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Foreign welcome to the Cynical Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll 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 content conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from the lovely little village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire where my sister and her husband live. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free as always, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please consider lending your support. You can get me@senecapodmail.com and listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber@senecapodcast.com you will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China focused columnists and commentators. And of course, you will also enjoy the knowledge that you are helping me do what I honestly believe is very important work. So do check out the page to see all that's on offer offer and consider helping out this week on Seneca. We're going to take a step back and look again. Well, really, really, really look at how we understand China's leadership under Xi Jinping. I've often been frustrated by the persistence of certain tropes in especially American commentary, but you know, more broadly Western commentary about Xi and the senior leadership in Beijing that he's either, you know, Mao reincarnate or some brittle autocrat presiding over imminent collapse. That's why I found Jonathan Zinn's new piece in Foreign affairs titled China Against China Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success really refreshing. The piece should come out right around the time that you're hearing this, if you're listening to it on the day that the show drops. If you are a subscriber to Foreign affairs, you might think about hitting pause and giving it a read first. Or not. John is Michael H. Armakost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the John L. Thornton China center at Brookings. He served as a Director for China at the National Security Council during the Biden administration and spent many a year as an analyst at the CIA on working on China. Of course, his essay and his work on China More generally, it really, it does something that too few in Washington do these days. He actually takes Xi's project seriously, on its own terms. He asks not just what Xi Jinping has done, but why. And he suggests that many of the reforms that we lament as illiberal were actually from Xi's vantage point, efforts to fix problems that earlier, more liberal reformers were, well, had left unresolved. I really want to emphasize here that the strength of John's piece, at least to me, is that he bothers to try to look at things from Xi's vantage point. What do we call that, boys and girls? We call that cognitive empathy. And it's basically, you know, the North Star I strive for with Sitica. Right. Anyway, John argues that Xi's China isn't the story of a failing autocracy or a state losing control. It's the story of the leadership trying to cure the pathologies that its own success created corruption, dependency, and fragility born of prosperity. It's a very sober, and I'm sure for some, a deeply unsettling read because it challenges not just our assumptions about China, but about, you know, ourselves. So my own essay, the Great Reckoning, just came out this week in the Ideas Letter from the Open Society Foundations. I've actually reprinted it now just now@cynical podcast.com so it explores how China's rise forces Americans to confront certain uncomfortable truths about modernity, legitimacy, our own myths of exceptionalism. And I thought this would be a really good moment to bring John on for a conversation. Both of our pieces, for sure, in very different registers, are kind of about clarity, about seeing through the haze of ideology and wishful thinking. John's essay, like I said, just calls on us to see Xi's project not as the simple story of repression that so many in D.C. have sort of settled on, but as a complex, adaptive response to the contradictions of China's own successes. Mine, meanwhile, is about reckoning with what China's achievements force us to confront about ourselves. Read the piece. You know, it's about our complacency, our narratives of exceptionalism, our tendency to explain away what doesn't fit our mental models. So, in a sense, both essays, I think, are attempts at intellectual honesty, at looking directly at the thing itself without the reflexive. Yes, but so with that, Jonathan's in. Congrats on this excellent, excellent piece, and welcome to Seneca. You are long overdue. Ryan Haas shouted you out back in March. I've been itching to get you on ever since, man. Welcome.
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B
Thanks so much, Kaiser thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure, especially because I am a longtime listener. Your voice has been pumping into my ears on many a commute and many a long run for quite some time.
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Ah, well, I'm really pleased to hear that. So let's dive right in. First, thanks to Jenna Leif and other folks at Foreign affairs for, for vouchsafing with me your, your essay before it was published. So I, I got a chance to read it and to talk to you on and put the podcast out on the day that it drops. But let's, let's, let's talk about this. You described Xi's leadership as a Counter Reformation. It come the word comes up a bunch of times. It's a term, obviously, with your historical resonance. And yeah, it's kind of a pun, I guess, but it probably needs to be unpacked a bit. I mean, several years ago I had Carl Mintzner on the show. You actually name check him and his book in your essay because he basically made the argument that Xi's ascension meant the end of the reform and opening period. And that's certainly not how Xi Jinping himself thinks about it. He still talks about deepening reforms, but they are clearly neither the market liberalizations nor the political liberalization that Carl or maybe even Jiang Zemin or Ku Jintao or others have had in mind when they've talked about reform. So is it that she's Counter Reformation is analogous to the Catholic Church's pushback in the 16th century against the spread of Lutheranism and Calvinism? Or is he reforming against something? Is he countering a reform with a different kind of reform? What do you think? How does that work in your mind? If you could unpack that.
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B
Yeah, and I think you're right. I owe a real intellectual debt to Carl Mintzner for using that phraseology, because I think it really popped with me. And I think there is a decent analysis with the original Counter Reformation going back to the 16th and 17th century, because it's both about countering the pathologies that you see developing in your own system. But what happened in that Counter Reformation was also qualitatively different from what preceded it. Right. The Catholic Church was not the same after it. And I think that's similarly what's going on with Xi Jinping. He's trying to get back to basics in many ways and go back to his heritage as a princeling and the parties. He knew it under his father. But because of the transformation that China's gone through through the ensuing years, you can't go back to the future. Right. This isn't a Michael J. Fox movie. Right. You're going to land somewhere new and different in that process. So that is part of why the term really resonated with me. And I think when you look at the party documents, they don't talk about it that way. And I think you're quite right. They still talk about this very much as continuity. Right. But I think that's partially for their own ideological purposes. Right. This is the same reason that Deng had to say Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. Right, right. They can't really jettison that heritage or push back against it quite so explicitly. So, you know, it's a little playful and I'm trying to put things a little bit more starkly, but I think it helps generate productive thinking about how do we construe what it is that Xi is trying to do and accomplish here and what is on his mind and how did he see things when he arrived in Beijing as the heir apparent back in 2007?
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A
Yeah, and we will dig into exactly what it is that he saw as he arrived in, you know, as the ari parrot in 2007, but, you know, more meaningfully, you know, as 2012 turned into 2013 and he prepared to actually step up. So. So many Western analysts see Xi's consolidation of power as, you know, inherently pathological. You seem to argue that it was actually, from the party standpoint, a logical corrective to the dysfunction of the era that came before, you know, the Hu and when era, the deliberately but maybe excessively collective nature of, of the leadership. Very deliberately, which was from 2003 on. Susan shirt really makes that exact same argument in her book Overreach. She sees Xi's project as essentially trying to reconsolidate and thinks it actually begins toward the end of the Kuwin one era itself, right after the great financial crisis and all. But let's remind listeners about what that political landscape looked like by the end of the 2000s, when Xi was, as you said, already the anointed successor. What did he see as he looked around him? And how should that help us rethink the trade offs between centralization or recentralization and adaptability in that particular context.
