussions

about, shall we say, other forms of uh

democratic governance experimentation in

China at the village level.

Xiinping's conclusion was that all these

added up to an erosion of the Leninist

control of the party

uh and therefore uh crackdowns unfolded.

In the case of religion um because

religious practice is so widespread in

China, it's not an abolition of all

forms of religious expression, not at

all. but reigning in anything which was

uh not authorized. So that if you were

to look at it in 2026, it's vastly less

free uh than it was a decade before.

>> More recently, we've seen some purging

happening in the military. What have you

made of that?

>> With the military in particular, uh he

has sought to reassert his control. It's

not just that we've seen multiple senior

Chinese commanders, including those in

the Central Military Commission removed,

but in the last several years, we've

seen a hundred senior PLA generals uh

purged as well. What's it about? Why has

he done it? A um he genuinely thinks

that corruption the military impedes the

professional capacity of the military to

execute its mission in relation to

Taiwan or other contingencies.

The second is and here it's harder for

us to reach these judgments but I have

some confidence in them. He's not really

prepared to brookke a whole lot of

internal dissent within the military or

alternative views. Uh the most recent uh

purge for example of Jang Yol Sha who

was the um effectively uh deputy

commander of the central military

commission a lifelong friend of Xiinping

uh going way back when uh and through

their fathers

um reflected an ultimately unemotional

view that unless you are 1,000% on board

the Xiinping bus um then it's not the

place for you. So, uh,

>> and in what ways were these figures,

these officers not fully on the Xi

Jinping bus?

>> Here we have to speculate. It's not as

if they were engaged in preparations for

military coup. That's not the nature of

the beast. It's more internal

disagreement I suspect about um the

nature of uh levels of military

preparedness

uh for shall we say deploying the PLA

against and into Taiwan contingencies.

So an officer who says in a meeting I I

think this would be a disaster is not

long for the world

>> or an officer who says senior officer

who may say comrade chair um I think we

uh have two or three capability sets

which need to be further improved. That

would be the more cautious way of

putting it. uh whereas my suspicion is

that Xiinping's response to that will be

to say uh you guys are supposed to be

providing absolute confidence in the

system that we're ready. Um how can I

therefore be trustful of your leadership

of the system when you yourself are the

sources of doubt. Now that I have to say

is hypothesis I do not have strong

evidence points of that but it's not

just a corruption equation. I've also

seen American analysts say, for example,

that the purges in the military

therefore

make it much less likely that Xiinping

would deploy the PLA against Taiwan uh

in the coming years. Uh my experience of

these things is that for everyone who is

purged, there's a queue of 100 people

waiting to take the job. Um PLA is a

very big beast. How much are the

corruption purges, the corruption

campaigns about corruption and how much

are they about control?

>> I think it's um uh control um being the

dominant factor in the equation. Um and

therefore the ability of the system to

be able to deploy a corruption file

against anybody on anything is large uh

in a formidable security apparatus.

Remember in the uh organization

department of the Chinese Communist

Party, which is basically the Uber

personnel department, everyone has a

file and on that file goes a whole bunch

of stuff. Um and some of it may well be

fabricated. So it is ultimately about

whether I choose to pull your file out.

So you for this PhD thesis, this book,

you read everything Xiinping has

written, which is quite a lot. He's I I

find this to be an interesting thing

about him. He is much more well

published than most world leaders.

>> That's true. Of course, at the end of

the day, we don't know how much is the

hand of Xiinping. How much is is it his

writing group of people who may get two

or three lines of instruction and off

they go. Um, and how much of it is

actually a formal party document which

simply has his impromata later on?

>> I'm not I'm often not sure that matters.

I I have a belief that is not always

shared in my profession that the things

politicians say in public are much more

important than the things they say in

private. You're absolutely right. Uh

having been a political practitioner

myself, you are very mindful as a

political practitioner of the parameters

you set for yourself for the future, for

your party for the future, and for the

country. um as opposed to private

ruminations over a beer.