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B
Yeah. So first off, you know, one kind of framing point, what I wanted to do with this essay was frame how it looks from Xi's perspective and his desk. But you know, what I want to be clear about upfront with listeners and with readers, is that there's still a lot of dysfunction in the system right there, despite itself. And I think so there's the kind of objective view about how dysfunctional is the Chinese system. And then how does this look from Xi's perspective and what is he trying to do to remedy what he would see as the dysfunction? So going back to that moment in time when Xi was the heir apparent and coming into power, not to be glib about it, I think when Xi got to Beijing in that time period, and keep in mind, it would have been the first time he had been serving in Beijing since he was Gong Biao's michu back in the early 80s, right? So he was coming back to the capital. And I think, in short, what he found was a mess, right? And you started to see this language percolate in the system that the who, when, when era was what people were calling the lost decade, right? Not in the sense of Japan's lost decade, where things had just kind of flatlined and stagnated, but a lost decade in the sense that this was a lost opportunity to make kind of meaningful reference reforms to further energize China's economic engine and even just to make progress on some of the reforms that Hu and when themselves wanted to deal with, right, in terms of redressing inequality, making meaningful headway on environmental problems that that were plaguing the country and that just didn't happen. I think there was a real sense, and you probably heard this as well, Kaiser, when you were living in China, that they were living on borrowed time, basically, these guys, right? The economic growth that they were, they were surfing on the economic growth that happened produced by the hard economic reforms that Jiang Zemin and in particular Zhu Rongji had instantiated in the previous decade, right? So I think there was a kind of real sense of malaise and drift. I think one of the other things that I flag in the essay too is that there was so much talk in the West, I think, going back 20 years ago, about this notion about what modernity is and this kind of ties to your essay, that as you have this economic growth, you're going to have an emerging bourgeoisie that will surely challenge the authoritarian elite. And nobody was more keen attuned to that than the Chinese leadership. So you have the three represents Jiang Zemin's signature ideological contribution to the party, which is a remarkable feat of intellectual gymnastics whereby the Communist Party invites the capitalist into the party. And so in one sense that strategy was incredibly successful, right? You co opted this emerging capital class, but what you've done is you've invited the wolf into the tent. Right. I think what happened in the subsequent years during the Hu Jintao administration was that you had this marriage of wealth and power in the same place that took a problem with corruption that was already extant in China and had a long and sordid history, and it really just magnified it.
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Yeah.
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Right. And that was such a big part of what Xi Jinping found when he got to the capitol in. In 2007.
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Yeah. I mean, and it was absolutely everywhere. I mean, there was just no escaping the. The fact of endemic corruption, of having these people that sort of entrenched up these interest groups with entrenched power bases in different industries in petroleum or in the state grid or what have you. Yeah. It was. No question. I think it's important that we remember what it was that he was stepping into. You write that Xi marshaled the resources to make the country more resilient. How do you. I mean, this is something that, you know, we. There's a whole literature about authoritarian resilience and all and all this stuff. But let's define resilience in this context. How does it differ from the Western notions of resilience that are rooted in pluralism and openness and sort of, you know, these process mechanisms for self correction? What is resilience when you talk about it this way?
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Yeah. Joseph Turgean's excellent biography of Xi's father has been very much on my mind this past summer. And I think resilience from Xi's perspective is, not to use an old cliche, is really about the ability to eat bitterness, its ability to withstand an onslaught from what he sees as a hostile United States. So I think there's something that's both very practical about it and ideological about it at the same time, which is very consistent with Xi's modus operandi. And I think what's really interesting, that Joseph's book really lifts up that struck me as quite right, is that she doesn't see that ability to withstand pain and suffering as something to be avoided. He sees something really salutary in that for the Chinese populace. Right. I think this is part of his take and his diagnosis on what had gone wrong with the leadership, on with China more broadly when he came into power, was that everybody, including the military, we can talk about this later, had kind of gotten soft in the intervening years. Right.
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So in that sense, he's like any Chinese parent.
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B
Yeah.
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He thinks the ability to eat bitterness is. It's a good thing, right?
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B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Make sure you get your daily dosage yeah, yeah.
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Suffering is good for you. Yeah, for sure. One of the, I think the central arguments is that the pathologies of prosperity this related to is you go soft, right? You get prosperous. And that's one of the numerous downsides of success that you actually lose this ability to eat. Bitterness. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on what you mean by this phrase, the downsides of success. What are some of the other ones that Xi would have picked up on as he took office?
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B
Yeah, so I mean I talked about the one with the three represents, which is one that really jumps out at me, right. Where they solve one problem, but in the process you end up creating another problem that's also potentially very threatening to the regime. I talk in the piece too about what happened in China's real estate sector. Right. And this to me encapsulates so many of the intertwined pathologies in China's political economy all at once. Because on the one hand, the reform that Zhurongji pushed through in the late 90s, where people could, if not own, have a long term lease on their own property, was a huge and hugely consequential reform that produced a tremendous amount of wealth for a large number of Chinese families. And it was extremely important. But the flip side of this was that it actually ended up creating a lot of problems. Right. And not just in the sense that you had a property bubble. It had a lot of problems when you pair with other reforms that were subsequently trying to push through. Push through, like when the Hu Jintao administration abolished the 2000 year old tax on, on, on agriculture. Right, right, right. Because what this meant, these are all well intentioned things that had very positive upsides initially, but they have longer tails to them that create new problems. And the problem that it created was that the deprived a lot of localities the resources they needed to execute on the unfunded mandates in effect that were coming down from Beijing, especially in the who when era. Right, right. So then you have this problem where the, the local leaders and this is, will be well known to a lot of China watchers. Then they have every incentive to push farmers off their land, Right. And sell that land to their corrupt cronies to try to generate revenues for their locality. I think that was, that was, that was a prominent storyline across China throughout much of the 2000s. Right. And the fact that you have this endemic corruption in China and that was exacerbated by the three represents only compounded the problem. Right. So they solved one problem. Right. People could buy their own homes, they could create a lot of wealth, you got rid of this onerous agricultural tax, but you ended up creating a whole new host of problems, right, that are very tricky to unwind, becomes a Gordian knot unto itself. So I think that is part of the pathology that she sees, and I think some of that is just endemic to the Chinese system and how it operates. Right. This is very sticky, this stuff, and it's very intractable to try to get a hold of it.
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Absolutely.
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You know, and I think what happened with Xi, with the. With the property sector, and this is my theory of it, is that there had been discussion for a long time under Li Keqiang, the former premier, about efforts to address what was going on in the property sector, Right. To kind of let the air out of this bubble slowly. And I think at some point, especially as Li Keqiang was on his way out the door, they had the three red lines policy at the start of this decade. And I think when things got hairy, Xi seemed content to say, you know what? Just let it ride. Right. And I think from his perspective, again, the ideological frame is really important. Not only was this something he felt needed to be done for an economic rationale, but I think there's also an ideological lens to it too, Right. Which is that a lot of this is speculation, a lot of this is. Looks like late stage finance capitalism to me. Anyway, let these guys take a hit, Right. And let's put the resources to things that are actually more tangible and more productive. And for some aspects of that, he's been quite explicit about that as part of his thinking.
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A
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I want to go back to your metaphor of Counter Reformation. I mean, because just as the historical Counter Reformation wasn't all autos de fe or auto da fe, I'm not sure how you just as. I mean, it wasn't all just burning people at the stakes who were heretics. I mean, there were, as you, as you note, these efforts by the church to reform itself, often in line with some of the criticisms that you heard in the early 16th century, you know, coming out in the late 15th century all along, really, about, you know, the sale of indulgences. You know, so things like that, you know, they were trying to clean up and, you know, C. Consciously sees himself as actually cleaning up after the excesses of the reform era, but not throwing it all out. I mean, he sees elements of reform and opening up that are very positive. He's not looking to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So what is baby here and what's bathwater?
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B
It's a great question. It's a great way to frame it. It's funny when you said auto defe too. I mean, especially this past week, she has metaphorically burned a number of people at the stake. So it's an important part of the program.
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But your point, I'm going to nail you down on that too. Put your feet to the fire on that question. But so to speak, I'll stretch you on the rack and we'll do a bunch of other stuff.