>> Yeah. People politicians will tell you

all kinds of things. They shade to the

audience in private. They

muse when they say things in public. It

is a steadier signal of where they're

actually going to go. And we treat it

the opposite. We in my profession, we

love the off thereord comment. We love

what is said over a beer. We think that

is like a guide to the truth. And it's

often, I think, a way in which we badly

get the future wrong. Like, if I

understood the Republican party from

what Republican members of Congress told

me privately over the course of the

Trump era, I would have predicted it

completely wrongly. Whereas, if you take

seriously what they do in public and

their speeches, you get a fairly good uh

sense of where it's going. Which is all

to say,

what is the ideology

of Xi Jinping that emerges out of these

documents? You've described it as

Marxist Leninist nationalism, a turn to

the Marxist left.

For an American audience who's not that

familiar with these terms we've been

banning around, what's your sort of

synthesis of it?

Let me answer it two levels. The first

is I've read enough of Xiinping to

conclude that he is a convinced Marxist

dialectician.

What do I mean by that? Cuz it's not a

term that we bandandy around at

Starbucks much here in New York. Um but

it's important we understand how the

other person thinks but more importantly

their methodology their epistemology the

way in which they reach conclusions

about that which is real and that which

is not that which is true and that which

is false. But when a dialectician which

sounds like a horrible word

comes from Hegel the German philosopher

uh adopted by Marx and Engles and it is

essentially a view of history that there

are two fundamental sets of forces

changing historical developments over

time. One's called dialectical

materialism and the second is called

historical materialism. So what the hell

is that? Um, dialectical materialism is

a worldview by Marxists

uh which says that

change in society, the economy and

politics occurs between this uh constant

push between progressive forces and

reactionary forces which they ultimately

describe as the forces of the working

class versus the capitalist class. And

ultimately one pushes hard against the

other, overturns the other and creates a

new synthesis which ultimately is a

communist state. And so that's

dialectical materialism. And the Chinese

Communist Party says

>> basically the the inevitable historical

engine that pushes through

>> the capital state to communism.

>> That's true. And through the agency of

what they call class struggle or just

struggle. By the way, one of the things

that Xiinping has rehabilitated as a

term in China's political discourse

today is struggle, struggle, struggle,

struggle. Uh, a term which largely

disappeared during the Dong Jang and who

period. So bear with me for a moment.

This is turgid stuff and I apologize to

your listeners. Th this is a safe space

for turgidity.

>> This is seriously

>> they know what to expect.

>> This is this is seriously turgid. Um,

and I've had to read this stuff and I

wouldn't recommend it to any of you

unless you're suffering from deep

insomnia and I can give you the relevant

chapters of my book which will send you

off to sleep. But historical materialism

is the parallel discipline which asks uh

Marxist historians this question. Where

are we in this current historical moment

in the evolution of this uh inexraable

struggle between progressive and

reactionary forces between working class

and the capitalist class? Uh between

workingclass nation states and

capitalist nation states in producing

this final resolution through struggle

of an evolution towards a a socialist

and communist society. And where they

say uh through historical materialism

China has reached uh is that they are

now moving out of what they call the

primitive stage or the primary stage of

socialism into something higher than

that and that the role of the Chinese

Communist Party under she's leadership

is to further accelerate that change and

applied to the nation state not just

China's society and economic experiment

domestically when they talk about uh

changes not seen in a 100red is a

favorite phrase of Xiinping

uh when they talk about um the rise of

the east and the decline of the west.

These are all euphemisms for an

historically materialist view that

China's time has come uh in this

inexraable process of of dialectical

change to emerge on top. So the reason I

say all that is that it may sound like

gobbleygook to you and me and I don't

really subscribe to any of it. But we

would be wrong to conclude that this is

not the analytical mechanism used in the

central organs of the CCP, the Chinese

Communist Party to understand where

China is today and where the rest of the

world is today.

>> Well, let me try to build that uh

empathic bridge.

I think to

most of us in the US, e even the

socialists in the US are sometimes they

pretend to be Marxists. I've met

relatively few who truly believe in

dialectical materialism or historical

materialism. And I think if you're here

and you're trained in the way we see our

society, the way we do our thinking, the

idea that history

is linear in that way, teological in

that way, that there are forces playing

out that fairly inevitably are moving

towards a certain end state. I actually

find this the hardest thing to believe

that other people believe.

>> Right? This is the belief. I can imagine

why you believe a communist state is

better, a social state is better, but

the belief that it is

driving in that way that that history

has a direction

>> is I think often the hardest

part of the pill to swallow.

But as I understand what you're saying

is that Xi Jinping and the Communist

Party do believe

that history has a shape

>> and that that shape is very important

>> to the way they understand their role

and structure their governance and

direct their society. Is that fair?

>> Uh that is a fair summary. Remember this

shall we say teological trajectory of

which you spoke just before

um has not historically been unique to

Marxism Leninism. There's been you know

Judeo-Christian variants of this at

various times in history moving towards

an ultimate tilos um which is the

realization of the kingdom of heaven on

earth etc. Um I'm a bit like you. I'm

somewhat skeptical about both these

propositions. But when you describe uh

and said just before this is the way

they think that history has its own

force that it is moving and you can make

it move more rapidly through the agency

of a Leninist party. That is precisely

what they think and would be

analytically derelict if we did not

explain that to others as saying this

underpins their ultimate analysis of

where the rest of us fit in the world

and where they think they are taking

China today. They call it scientific

socialism. But there's the other

dimension that it is also for Xi Jinping

specifically Chinese. And so attached to

this theory of this communist theory of

history, this Marxist theory of history

is also a theory of China's history and

its role in history. So how does she's

nationalism, his story of China and its

role in the world play into this? I

argue in the book that simultaneously

to these shifts to the Marxist and

Lenist left, there's been a shift to the

nationalist right. Um, by which I mean a

permanent and growing appeal to China's

own inherent nationalism.

Uh, anchored in its civilizational

achievements in the past. Anchored in

we've been badly done by by the um by

the rest of the world during the hundred

years of um foreign humiliation from the

opium wars through the end of the war

with Japan in 1945.

And now we're on this trajectory to make

China once again a global great power.

and the global superpower

and be proud about that. Be super proud

about that. So you have this turbocharge

of history in the nation and the nation

now being uh the vessel or the vehicle

through which this great ideological

enterprise of Marxism Leninism is

therefore realized into the future and

will become the vehicle through which

that is then taken into the world.

It has been much longer than I would

like it to have been since I've been in

China. My hope is to go back sometime in

the next year or two. But when I was

there, it was 2010, 2011.

And

the most common thing that members of

the party

and members of the private sector said

to me was that China was not going to be

stable beneath something like 8% growth.

that the the way they described China to

me was almost as a transaction between

the party and the public and the public

support for the party was dependent

on this roaring growth rate. M and then

I watched over time as that growth rate

began to fall and then under she

as the growth rate began to be dep

prioritized as he began to do things

that were clearly about

control ideology and we're sacrificing

that that level of prosperity

and I've wondered how much has been a

turn from

this uh growth above all to nationalism

as the new way you hold the country

together. I mean, everybody seemed

obsessed to me with the question of how

do you hold together a country as big as

China? How do you keep it to the point

she made about when China's great? How

do you keep it unified? Is that

accurate? I I have always found this

puzzling because it seemed to happen

very fast, right? this thing everybody

was talking about to well we're just

going to experiment with actually

letting the economy be much weaker than

that and doing so fairly successfully.

I think um she's response to the dilemma

of national control is at two or three

levels. Uh one

his first impulse is always ideological.

Remember the analogy with the communist

party the Soviet Union we just need to

get these kids to read more Xiinping

thought and that'll brighten up their

day. in my view, not an enormous recipe

for success. Um, but that's his first

impulse. Double down on ideology and

double down on ideological propaganda.