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B
I look forward to it. But kidding aside, I mean, I think you're right. I think that she does not want to throw. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think, you know, what is the bathwater? I think the bathwater part, we alluded to this a little bit earlier, is how the top political leadership was structured, right? And it goes back to that sense of malaise at the start of the Fujintao era. I think that what he saw that in liberalization of the Hu era and that collectivist approach to leadership, I think she saw both of those as deeply problematic and in need of remedy. Because what it was leading to was indecisiveness at the top, an inability to act decisively to address problems from the Chinese leadership, and also a lack of discipline throughout the party apparatus. Because I think what you really had at the end of the Hu Jintao era was, was again, going back to this early modern European metaphor, it was more like a collective of barons, right? They each had their own fiefdoms, they were relatively impenetrable, everybody kind of controlled. And I think the whole collective leadership model was actually kind of predicated on that idea that it would function almost as a system of checks and balances. And I think from Xi's perspective, especially as a princeling in a system where power does tend to be monistic, that was unacceptable that you had the bureaucracies with so much latitude and able to do their own thing. So I think at the top level, that is part of what he wanted to throw out, move away from that collective leadership model, because especially in that kind of system. And again, Alice Miller pointed this out a long time ago. This is kind of endemic to oligarchic systems like China's. Going back to Aristotle, they have centripetal forces and they have centrifugal forces. And I think what she saw was a lot of centrifugal forces at play. And so the natural response mechanism was to recentralize. And I think from his perspective, that is entirely consistent with the Leninist heritage of the party. Right. It's really about getting back to basics. I think what Xi didn't want to get rid of and doesn't want to get rid of, though, is the economic growth. I think he is content with slower economic growth, what he calls higher quality economic growth. It's a different reflex than Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao had. Wherever there was some kind of economic problem, there was some kind of stimulus package or some. You could almost see them scurrying to figure out some way to ensure youth unemployment didn't spike. And Xi doesn't have that reflex. But I think he is insistent on China's prowess, and I think that makes a lot of sense just given the history of his own career. One of the things that I always think about with Xi Jinping is that he just came up through the party ranks at a very different moment in time than his predecessors did. The entirety of this guy's political career basically occurred after 1978.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Right. So as an adult and as a professional and as a politico, all he's known is a China that's on the rise and on the move. Right. And so he doesn't. Even as he goes through this counter reformation. The counter reformation is designed to ensure that they stay on that trajectory. Right. Rather than necessarily deviate from that. Right. He wants that to be an important facet of this because that's what he's grown up with.
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A
So you mentioned Alice Miller and her trenchant observations about the centripetal and centrifugal forces at play. There are other sort of maybe, commonplaces in the wisdom on authoritarian politics that I think maybe China doesn't illustrate so very well. We both agree that in the academic world, among political scientists who study authoritarian regimes in the strategic class, there's this idea that course correction just isn't a strength for one party states. Right. It's not something they do particularly well. But you actually argue that she has, I'm going to quote you here, recognized weaknesses and taken steps to remedy them, perhaps. And you suggest this even better than the American system has done. It's something maybe I wish I had addressed more directly in my own essay, but it's a remarkable claim in the American context. What are the mechanisms that you see through which such course corrections are actually happening in the Chinese system? And what is it that keeps the idea of authoritarian path dependency and, you know, inertia so alive in our thinking, despite having seen instances of pretty obvious course correction?
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B
Yeah. I mean, I think that that part of which feeds the course Correction. Part of it, I think, just is, is a function of, of Xi's own worldview and diagnosis. And I think the tremendous power that he's been able to concentrate in his own hands, right, this has been one of the upsides, is that he has been able to identify a problem, whether it's in the property sector, whether it's with corruption, and do things that I think his predecessors, even if they wanted to address them, would not have had the wherewithal and the political heft to actually do those things, right? And so I think that the two really go hand in hand, and that has really been. Been crucial to it. I also think it gets to this whole question of feedback loops and whether or not they're broken in the Chinese system, because I think this is related to this idea of a stagnant kind of plotting bureaucracy just plodding along. I think Xi is very cognizant of that. I think this is part of his heritage as a princeling, is that he knows he's going to get, yes, manned, right? And I think what he has done in part through these proliferating commissions in the party and leading groups, is he's setting up a system where he can triangulate, right? He can ask one part of the system a question and get one answer over here, and then he'll ask another part of the system the same question, and then he'll kind of triangulate and figure out, try to figure out what's really going on, because I think he knows that everybody around him is going to be too scared to just walk up to him and tell him, hey, boss, that's not such a great idea.
- [25:37]
A
So, John, two pieces to this. One is this ability to triangulate, as you say, you know, from otherwise unreliable sources. I mean, what you suggest makes a ton of sense to me, but. And maybe this is just a surmise, but this, this idea that in. In the atmosphere of mutual distrust that surrounds any powerful leader, I think of Donald Trump, for example, you can play your subordinates off one another. I mean, I've definitely heard the first Trump administration described that way. So let's look first at is there evidence that Xi has actually done that and what that is? And the other piece of this, which I thought was really intriguing because. So I don't know if the listeners remember, but right after the lineup of the Palmeira Standing Committee was announced following the 20th party congress, I got together with two people who I regard as smartest people in biz. Lizzy Lee, who's now the Asia Society and who's been on the show many times, and Damian Ma, who is formerly of Macrop Polo, to talk about the lineup and what it meant. And Lizzie said something that I, I heard completely echoed in your piece, which I thought it kind of was like, yeah, I was kind of delighted to hear this. I've been going around telling people, anyone who will listen, the same thing. So it really struck me when I read it in your piece that you basically suggest that maybe she hasn't surrounded himself with yes men the way that, you know, the conventional wisdom suggests that instead he's actually elevated people who he's comfortable working with and who, whom he trusts who are going to speak truths even when they're uncomfortable. So we've got these two things. One is the playing these unreliable subordinates off against one another. What's the evidence for that? The other is he, these people aren't yes men. They're actually people who he trusts will tell him, as you said, hey, boss, listen, here's the straight dope. Is there evidence for either of these that you would look at?
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B
I will confess for on my part, it's more of a theory and it's more of an inference based on watching Xi react to events and seeing him make these big muscle movements to do course corrections. Right. It suggests to me a system in which there's not necessarily ossification. And I'll offer a slight caveat on this idea about the Politburo Standing Committee and whether or not they're yes men. I would call them yes, but men. Right. I think my operating model here. Think about it. And again, I always try to think about this from Xi's perspective. How does this look from Xi's desk? Right. When he walked into the Politburo Standing Committee 10 years ago or even five years ago, he would see Liu Kutchiang, who was his one time rival, to be heir apparent, right? He would see other guys who had some association with Hu Jintao or other senior leaders for the last few years when he's marched into the Politburo Standing Committee meetings, he's seen guys he's known for decades, with the exception of Wang Kuning. Right? But you know, like I've jokingly called this Xi's frat house, right? Because they're all his old buddies that he's known, known for quite some time. And I think what that means, it's not just about, you know, can they, can they speak truth to power? They might. They. They might be able to. Right? But even if they don't, I Think what that comfort and that. That knowledge of these people would. Would inculcate is, is that these are guys who know how to talk to the boss. Almost everybody on the standing committee has been his michu at some point. Right? So when there is bad news. Right. They're going to know how. How to couch it. Right. And how to get through what they need to in a way that, you know, somebody who doesn't have a relationship with Xi Jinping might have a harder time doing that. Right. And this is admittedly speculative on my part, but again, I'm trying to use a little bit of moral imagination to think about how does this look from Xi Jinping's perspective and how might the people in the room operate. Right? And I think that's something that kind of gets lost to look around and say, oh, these guys are all just yes men. You know, like, again, you know, if you wanted to be cute about it, you could think of the old show, yes Minister from the BBC. Right. It's like, that's a wonderful idea, boss, but is the time really propitious?
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A
Right, right, right, right, right. That's a. That's a good way to think about it. This actually brings me to the other side of the mirror, as it were. Not how Xi Jingting gathers information about his own system, but how we try to make sense of his system, of the Chinese system, of his thinking. Because, I mean, let's be honest, a lot of what passes for China analysis in Washington or in the media, I mean, it's not exactly inspired. I kept thinking as I read your piece, this is a great antidote for so much of the junk analysis out there about C and the system. So what is it that you think keeps producing that junk? Because it's clearly not just bad sourcing or lack of access. That's obvious. It feels deeper. It feels almost theological, like it's baked into the way Americans have been taught to. To think about open versus closed systems or to assume that legitimacy can only flow from liberal norms. I mean, I get it. There's a lot of opacity. I mean, this is something. It's bugged me for a long time. It's like any American politician who you can name, I have a pretty good idea of their personality. Like, you know, it's like, oh, that guy's mercurial. This guy is kind of a feckless showboater. This guy's really witty and sharp and has a great sense of humor. I know something about their personalities. I don't know jack about the personalities of The Chinese leadership. And that's always sort of bothered me, of course, as they tried not to let you know anything about their actual personalities. There are so few adjectives that I could muster in describing the personalities of any Chinese leader. I mean, certainly in the last, like, 15 years, I'm previously sure, I mean, we all could say some things about Drunji or about Bo Xilai or. But no, not, not now. Anyway, I wonder if you think that there's like, something there, something, you know, that, like I said, it's almost theological about how our strategic class, our analytical class, thinks about politics in China that gets in the way. What is it that produces this?