And there's the uh whole view that they

can produce a whole new generation of

what they call little pinks, that is

little reds,

who will

capture this vision and transcend them

into the future. The second response to

the challenges of national control uh

political control during a period of

sliding growth is um simply the

surveillance state. The so-called white

card movement was a protest movement

where people didn't hold up protest

signs. They just held up blank white

cards. Uh well those people all tracked

down through um surveillance systems,

their phone locations, etc. and whisked

away. And so understand that the

surveillance state through iris

recognition, gate recognition, facial

recognition, the monitoring of uh all

your payments uh which are all done

electronically means that frankly the

tools available to the uh surveillance

state today is stuff that Mao and Stalin

would have dreamed of way back when. So

that's number two. Number three goes to

the core of the economic um dilemma

which the party faces at present.

Effectively through a series of central

economic policy decisions what Xiinping

has said and what they are now doing is

placing an absolute priority on let's

call it the supply side of the economy

rather than the private demand side of

the economy as a growth vehicle. And the

supply side of the economy is

manufacturing. It's industry. It's high

technology. It's ensuring that we have

complete control over our own supply

chains and that we progressively control

the supply chains of the world. That's

what we're doing because against a

future national security crisis over

Taiwan, we will not allow our country to

be vulnerable to external pressure. And

that's what they're doing. That is

therefore sacrificing the normal

evolution of private domestic

consumption as the driver of growth. And

if you look at China's domestic savings

rate which remains high, the private

domestic consumption rate which remains

low relative to where they would

normally be as a low middle inome

country. There is a direct trade-off

here. So we are likely to see continued

lower growth in pursuit of these

national economic industrial policy,

national security objectives in the

economy uh with this trade-off. But the

problem is uh lower levels of

employment, higher levels of youth

unemployment and people frankly becoming

increasingly disenchanted. I

>> I want to zoom in on youth protest

movements like the white cards. You also

have the sort of people just laying

down, right? There's the

>> the sort of quiet quitting, so to speak,

>> lying flat.

>> Lying flat.

>> It's hard to know from the outside how

meaningful things like this are, but

typically when you begin to think about

a society with sustained levels of youth

unemployment, you imagine a certain

ferment to that, a certain space of

dissatisfaction. Now, there's a lot of

surveillance, right? a very very

powerful central party but it's also a

party that does have to respond at some

level to you know a public if it is

disenchanted so what is the theory of

this does the Chinese Communist Party

see this as a problem just see it as a

discontent to be managed they see it as

a problem but in Xiinping's calculus

they see it as the lesser problem

against the greater problem which is

national economic self-reliance and

national economic dominance in the

driving technologies of the future. What

they call in the party's discourse the

new productive forces which is

essentially AI quantum and everything

else. If you want evidence of this, just

look at China's made in China 2025

strategy, which is the largest scale

exercise in any nation's industrial

policy seen in economic history. So

what's their theory of the case? This

massive investment in industry and in

leading edge technologies will

ultimately produce a new wave of

productivity in the economy which will

create a new wave of wealth including in

the related services sectors but this

will take a while to wash through. In

the meantime maintain surveillance and

do a certain amount to keep the economy

and growth as stable as possible. For

example, the property sector has been

the one in which most Chinese citizens

have had their savings over the last 20

years. Uh over the last 5 years, the

property market has collapsed through

the floor um through a series of policy

and political interventions by Xiinping.

Xiinping rather than allowing the

property sector to collapse completely

decided as of about 2024 to put a floor

under it uh to rescue some of the

property development firms and also to

ensure that people were not going to

lose anything and everything. So there's

an awareness that you can't just allow

private consumption to be destroyed

completely. You can't allow that. But

has that dissipated his fundamental

ideological resolve to build this all

powerful Chinese industrial state which

controls supply chains at home and

abroad hasn't compromised that one bit.

The bottom line is Xiinping's response

uh to a very disgruntled body politic

was what you need to do is to learn how

to ch which is eat bitterness. That's

what we've done throughout the most

difficult periods of party history. Of

course, if you've got a formidable

allseeing, all dancing surveillance

system across the country run by the

security intelligence authorities, you

can say chool, eat bitterness with some

effect because the system will be out

there to round you up if you don't do so

accordingly and with a smile on your

face. Well, let's talk about the way

he's building that industrial juggernaut

because there was a way of looking at Xi

Jinping's economic policy a few years

ago

which made it seem like he was in many

ways decapitating

the productive factors of the the

Chinese economy. This is maybe a good

place to talk about Jack Ma and Alibaba,

which was, you know, the Chinese

national champion, globally competitive

until Ma was seen as getting too big for

his britches. And then something

happened. I mean, what what happened to

Jack Ma?

Well, Jack was always larger than life,

and I've known Jack quite a lot over the

years in one form or another. Um, if you

ever listen to Jack's English, you'll

notice an Australian twang. It's not

from me, but as a young person, he went

off to Australia uh to learn some

English. So, uh we're responsible for

Jack's version of the English language.

But the bottom line is this. Jack became

um uh adulated across China as the

symbol of this new entrepreneurial class

that is uh this u poor boy poor boy from

nowhere could build up this

extraordinary firm to become

worldleading.

uh but in the party's view and in

Xiinping's view he became bigger than

the party. where all this came to a head

uh was a number of years ago at a what's

called the Bund Conference in Shanghai

um which is an annual conference

uh Jack decided to publicly attack the

parties um financial management policies

and how constricting it was on uh new

forms of innovation in the Chinese

financial services sector where Ant

Financial one of Jack's subsidiaries

would be a major participant uh Xiinping

just cracked right down and not just on

him but what was then called the

collectivity of the platform companies

and that included uh others uh including

10 cent uh and a number of other firms

and then there be began a series of

quote anti- monopoly or antitrust moves

against the size which these companies

had reached and then that spilt over

into a broader campaign against uh shall

we say the excessive display of private

wealth health, private influence,

ostentation and the private sector at

large. And that led to a further

campaign to implant party secretaries uh

in each of these private firms and to

say to these private firms, by the way,

um we think it's a good idea under a

mixed economy model that the state

begins to take equity in your companies.

So needless to say, this didn't lead to

a set of happy campers amongst the

Chinese private sector.

And as a result of that, you began to

see not only this uh trend that I

referred to before, which is static or

declining uh figures for private

domestic consumption, consumers driving

the future of growth. But private fixed

capital investment uh also began to

slide as well. Both these things created

a dilemma uh for the party's overall

growth discipline. you correctly said

before the unofficial social contract

used to be 8% growth. It then became 6%

growth. Hey, four would be okay. Um but

it was beginning beginning to slide

south of that. So they've tried to

stabilize both these things since about

2024. You may remember this high high

level meeting in early 25 when Jack was

finally brought in from the cold

together with other

>> he had sort of been disappeared for a

while.

>> Yeah. He'd um

>> you didn't see him anymore.