- [31:45]
B
I think it's a couple of things, and I've been thinking about this a lot as I've made the transition from being at the CIA to being at a think tank. But so much of your job when you're in one of these roles outside of government, is to think about either what US Policy should be. And I think this is true, especially for many economists. Think about what China ought to be doing in its management of the economy. And you have the liberty to do that, you know, and one thing, you know, this is just for me personally, I think part of the perspective that I've brought to bring in this essay and in my work is that it was beaten into my head from day one when I was at the agency, that my job was to see the world as it looked from China's perspective. Right. And try to explain that to U.S. policymakers. Right. And I think, you know, if you look around in the academic or think tank ecosystem, it's difficult to do that, number one, right. As you noted, there are high barriers to entry, whether it be the language or the, the. Or access to credible and useful information. Right. But it's also just not in vogue in many ways, right. To say, to try to sit down and explain this is what they're trying to accomplish and try to understand what's going on in the system on its own terms. Right. There's just not a big incentive to do that. And I think, you know, especially in academia, there's not an incentive to try to understand political systems from the top down. Right. To look at it from the leadership perspective first and foremost and try to understand elite politics. Right. The emphasis, I think, for a long time, and there's a lot of merit to it, is to try to look at political systems much more from the bottom up. Right. So I think it's left, this gap in how do we approach the woke virus?
- [33:24]
A
Man, it's the WOKE virus, all this subaltern stuff. No, no, I totally get you. I totally get you. You know, and it's, it's interesting that you talk about the agency as being different because one thing that I have observed from all this time I've spent just interviewing so many people is almost anyone who I've ever talked to who has spent significant amounts of time at the Agency, they have that ability to, you know, that cognitive empathy. I mean, I think of people like John Culver or Paul here or Paul Triolo or Gerard the pipo, you know, all these people who've spent time there, whether they've been analysts or whether they are. I guess I've probably not talked to a lot of ops people. Yeah, it's surprising, I think, to a lot of people to hear that they're the least ideologically fettered in, you know, so much of the time that they're the ones who actually can sort of see the board from the other side.
- [34:24]
B
Right, Yeah. I mean, that is, that is, that is the nature of the work. Right. And you know, you're kind of very explicitly told, like you're not supposed to be policy prescriptive. Right. You're not supposed. That is not the role of an agency analyst to say, this is what the US should be doing. So it really forces you to put that aside. There's also the truth too, Right. Just in terms of incentives and how you think about these things. If you are approaching these issues from your own ideological prism, there is a high likelihood you are going to be wrong. Right. And that is embarrassing as an analyst. Right. That you're going to be surprised or misjudged what Beijing is doing. Right. And why they're doing it and what they're going to do next. Right. What are the possibilities for them? Right. So if you had again, just to kind of pick the pick on the economy. So if your presumption is they need to move towards a consumption based economy and that is what is going to impel the leadership, you know, you would have been consistently wrong for most of Xi's tenure. Right. And even Hu Jintao says they fail to make a dent in that issue.
- [35:22]
A
I want to talk a little bit about this piece of. I mean, both of our pieces, I think. I don't know if you got a chance to read the piece that I wrote. Yeah, you did. Okay, great.
- [35:32]
B
Yes.
- [35:33]
A
I felt like there was. And maybe I'm totally off here, maybe I'm just projecting, but I felt like there was a kind of symmetry, maybe an inversion between that we were both kind of grappling with here. You described C's system as one that despite its opacity, still alters course when it needs to. And I argue in my piece that the, the great reckoning, right, the American system, for all of its vaunted openness, increasingly can't course correct. Are we kind of describing the same problem from opposite ends, systems that have become sort of prisoners of their own myths, or what are we looking at here? I mean, did you have sort of an impressionistic 30,000 foot take on our two pieces lead side by side?
- [36:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think what our pieces share, and I really appreciated your, your, your piece, Kaiser, and enjoyed it, is that, you know, to, to use George W W Bush's phrase, is that there's a real risk on the American side of misunderstimating China. Right. And that we don't appreciate its strengths and its resilience and what it brings to bear. And, and I think what we share too is that, you know, from my perspective as a national security person, it's not just that China is going to challenge American power. And I talk about this in the piece, whether you're talking about in the military domain or the technological domain or even potentially economically. But I think the more profound challenge, and this is embedded in your piece, is that. And challenges are underlying conceits, right? About what are the virtues of an open society. Kind of most pronounced among them, going back to at least John Stuart Mill, is that you can have an open debate when there's problems in your society and then you can come to some kind of notional consensus or agreement and then marshal the resources to remedy that. And the U.S. i would argue, is not doing that particularly well. But I think you can even take narrower too. And I think Dan Huang talks about this in his book. It's about the capacity to innovate. Right. So much of the storyline about China and its technological development, I think you still see residuals of this, is that they can't really innovate because it's an authoritarian system and we have an open society and that that allows for greater innovation because you can have more of an open debate. But you know, China's authoritarian system has actually produced a lot of scientific and technological innovation, as Dan documents very well in his book. So it's a challenge not just to the fact that they're catching up maybe, or have overtaken us definitely in places like EVs and other specific technologies. But our whole theory of the case is kind of under challenge from what China is doing and what they are actually able to produce and do. Right.
- [38:11]
A
Yeah.
- [38:12]
B
And I think that's the challenge. And I think the. I don't think that the realization about that has really started to hit people yet. I think we're kind of on the front edge of that, maybe. And I think you see that reflected in some of the chatter in official Washington, like even going back to this idea of China perennially collapsing, and Secretary Besson's comments just in the last week or so, where he's talking about China sliding into a recession or a depression that there's so much into the system. Right. So that. That is a very. No, I don't know why.
- [38:45]
A
It's Schrodinger's. Schrodinger's China. It's simultaneously collapsing and taking over the world. I can't remember who coined that, but it was pretty smart.
- [38:53]
B
I like that.
- [38:54]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's. It's a. It's. It's a funny thing. I mean, you know, it's weird. We've seen a consolidation of power in, you know, the executive, as it were, in both of these countries. You know, Trump in the US And Xi in China. The consequences seem to be very different. I mean, it could be argued that in China, it's actually produced coherence and capacity. I mean, as your piece kind of argues. And in the U.S. look, I mean, polarization and paralysis. I mean, maybe even deepening sclerosis. I mean, we're on day, what, 18, as we record right now of a government shutdown. What does that tell us about institutional design versus political culture? I mean, I feel like sometimes I feel like American political culture gets in the way of our ability to actually design more effective institutions. It's tragic. I mean, and, you know, as one who is deeply steeped in and still a believer in the religious sense in American political culture, it's hard for me to wrap my head around.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. I think part of what I argue in the piece about why centralization of power is having such different consequences in each system is that for Xi, operating in a Leninist system, this is back to basics. Right. In some ways, he's bringing back the whole system back to its core operational DNA. There's a certain comfort with such a powerful leaders or a real history and legacy of that. Whereas for the United States, this kind of concentration of power is. Is a deviation for us. Right. It's. It's an. It's an experiment with a new novel form of unchecked and Unbalanced executive leadership. Right. And so I, I think that is an important part of, of the difference in outcomes. Right. In addition to the fact that you have two very different types of leaders at the, at the helm of each system. Right. And I think that's a, that's a, that, that's a, that's especially important right now. I mean, she is, is he's a risk taker, but he's an extremely methodical one. Like my mental model for him is he's kind of like a jack in the box. Right. He gets wound up and he waits for the right moment and then he springs out.