>> Yeah, he he'd been actively studying

texts and I'm sure that included

Xiinping thought. I'm not quite sure but

you know he wasn't arrested but he was

not exactly completely free to move

either. So there's been an effort to

bring these folks back into the into the

circle and also because even under

Xiinping's industrial policy with

cuttingedge new technologies led by

artificial intelligence being at the

four and Xiinping realizes that guess

what state enterprises can't do all of

this. In fact, most of the juice lies

within the Chinese private sector. we'd

better remain them. So there's been an

attempt to correct, but we should not

lose sight of the fact that the

fundamental, shall I say, move to the

Marxist left, move to industrial policy,

Uber Alice, move to the China

controlling global supply chains,

national party state view of the world

is still predominant. it is these other

two corrections for consumers and for

private entrepreneurs have been more at

the margins. Well, let me speak from the

what what I think to be the American

perception of China and how it's changed

in this let's call it five-year period

right since postco

and there was a period when Jack Ma was

suddenly gone and you could see she

cracking down on a bunch of these

companies where you know many people in

the US I think had the view and zero co

was considered to have gone on way too

long it had been something of a disaster

that we were finally seeing the thing

that had been long predicted which is

countries with that strong of a

centralized government, call it

authoritarian, call it communist,

whatever, however you want to frame it,

that eventually they begin to break

because the leader can make bad

decisions and eventually will paranoid

decisions, power consolidating decisions

and that that you know you saw China's

growth rate going down and that maybe

this period of Chinese

rise was coming to an end. This was very

much as the Biden people left office how

they felt things were.

>> And then I would say over the last two

years that shifted again, this is my

perception of the zeitgeist

to a a sense now that China's industrial

juggernaut has jumped a series of levels

such that it is no longer just copying

America, but it can now do things

America to say nothing of the Europeans

or others cannot do. It is nearly level

with us in AI but much more able to

build some of the underlying

infrastructure of AI like energy but its

ability to produce electric vehicles.

Its ability to produce functionally

anything because of its manufacturing

ecosystems is now actually beyond

>> where we are. And so it was wrong this

sense a few years ago that the Chinese

model is beginning to break down. And in

fact, whatever its problems, it has

developed perhaps not economic

prosperity, but economic power

>> that is very very real. In some ways,

all of these stories seem true to me.

And I I'm curious how you think about

that that kind of whiplash that has been

happening in the American story of the

Chinese economy and its power.

Well, I think uh Ezra, you're right to

describe that evolution of American

perceptions and American perceptions are

not entirely detached from the

underpinning Chinese economic reality.

Sometimes I worry though in this country

where I've lived among you now for the

better part of 10 years. Sometimes uh

hope becomes a substitute for analysis

and strategy in this country that uh

Americans uh or at least those in

administrations of one hue or another

look at Chinese demography. They look at

the slowing of growth and they say yeah

we told you so problem fixed and we move

on. It ain't fixed. Um, China is

formidable and particularly under a

leader like Xiinping, it's doubly

formidable and given his surveillance

apparatus, it's trebly formidable. I

think in terms of the periods you're

talking about, yes, postco growth

slowed. But underpinning it all was

always this continued red thread of

Xiinping's core organizing principle,

which is I'm building the world's most

powerful industrial state. and I'm not

going to let any bunch of private

entrepreneurs or consumers get in the

road of that. I'm just going to do it.

That was made in China 2025.

The 10 technology objectives he set for

himself in 2015. If you look at the

double down in the current 15th 5-year

plan announced in only

>> these are technologies like

semiconductors,

>> aeronautics, EVs, batteries. If you look

at the list of where they were in 2015,

which was nowhere much, and where they

were by 2025 and the end of last year,

frankly, as an exercise in industrial

policy alone, whatever the economic

inefficiency may have been in getting

there, Xiinping regards that as a bit

bit of loose change compared with

obtaining the commanding heights of

these new driving. America is keeping

Chinese electric vehicles out

>> not because they're bad cars. It's

because they're such good cars and if

they came in here at their cost they

would annihilate the American electric

vehicle sector. Right? I I I think this

is a change and people have not for so

long our theory was they're copying us

or stealing our intellectual property.

Now we are quite afraid in some cases of

their intellectual property. I think

this has been a big evolution in the

reality. Does China engage in industrial

espionage? Yes. Does China uh copy stuff

which is obviously uh um available

through open patent of course and they

have the great advantage of scale and

they scale up they scale up rapidly

given the automatic leverage of their

domestic market. uh but given their

domestic market is still flat uh because

of problems with uh disposable income uh

then deploying this surplus capacity

this surplus production on global

markets is their next best step and

since America has has erected the tariff

wall all roads lead to Europe which is

why you see such huge reaction now from

European political leaders that's what's

unfolding and it's all of those things

everywhere at once and at a pace of

knots like this thing is happening at

speed now. Is it sustainable for China

itself?

Ultimately there is a problem of finance

and we need to think this through. How

does China finance this level of

industrial subsidy for them in their

calculus? This is a temporary exercise.

That is we will through our level of

industrial subsidy ultimately destroy

the world's competition and opposition.

Those will fold. Then we can restore

prices at a level which makes sense for

us in terms of the cost of production

domestically. But by then the

alternative sources of production have

gone. This is a very elaborately thought

through strategy on the part of the

Chinese and so far to give them credit.

Um it has worked remarkably well but

they cannot sustain it indefinitely.

They're currently borrowing from Chinese

consumers and their personal savings in

banks to keep this whole thing afloat.

But industrial subsidy, which is of an

order of magnitude not seen in economic

history before, cannot be sustained

forever. So I want to slow this part

down because I think it's really

important. You were saying earlier, you

know, you described the the problem,

right? You know, the Americans just sort

of hope the problem is solved. And what

is the problem? How how does one define

the problem?

And we're not always very clear about

that. But I think it's something quite

close to this that the challenge China

poses to the rest of the world is it is

able to

suppress domestic prosperity, take money

from its own people, keep their wages

down in order to put it into these

industries to attain scale

which would functionally make it

impossible for other countries to

compete in these industries because they

will just be too far behind and the

Chinese goods will be too much cheaper.

I mean, that is the theory in part of

the tariffs you saw come out in the

Biden administration and obviously even

more in the Trump administration, which

is if China is going to make its

products artificially cheap, we are

going to make them artificially

expensive.

From that perspective, is that a wise

strategy?

It is a perfectly logical response to

the challenge which China's industrial

policy which exists on the basis of

massive industrial subsidies poses. The

alternative is you simply

uh allow the Chinese industrial

juggernaut to dominate every single

industrial and sub-industrial sector.

We've already seen that in terms of

critical minerals and rare earths both

raw and processed. If you want a case

study of how what that looks like in

practice, look at that sector.

>> Not only did they dominate that, they

were so dominant in it that they were

able to break Trump's tariff policy,

break his trade war by simply

threatening to remove our access to

their rare earths and magnets and and

and so on. They had leverage over us

that we did not have over them. The

Chinese are highly intelligent, highly

disciplined, masters of economic

statecraft, and they know where leverage

lies. And because their political

culture is dominated by a culture of

engineers, they understand precisely

instinctively before you get an

elaborate dumb down briefing to your

average western cabinet about where they

stand against the periodic table of

critical minerals and rare earths, how

many they've got both on the extraction

side and the processing side and where

they therefore will end up to by year X

in their ability to, shall we say,

exercise leverage elsewhere.

So, I think I want to flip the question

of what Xiinping believes for a minute.

We've been talking about what he

believes about China. What does he

believe about the United States of

America and about Donald Trump?

Um, he hasn't told me. So, again, we're

into the realm of speculation here, but

uh his view of America, let me start

with that. Um, and then we'll move on to

the president. His view of America is

that it's the only country in the world

potentially standing in the way of his

uh national political and economic and

geopolitical ambition.

Why? Simply because of your scale. And

secondly, for 100 years, you guys have

represented since the early days of duey

liberalism

an alternative script. uh for how you

construct the politics of a country. And

so when Xiinping looks at America, he

looks at it through these two lenses.

You represent uh this massive

alternative ideiational force, the

attraction to the idea that still causes

many uh successful Chinese uh to go and

live in the United States and the rest

of the collective west because freedom

is not an a hackneed phrase particularly

if you've lived in a country where there

is none. But at the level of raw

national power, the power of the US

military, the power of Indopacific

command, the power of what you have in

cyber and space and your nuclear forces

and the power of American innovation

reflected through Silicon Valley cubed.

He looks at that and says that's the

only thing that can get in my road and

that's why America occupies this unique

position whether you're run by

Republicans or whether you're run by

Democrats. We've talked about how

Xiinping has a

dialectical historical view of China's

rise and communism's rise.