- [41:03]
A
Then pop goes the weasel. Right?
- [41:04]
B
Pop goes the weasel. I think that was, you know, kind of the story of his whole career. And I think, you know, Trump, Trump is not like that. Of course, you know, there's not the same kind of patience and, and methodical nature to his decision making. And I, I don't know, you know, if that's just true of our politics in general. Right. Yeah, right.
- [41:23]
A
I should point out for the listeners, I mean that, you know, it's not like you're saying that back to basics means, you know, Mao more than ever. It's definitely not. Right. I mean, you're very careful. Not, I mean, I think that, you know, you oppose that reductive idea as well. Right.
- [41:42]
B
And not just me, but Xi Jinping himself, having lived through the Mao era and seen his father toppled as a nine year old boy, I think, you know, I think that's part of his generational heritage too, is that there's a certain, you know, allergy to both revolution and to the preceding eras of reform. Right. What he's trying to do is, is, is much different. I think what he has really tried to do is that, you know, for the, I think for, you know, until she took power, you did the, the Chinese political system was a very wide amplitude system. Right. Especially in the Mao where you'd have these wild swings in policy, these wild shifts, and people like his father would end up on the wrong side of it. But even, you know, kind of the, the operating template for most of the reform and opening up period where, you know, the notion was you'd have these periods of fang and show.
- [42:25]
A
Right.
- [42:25]
B
Of opening and closing. I think what she, a big part of Xi's political project has been to flatten that curve as much as possible. Right. And make the political system more linear. Right. So he does, he doesn't want to go back to that kind of erratic decision making. He wants to be steady and Consistent and focused.
- [42:43]
A
Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I talk about in, in, in my piece how there seems to be this sort of China envy across quite a bit of the American political spectrum right now. I mean, it's sort of latent in, in it's, it's tacit, it's not made explicit, you know, in the Ezra Klein, you know, Derek Thompson kind of abundance agenda. It's there in the libertarian court quadrant in the Valley, for sure. You know, this kind of admiration for this effective, technocratic, authoritarian approach, I mean, ironically, is they're supposed to be libertarians. And then in maga, you know, you have this kind of envy of China as this, you know, ethnostate. They don't have immigrants and that's why they're able to do this. It's weird, but I mean, obviously I think that this isn't happening in a vacuum. This is happening in a time where our institutions are checks and balances and our norms are being transgressed really routinely. They're not working as we imagined that they were supposed to. So you do end up having people sort of looking across at China and feeling envy. How does that strike you? I mean, that's really a deeply disturbing thing to me. On the one hand, I want people to be reckoning with it, but I mean, this sort of slavish mentality, this reductive mentality it looks at, finds what they want to see in China to advance their own agenda. That's not helpful to me.
- [44:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very fair point. And what's interesting to me, again, we talk about this, these conceptual frameworks that we have for understanding authoritarian systems in the west that persist and have a longer shelf life than they should. But one of them is this whole idea of a legitimacy crisis, right? And the tendency for so long is to see China through that prism, right, that if you don't have voting and you don't give people a voice, that there's going to be some kind of legitimacy crisis. And, you know, there's some truth to that. But I think it's useful actually to take that kind of analytic framework and, and try to apply it to our own system. Right. And I, this is part of what I argue in the piece. That's certainly how China sees it, Right. I think from a lot of their commentators perspective, right. They see us as deeply dysfunctional and they see us as having had a pretty rough 21st century, right? Between the global war on terror, the global financial crisis, January 6, now the government shut down the list Kind of goes on and on. And I think that is an important feature of what's going on in American politics. It's not just about one party losing power. I think there's something deeper going on where from an American perspective, our institutions are suffering a legitimacy hit and we are having our own version of a legitimacy crisis. I mean, what's striking to me, and this is, you know, this is beyond my remit as a, as a. As a China analyst here, but my own view of this is that, you know, for such a long time, you would see these polling numbers where Congress is polling, you know, the value that Americans ascribe to Congress in particular, right. It would. It would be in the tank, right. It would be like something like 20% of Americans or less you know, thought that Congress was doing its job. You know, the same thing has happened to the Supreme Court. And I think part of what's happened in the last few years is that all of this has just kind of come to a head. Right. We had this percolating in the system for a long time, the deep distrust of the institutions, and now it's coming to a head. Right. And I think you're right. I mean, people are kind of fumbling around or groping around for what other systems are doing well. And it's troubling to see people looking to China in some ways, both because there is some real success there, but again, it kind of is a utilitarian approach to it and not really understanding the place on its own terms. And also, you know, you. You risk an. Glossing over some of the real pathologies in that system. Right. And the really deeply ingrained dysfunctions that. That. That are endemic to it.
- [46:34]
A
What we're seeing shifting here right now is, is like, look, I mean, I'm very careful not to be reductive and say that either system rests just on one type of legitimacy. I mean, it's not like Americans have only processed legitimacy to, to rest on, or that China only has, you know, performance legitimacy. But I do sort of see now in America a shift from one leg to the other and finding that the leg they're shifting to isn't particularly sturdy either. So, you know, we're neither delivering through our long cherished democratic institutions, nor are, you know, in the processes thereof, nor are we really delivering. Well, and by performance, I mean that. That's the recipe for crisis, anyway.
- [47:19]
B
Yeah.
- [47:21]
A
You know, you call the ccp, it's interesting, an extraordinarily effective learning institution. That is not a phrase we usually hear in Washington. Let's talk a little bit about how the party actually learns. What are the mechanisms of feedback or experimentation that actually seem to make it capable of adaptation, you know, short of these democratic processes, short of transparency or a fourth estate. So I know, for example, that they do a lot of sentiment analysis. They're constantly sort of taking the temperature. There's kind of a constant dashboard of little areas of flare ups or unrest that's mapped digitally and physically as well. But what are some of the things that you had in mind as you talked about them as an effective learning institution?
- [48:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think probably the best and most obvious example, I think, is the way that the party leadership has been obsessed with what happened in the Soviet Union in the 80s and about how to guard against that. Right. And you do have scholars at the central party school who are preoccupied with that. And I think you see that reflected in a lot of what they say publicly, especially when you're talking about the military. This idea that she says explicitly that, you know, a big part of the problem for the Soviets was that, you know, they didn't have a party army. Right. So I think they're, I think they have these institutions, you know, the various kind of think tanks that they have internally to the party. And even though my understanding is, you know, that, that the space for them to, to kind of speak truth to power, say what's going on has become much, much more restricted, they do have those institutions. Right. And those, that ability to, to funnel up, I think still in the system, it's not perfect and I'm sure there are signs of ossification. But I think you can also, this is one of these things you can kind of get at by inference too. And I don't want to make the case that they're kind of omniscient or they never make mistakes. They make plenty of mistakes and some pretty egregious ones. But I think what's really interesting to me just as an observer of the system, is that you will see them make a mistake, but not necessarily make the mistake more than once. Right. And I think that's partially because they do take those lessons and funnel them back into the system and do real autopsies of what went wrong here and what should we be trying to do differently. And I think you see that this is kind of the case I'm making about Xi Jinping himself, right? That so much of what he's trying to do is take a hard kind of painful glare at the system and say, what is going on here? What is wrong here and what do I need to do to fix everything it right. And I think that's very much been been an important part of his mindset going into this.
- [50:02]
A
Meanwhile, we are about to try regime change down south in Venezuela again, having not learned certain lessons from, you know, 20 plus years of constant war state building. I want to talk about the title of your, of the piece and I don't know whether you had a hand in titling it, but, you know, you do cite Wang Huning's fascination with America is much talked about America Against America, which somehow makes its way into so many people's writing on China these days. But, you know, it's a kind of diagnosis of America's unraveling under the weight of its own contradictions. Is, is, is this the title that you went with China Against China or.
- [50:43]
B
Was this, you know, coming coming from a strong footnote culture? I do have to give credit to the, to the editors at Foreign affairs for coming up with this title. But I liked it both because it's a little cheeky to riff off the title of Huang Kuning's book, but also because I think there's something there. Right. There's a symmetry there in the sense that what I'm trying to do without traipsing around China the way Wang Huning did in the US in the 80s is to get a handle on what are the pathologies of the system that I'm observing and try to figure out how they are trying to cope with with those pathologies. Right. Which I think is part of what Wang was trying to do in that book. Right. By taking a hard look at American society. And so this is a smaller project and a smaller piece of that. But truthfully, the genesis of this article for me was just kind of a casual observation that yes, the US and China are the number one and number two superpowers in the world, but these are both pretty dysfunctional places is right now. Right. And so the, the original title I had proposed to them was that this would be called the the US China and the Era of Not so Great Power Competition. Right.
- [51:55]
A
So I like that too, you know.
- [51:56]
B
And I, I think there's something broader at play actually. And, and this is, this is, you know, outside the, the parameters of the piece. But it's not just true of the US and China. We're living in this really interesting moment right now where I think you could easily make the case and many have that all of the great powers are pretty dysfunctional now. We really have entered, exited this post cold War moment, I think, where anyone's superpower looks like it has all the answers, right? And I think if you look at Europe, there's plenty of dysfunction there. Russia, I mean, obviously has huge problems in addition to, you know, its egregious war against Ukraine. But even you look at other emerging powers like India, Japan's, on the political merry go round again, you kind of go one by one and it's like, man, all these places really have not just kind of seasonal afflictions right now, but these are really some deep seated dysfunctions and nobody's really kind of a paragon of success right now.
- [52:55]
A
No, indeed. No, indeed. Hey, John, I want to end with a couple of tough ones. I mean, you have constructed what I would say is a much better lens through which to view the Chinese leadership than the one we usually have on offer. I mean, to understand once again what the view is from behind their eyes, what their priorities are, what they see as their toughest challenges. So let's take that framework of yours, that improved mental model of yours, and help us make sense of the current dust up over export controls that arguably began. I mean, I don't think it did begin with, but with the export controls on rare earth elements and other things are announced on October 9th. Because there's just been so much confusion and frankly, a lot of really gross oversimplification of that. How would you interpret that through your lens? And what does it look like from Beijing's side?
- [53:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the main quibble I would have with a lot of the takes out there right now from the US Side is that they're very tactical, right. They're focused on the upcoming summit and the negotiations that have been going on between Secretary Bessant and Jameson Greer and Holy Fung on the other side and very much viewing that through that prism. Right. And I think as a corollary to that, you know, there's been a lot of debate that you've probably seen online about was China overconfident? Did they misplay their hand? I think if you're looking at this from Xi Jinping's desk, it looks different, right? There's a different perspective and a more useful frame. I think, number one, this wasn't number one. This was a calculated risk. Right. To go back to that jack in the box metaphor about Xi Jinping, he kind of winds up and then he pops up. And I think what's going on here is bigger than just about building leverage for negotiation over a particular issue. This, to me feels like a bigger Vibe shift where Xi Jinping is going from having largely been reactive in responding to US Measures, he's trying to take the initiative now and shape the bilateral dynamic with the United States. I think then that raises the question of, well, why is he doing that now? Why would he do this right before a summit? And I think it's very telling and unsettling. I think he must have known that doing this could have potentially jeopardized the summit. So why would he do that right now? And I think it's threefold. I think he feels very comfortable in his position at home right now. I think he feels very comfortable in his international position, especially after hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and a variety of international leaders for the subsequent military parade. And I think he feels like he's got a good read on the Trump administration right now. Right. Like, there's two ways to play the poker game. You can play the cards or you can play the opponent. Your opponent. Right. And I think that's what she's doing. Right. It's not that the United States States doesn't have countermeasures that could. It can employ that would be very painful to China. We do. Right. I think what she has been banking on is that there's not the appetite on the US Side to play those cards because they're, they're too risky. You know, so, so much of the conversation, again, has kind of been about, was this a response to a US provocation with the, with the 50% rule for, for. For Chinese entities. Right. That came out of the Commerce Department right before the Golden Week holiday. I actually see it differently. This is not about US Provocations. I think the deeper cause for why we're seeing this now is actually the Trump administration's efforts to mollify China since its post Liberation Day climb down. Right. I think Xi felt like he could do this and he could do this with, with impunity. Right. And to me, this feels both like how the Chinese treated the Europeans in the run up to the, to the China EU summit this summer where, where, where they were very rough on them and it wasn't a positive summit. But I think more deeply, as somebody who's been watching Xi Jinping for a long time, what worries me is that this feels a lot more like Xi Jinping's first term. Right. Where, you know, in my day job as an analyst at the agency, you know, I woke up every morning and wondered what Xi Jinping may have done overnight that was going to derail my research plans for the day. Right. And this is starting to feel more like that, and I think that should be unsettling for everyone.
- [57:10]
A
Okay, interesting. Not the same perspective that I have. I mean, I think it was inevitable that they would be preparing these sorts of potential retaliatory measures. I mean, obviously they would be, they'd be irresponsible not to. But I think that there had to still be a trigger for them to deploy, and I think the 29th was still a trigger for them to deploy.
- [57:31]
B
I think of it more as. I, you know, not to, not to quibble about it, but I think of it as more as a pretext. Right. And I think, you know, there, there, there is a rough analogy to, to some of the US Export control measures over the last five years or so. Right. Where it does take a long time to assemble these things. And once you've kind of pulled together what the program is going to be, then the question that becomes a tactical one of, okay, when do we drop this? Right? When are we going to do this? How are we going to orchestrate it? What is going to be kind of the, the dramaturgical aspect of this and not just the, the substantive aspect of it, and, and this, given the scope of what they've done, I think you're right. It would have taken a long time to prepare. They had a pretext, and I think that they always want to have the moral high road, of course, but I think that that was kind of the bank shot on their end. They thought that we could do this and we could do this now and we can get away with it.
- [58:16]
A
Well, when I run the counterfactual, though, I can't imagine that two weeks out or three weeks out from the meeting, they would have done this without a trigger. If EIS hadn't put anything out, I don't think they would have dropped it. I think it would have sat on it and held it for later. But.
- [58:31]
B
Interesting. I think that's fair.
- [58:32]
A
We'll never know. We'll never know. Let me one more, though. I mean, because, you know, I think this is another one again through your lens. Big news, of course, is that we've just seen nine meetings, very, very senior military officers, everyone from like, the General Heidong, who's like sort of the number two at the cmc, Admiral Miaoa and seven other very senior military people, generals or admirals in the pla, Navy or in pla removed now, not. Not just expelled from the military, but expelled from the party as well. What. How do we explain this? What I, I get asked this a Lot. And I don't have a good answer. I, I haven't had a good chat yet with Taylor Frable or the other people I would ordinarily turn to.
- [59:18]
B
So I, I think part of what's going on, especially, you know, there, there's two questions here, kind of why and, and why now? I think since we are in the run up to the plenum and the Central Military Commission in particular has been so depleted by these purges over the past year, I think, you know, formally getting rid of Hu Weidong, who had previously just gone mia. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly, yeah. Has, you know, it clears the way for him to name somebody else to the Central Military Commission as a Vice chairman because he couldn't do that previously. Right. So there's a mechanical aspect to this. Right. And I think that's part of why he went. You know, he hadn't been removed previously even from his position formally, so he just went for the full cleaver like you said. Right. It was both removed from his position and purged from the party altogether. Right. And I think for other people, I mean, you had people who had already been removed or some people who had just been kind of, kind of quote unquote missing like Ho Weidong had been, and now they are gone as well. I think, again, I think the orchestration is never far from shooting Xi Jinping's mind. I mean, to do this right ahead of the plenum is another shot across the bow at the military. Right. And I think this has been a central preoccupation of his since he was the heir apparent. Right. The, you know, as John Colbert and I argued in our Foreign affairs piece this summer, I mean, it's hard to fathom the extent to which the PLA is kind of a technologically advanced, extremely insular empire unto itself within the Chinese Communist Party. Right. And Xi does not like this. And I think this explains why he's been so intent on puncturing that a.