Does that extend to a similarly

inevitableist view of American decline?

Does the Chinese Communist Party does

its sort of mainstream of thought

believe America to be in a kind of

structural decline?

They do have this belief

and it's expressed in two different

ways. There is a Chinese concept of what

they call comprehensive national power.

Uh it's a standard analytical framework

for aggregate American power v aggregate

Chinese power against all indices of

power. They look at the size of the US

military, the size of allied militaries,

the size of their own military and they

make their own calculus. They also make

calculus about the solidity of shall we

say US alliances abroad and when there's

when those are under pressure or when

they're beginning to fracture. They also

look at the um solidity of the US

domestic body politic and the degree of

unity and disunityity against shall we

say the predetermined unity of the

Chinese unitary state. Uh, interestingly

they stopped publishing this stuff um

for the rest of the world to see what

their conclusions were about 12 years

ago. I think because the results were

beginning to look increasingly

indicative that China was really rising

rather rapidly.

Uh the second is in a propagandistic

phrase which is in Chinese it's

which is the rise of the east and the

decline of the west and in Chinese

political parliament that's a euphemism

for China and the United States. If

there's a third phrase it's probably uh

Xiinping's oftus phrase including during

the summit with President Trump most

recently the world is now experiencing

changes not seen in a 100red years. He

first began using that phrase in 2017 on

the 100th anniversary of the Bolevik

revolution. And the internal

interpretation of the phrase is that we

the Chinese now with our own revolution

now going out into the world at large

represent as seinal shaking an event of

the certainties and certages of global

politics today as the Bolevik revolution

pretended back in 1917.

>> And so then there's I guess two things

here. One is that in the time Xi Jinping

has been leader, American policy towards

China, American political elite thinking

towards China has changed dramatically.

It's become far more antagonistic. The

sense that China would become more

liberal and democratic as it became

richer has dissolved. The sense that we

allowed China to take advantage of us

has become a bipartisan theory and that

we are in locked in a great competition

with him. possibly a thusidities trap

leading to war has become fairly widely

believed and certainly widely prepared

for

and of course American politics itself

has changed

>> you know falling into this period of

Trumpism and much more internal division

I mean you wrote a book called the

avoidable war that was at least partly

about this

>> what is their narrative of us in this

era

>> they saw a sea change just under 10

years ago and during the first Trump

administration when the official

American

uh strategy towards China changed from

strategic engagement to strategic

competition.

HR McMaster, then Trump's national

security adviser, wrote that in the

National Security Strategy, I think

December of 2017. And that wasn't just a

piece of language. You could almost hear

the creaking

of the entire machinery of the US state

uh across all agencies of power.

>> Before that, Obama talked about his

pivot to Asia. That's true. But uh he

did not have an organizing principle

which is that we are in a competitive

relationship with China about which

country becomes the dominant power in

the Indo-acific and in the world. So

that's the big change that dominated

second half of Trump's term first term

dominated really uh Biden administration

and then through until the most recently

convened summit in Beijing uh where we

now have a different organizing

principle announced for the first time

this time by the Chinese called

constructive strategic stability. Um and

the White House uh briefing paper which

came back at the conclusion of the visit

said, "Yeah, that's the framework we

accept so long as it's fair and

reciprocal." So what does that mean if

you decode it? I think what the Chinese

are seeking to do

um is to cause the United States to be

more stable, less unpredictable, and

less antagonistic going forward. What is

it going to mean in practice? I don't

know. One of the advantages may be the

two sides begin to have an active and

substantive negotiation on the

regulation of the most dangerous and

destabilizing forms of artificial

intelligence which is what came out of

Scott Besson's conversations with his

counterpart Hurley fun for the rest of

the relationship beyond AI governance

I'm not sure yet I find policy towards

China the US orientation to China to be

one of maybe the most major area of US

policy where my own thoughts are most

unsettled.

It there's one story I think has become