- [60:55]
A
Rival power center, but one that's staffed. I mean, if you look at the biographies of the people, they were all Xi allies. I mean, you know, you look at Huidong himself, you know, he was the Eastern Theater commander. He was in the so called Fujian Clique and was fast tracked to the CMC in 2022 by, by Xi Jinping himself. Again, Yaohua also had deep ties to Xi from his days in Fujian. I mean, again, he was suspended in, I guess it was almost a year ago now in November and he was expelled, I guess just in 2025. But there's a number of people with deep ties. And this ties into what we were talking about earlier about trusted confidants, things like that. And it would raise questions that people who have believed that the anti corruption campaign has always really been about purging political rivals and now we see him purging allies. How do we make sense of this?
- [62:01]
B
Yeah, so I think you're quite right. I mean, this is very different from his first term when he was going after tigers, quote, unquote, tigers like Guo Boxiang or Xu Caiho, who had sat atop the system. Right. Because they were potential power center and potential rivals to him. Right. Xi has very much in his third term, gone from going after his friends, going after his enemies, excuse me, to going after his friends. And it's really striking because it's not just the military. I mean, you look around at the leadership. I mean, part of what happened so dramatically at the last party congress was she really stacks the, the whole leadership with people who are close to him. So then, as you said, this raises really interesting questions about, well, why is he going after these people? I think, number one, I don't see it as a sign of weakness. I see that she, perhaps because I'm from New Jersey, as kind of being like a mafia don. Right. He's comfortable going after not just his enemies, but his associates if he needs to.
- [62:58]
A
Yeah. I mean, Tony is the one who pulled the trigger on Big Pussy.
- [63:02]
B
Yep. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think there is an element of that. Right. So then it raises questions, well, what's, what's really going on here? Right. I don't know that. I think some of this, especially because there's been so many generals swept up in this, some of this is about old fashioned grafted corruption. I think especially in the rocket forces and the equipment department. Right. Where there's just so much money sloshing around as they go through a dramatic buildup. You could see how some people, even at this point in the, in the movie, I think nobody's going to notice if 100k goes missing here and there because it's such a big program. I think it's qualitatively different. When you're talking about top political leaders, though, and people who are running the political work department, I think there's something else going on there. And I think what I found so problematic for a lot of the rumors that were spreading around germinating this summer about some kind of coup or about a power struggle is that I think we need to move our mental model away from this idea that there's going to be Xi versus another part of the system. I don't have solid evidence of this, but my best theory about part of what's going on in the PLA is that I hesitate to reach for this analogy, but it's kind of like the Maurer. We're at a point where everybody is a Xi'. Acolyte. Right. So now what you are going to find more and more of, I think, especially as Xi goes into his fourth term, is more intramural skirmishing among people within Xi's orbit.
- [64:23]
A
Right, right, right, right.
- [64:25]
B
And I think that's probably the most popular, plausible thing that may have been going on here for those very top leaders like Hou Weidong and like Miaohua in particular, that there was something political going here, but it's not necessarily about opposition to Xi. Either there was some kind of egregious corruption issue at play, or there was some kind of Game of Thrones going on within the pla. The other point that I would add, too, and I talked about this in a piece I did at the start of September for the China leadership model. You know, it's my mental model for Xi and his allies, because not all of his allies are created equally. Right. And the way I think about it is that if she is at the center of the political solar system in China, there's kind of two tiers of people. Right. There are people who are inside the asteroid belt, and then they're the gas giants. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. And I would put the most of the. I would put the whole Politburo Standing Committee or most of the Politburo Standing Committee in that category. And I would put Zhang Kiu Xia in that category, too. Right. Both because they have a shared family history, they've known each other for decades, and also because, somewhat remarkably, Zhang Kiuxia has not only been held on to even after exceeding the retirement limit, but also is somehow the Designated Survivor from what used to be the General Armaments Department. Right. Everybody else who used to run that apartment has been purged. I think for people outside the asteroid belt, they're kind of associates. And I think it's important to keep in mind that Xi had picked a lot of these people up throughout his career, and I think he feels comfortable that he can make them and he can break them. And I would put Lee Sangfu in that category, the former Defense Minister. I would put Chen Gang in that category. These are people who he gave helicopter promotions to and were beholden to him. But I don't think he really felt that nexus with them, that he's got to hold on to them and protect them. Because it's not clear to me that even if he had known them going back to his time in Fujian or Zhejiang, that there was such a deep nexus there, just because of the nature of the work. It's not like the guy who is your michu, right. If you're in one of those positions, you're not. I don't think you're interacting in the same way with your counterparts from the PLA in their system. So these guys, I think a lot of them are just disposable to him. So if there is some kind of fracas in the military, I think he's comfortable getting rid of them. And I don't think he sees it as problematic. I think he sees it as enhancing his own power. Right. It keeps everybody off balance, especially in this very potent part of the political system. Right. You want people to be uncertain. And the last thing I would say is what's missing from that narrative then is the dysfunctional piece of it. Because to manage a system like that has got to be emotionally exhausting and it requires constant improvisation. And it's very different from the way the American system is designed where it relies on institutionalization. Right. That you have a process for doing these things and it's institutionalized. For Xi to triangulate information, for him to constantly be playing divide and conquer among people who are in his orbit and be playing those games, he's got to wake up every day and think about that and improvise and figure out how to do that.
- [67:32]
A
That.
- [67:32]
B
Right. And I think this is one of the bigger questions as he goes into his 70s and we get into his fourth term. How sustainable is that? Right.
- [67:42]
A
Fascinating stuff. My God. The piece is called China Against China as Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success. It's by Jonathan Zinn and it's in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs. I have other Foreign affairs related interviews coming up, including one with Daniel Kurtz Phelan, which I'm really looking forward to, where we'll be talking about sort of the direction of the China discourse as he's observed it over his years, both as executive editor and as editor in chief now of this really remarkable institution of a journal. I really want to thank you for spending so much time. But let's move on now to our Paying it Forward segment. You have been name checked before as a young analyst by none other than Ryan Hass, who's just one of my favorite people in the whole damn world. So I'm counting on you giving me a really good name check for a younger colleague of yours, perhaps at Brookings or anywhere else that you've worked recently.
- [68:41]
B
Yeah. So I will take the liberty, I think, of doing two name checks. One is for my very able research assistant, Alan Matthias, who has helped me do deep digging and yeoman's work on this. And. And I think it's going to be a star in her own right. And the other person I would flag, Kaiser, is your colleagues over at the Trivium podcast, Andrew Polk and Denny McMahon in particular.
- [69:03]
A
Denise. Great.
- [69:04]
B
Yeah. I think, you know, their, their recent report from CSIS on China's economy in 2035, I think.
- [69:11]
A
Amazing.
- [69:12]
B
Yeah, it is amazing and I think it really advances the conversation. I think, you know, what was so good about it from my perspective is that it gets out of the shred of China should just, should be focused on propping up domestic consumption as a driver of economic growth. And I think methodologically what they do really well is they try to see how this looks from Xi Jinping's desk. Right. There's that cognitive empathy once again.
- [69:34]
A
Exactly.
- [69:35]
B
Try to understand the system on its own terms and not say they're going to make it or this is the right path, but explain to people that this is what they're trying to do. And I think they do that every week on the podcast. It has become a staple of my podcast diet. So I would want to give a huge shout out to them.
- [69:51]
A
I'm so glad to hear it. They've just been hitting it out of the park recently. I mean, all the ones with Corey Combs who's just, I mean, he's just forgotten more about critical minerals than the rest of us together have ever known. It's amazing. Kendra Schaefer, just all of them, they have quite a team over there. It's just I'm really, you know, really, really glad to be sort of. Well, first of all, as part of the network and Andrew has gotten back on the ball. He started giving me every Friday the sort of roundup for the week in China. So that's. Now it's free. Another reason to subscribe to the Citico substack. All right, let's move to recommendations. Those are two very, very excellent. I'm going to count that one as a dinny. Denny paying it forward as well as Ellen. All right, what are your recommendations for the week?
- [70:42]
B
Okay, so recommendations for the week. Number one is, like I said earlier, Joseph Tyrigian's biography of she's father has really been on my mind all summer and I think it's just an excellent book. The research that he's done is hugely impressive. But I think what is great about the book too is the sense of contingency that he brings to it. Right. You really get the feeling of Xi Zhongshun and others just trying to grope their way through the system and figure it out day to day. Right. It's a very humanistic portrait of the Chinese political leadership that I think can sometimes be missing in the political science literature. Right, yeah.
- [71:17]
A
You mean they don't have a hundred year plan or they don't have everything planned out and mapped out? Exactly. I mean, that's been a source of frustration. They're muddling through like everyone else. Else. And that's the truth of it.
- [71:30]
B
And the other two recommendations since we've been talking so much about early modern Europe is that there's an incredible book I read last year called the 30 Years War by C.V. wedgwood.
- [71:40]
A
I love. I just finished rereading it. Wedgwood is the best. Yeah, just finished rereading it my second time through. Oh my God, is it great? It's so full of the writing. Just through the writing alone. It's so fun.
- [71:56]
B
Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, it's like a novel, right? Oh, it's a page.
- [72:00]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, part of it is that the characters who people that time are just so amazing. I mean, just she makes them come alive though. I mean, it's not just, you know, the heroic figures like, you know, Gustavus Adolphus, but it's, it's. That's funny. I figured you must have had early modern Europe on your mind. I'm not surprised to hear you recommend Wedgwood. So she's an interesting figure too. You know a little bit about her.
- [72:33]
B
What I know about her is that I think she was one of the first female historians coming out of Oxford. And I think she wrote that book before she was 30 years old, if I recall correctly. Which is kind of.
- [72:43]
A
It's her own 30 years war, right?
- [72:45]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
- [72:47]
A
And she was openly lesbian and. And you know, she used CV basically to disguise the fact of her gender, you know, because back then it was sort of still an issue. And she's a. The heiress to the Wedgwood fortune, apparently.
- [73:03]
B
Oh, I did not realize. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in related to that, the. I think probably one of the best pieces of literature that I've read in the last couple of years is Manzoni's book the Betrothed, which takes place in the middle of the Thirty Years War.
- [73:19]
A
Oh, my God. I have been asking the goddamn chatgpt to recommend me literature written during or set in the Thirty Years War, and I can't get a damn thing. Okay, give me that again.
- [73:31]
B
Manzoni, the Betrothed.
- [73:33]
A
Okay. Oh my God.
- [73:35]
B
It sets smack in the middle of the Thirty Years War. It takes place in a small town in northern Italy up by Lago da Como. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it's kind of one of the first examples in my understanding of kind of historical fiction. Right where he wrote it in the 19th century, but it's set in the 17th century.
- [73:54]
A
Oh, fantastic. I can't wait to read that. I know what I'm going to read on my way back from England now. Thank you, man. That's fantastic. What a great recommendation. A great couple of recommendations. The Wedgwood book is just. I cannot recommend it more highly. And you know what? The audiobook of it, which is what I read my second go or I just listened to it. It's just great. The audiobook is so well narrated. It has this total gravitas. I mean, this really kind of pompous British guy, but he captures the sly humor of Wedgwood's writing too. There's a lot of really, really sly humor.
- [74:31]
B
Oh, it's wonderful. I mean, nobody writes better than the British historians. And what I like about it too, especially as somebody who is trained in a bureaucracy as a leadership analyst, is like you said, the way she brings the leaders alive and the way she makes analytical calls about them, that kind of seem glib at first, but then as you read through the book, are actually quite well substantiated. She'll describe people as a bumbling fool or he could never get it together. It was always preoccupied or distracted. Then, as you see, events play out. Yeah, that's actually, that's. That seems a little, you know, a little glib at the outset, but this seems to be a well merited analytic judgment about this individual.
- [75:10]
A
Yeah, so, you know, at one point she's talking about Wallenstein and he offends one of his subordinates, calling him an ink swiller, and she sort of leaves it hanging. You know, it's like he forgot the insults, but so and so did not, and they would come back to haunt him. And it's just. It's such a fun book. Oh, yeah, it's funny. I was at a party in. In Chapel Hill not too long ago and ended up in a conversation about the same book. It's. I guess it's. It's having its moment again. I know. Something about America in the Zeitgeist today makes us all gravitate toward 30 years war again.
- [75:47]
B
Such a happy occasion.
- [75:49]
A
Yeah, Such a happy occasion. All right, all right. Okay. I've got a book to recommend as well. It's called Transplants by Daniel Tam Claiborne. Daniel was my colleague. He was actually a part of our sister nonprofit when I was at the China Project called the Sarica Initiative, which is still going on, like the China Project, and still doing very, very good work. He's always been a terrific writer. Actually. I judged some writing contests that he won. I voted for him back at the old Great Leap in the Hutong in Beijing years ago, but he's just always been a really, really good writer. This novel is quite good. It's set in China and in the US Just before and during the COVID pandemic. And Daniel manages this sort of story about crossing of parallel lives, I guess, if that makes sense. All the parallel lines aren't supposed to cross, but there they are. Parallel lives that somehow cross. A young Chinese woman who ends up in the US a Chinese American woman who ends up teaching in China and working in China. Both of them are on sort of these personal journeys. But. But, yeah, personal journeys usually makes me kind of bristle, but this is actually quite good. It's not cheesy at all. I thought it was bold to try to write not one, but two main female characters for your first major published novel. But I'm obviously not in a good position to judge whether he pulls it off. But, I mean, I just would say it worked for me. 4.2 on Goodreads with 78 ratings. So it's. It's pretty good. So, yay, Daniel. Again, that book is called Transplants. And, Daniel, if you're listening, I totally apologize. I dropped the ball on doing a podcast with you about the book, but things have been crazy, and I hope this makes up for it to some extent. Johnson, thank you so much for taking all the time to chat with me once again. That piece of yours in foreign affairs which just came out is called China Against China, and so make sure to read it. I look forward to hearing feedback on that and about this conversation.
- [77:49]
B
Great. Thanks so much, Kaiser. Appreciate the opportunity.
- [77:52]
A
You're going camping, huh? Where are you going?
- [77:54]
B
We're going up to, you know, if you drive out of Washington, D.C. and you go, you know, you're on 95 and you're going north to New York or Philly or whatever. You cross this big bridge over the Susquehanna River.
- [78:04]
A
Yeah, I grew up on the Susquehanna in upstate New York. Yep.
- [78:08]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [78:09]
A
So there's a Susquehanna at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
- [78:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, every time I go by it, I realize there's, there's a state park here and this would be a great spot to go camping. So we belatedly tried to get this on the book and everything in Shenandoah, which is the usual go to from Washington D.C. for camping, was, you know, totally booked up. But there were vacancies at Susquehanna State park just because I think people don't, don't think about it as much. And I think it's going to be spectacular up there, especially like the weather is. It finally feels like fall in D.C. after. Yeah. After having a protracted summer down here.
- [78:40]
A
Well, be a happy camper and enjoy. Enjoy yourself and I look forward to talking to you again before too long.
- [78:46]
B
Okay, great. Thanks so much, Kaiser. I really appreciate it. This is a lot of fun.
- [78:49]
A
Thank you. You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through substack@www.sinicapodcast.com where there is a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Or email me@cinecopodmail.com if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin, Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest John Zinn. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care. It.