What makes Xi tick?

Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Sue-Lin Wong.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Joining me from the thickets and brambles of storied Goldkorn Holler and the trackless wilderness beyond Nashville, Tennessee is Jīn Yùmǐ 金玉米, also known as Jeremy Goldkorn, who confessed to me privately that he’s the one who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline. At last, we know the truth. Greet the people mon saboteur.

Jeremy Goldkorn: Greetings people from deep in the woods in Tennessee, where I’m prepping for Armageddon in my bunker.

Kaiser: You’re bringing it on, is what you’re doing. You’re bringing it on. Anyway, today on Sinica, we are talking about another podcast, one that was released with impeccable timing just ahead of the 20th Party Congress that starts on October 16, just a few days after this show drops. That podcast is an eight-part series called the Prince, and it’s from the Economist, and hosted by Sue-Lin Wong. Her podcast actually made it as the actual cover of the magazine, which I believe is a first. I am delighted to welcome Sue-Lin as our guest this week. She joins us from Singapore. Welcome to Sinica Sue-Lin, and congrats on this excellent series and the incredibly great reception that it has received thus far.

Sue-Lin Wong: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Kaiser: So, let’s just jump right in and let’s talk about the genesis of the podcast series. Did you approach your editors with this idea, or did they have already this idea that they were going to do something on Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and then just approached you to do it? Or how did that come about?

Sue-Lin: That is a great question. I cannot claim any credit for this idea. I think it was our senior editors who wanted something big on China and they knew there was the Party Congress. And so, when I was approached to do the podcast series, I sort of politely asked if maybe there was another China topic we could do as a podcast series because Xi Jinping would not be the easiest narrative longform podcast to do, but they were pretty adamant. I guess it’s kind of interesting because I think a lot of China correspondents just wouldn’t think of pitching a series on Xi Jinping . It’s just so insane, in some ways. It’s like so difficult, which obviously we can get into the challenges of sort of reporting it out.

Kaiser: Oh, we will.

Sue-Lin: Will. And so, yeah, that’s why I guess my editors have paid the big bucks to think of these ambitious projects that China correspondents themselves are very skeptical of.

Kaiser: And the title of the podcast, can you claim credit for that? I mean, when I heard it, I was like, “the Prince, that’s interesting.” Is it supposed to evoke Machiavelli or maybe emphasize the fact that using Xi Jinping himself is red royalty, sort of a prince or princeling. Or did you have that title in mind before you started?

Sue-Lin: Yeah, so I can’t claim credit for that. That’s actually one of our colleagues at the Economist, Sondre. He’s a data journalist. And really, the way this title came about is a great promotion for Zoom because we were on a China Zoom video call, and I was explaining the concept of the podcast and how we were trying to think of a title, and then he just mentioned it in the Zoom chat. To this day, he claims it’s the best Zoom chat contribution he’s ever made. But the reason we went with it is actually because it has really multiple layers of meaning. So, as you alluded to, it’s a reference to Machiavelli’s famous text, The Prince, which is all about power. The most famous line for it is ideally, a prince is both loved and feared, but if you can’t be loved, then it’s great to be feared.

So, there’s sort of that level to it. Then there’s also a reference to the fact Xi Jinping was born into Communist Party royalty, and his dad was one of the founding fathers of China. But there’s actually two other references that I sort of thought of as we were making the podcast series. And one is connected to who Xi Jinping’s dad is, but the idea that Xi Jinping sees himself as a true inheritor of the Communist Party revolution. It’s like kind of reminds me of Game of Thrones or a Lord of the Rings where there’s this man on a mission because he sees himself as part of a larger project. Then the final reference I thought of recently was that he’s not actually at the peak of his power yet. And so, it’s a reference to the fact that there’s more to come.

Kaiser: Ah, so he’ll be king next.

Sue-Lin: Exactly. And then we had the whole problem of whether or not to translate it into Chinese, because when I started telling some Chinese people what we wanted to call it, they didn’t get the Machiavelli reference because prince, Wángchú 王储, is very different to Jūnzhǔ Lùn 君主论, which is Machiavelli’s text in Chinese. Then there was a debate about whether we wanted the reference to the princelings, like, is it going to tiānzǐ (天子) or tàizǐ (太子)? In the end, we were like, you know what? It’s too difficult. We just won’t translate it into Chinese.

Jeremy: That’s often the easiest answer to such questions. So, Lin, have you had experience doing podcasting before? Because it’s quite a different way of reporting from text journalism particularly. I mean, you’ve got to get the sound. And if I can just add a question on that, you mention in each podcast that there are many people who helped you that can’t be named. Can you talk a bit about the difficulties of reporting on Xi Jinping, particularly for a medium that needs actual people’s voices?

Sue-Lin: Yeah. No, there are so many great questions wrapped up in that. Just to take them one by one, no, I’d never made a podcast series before, and I feel for my production team, who I think really did an excellent job trying to explain the differences between making a podcast series and writing text articles, not just to me, but to the whole China team at the Economist. Because this really was a project between the audio team at the Economist and the China team. It was a very interesting project, I think, because a lot of my colleagues who cover China were all China nerds, whereas the audio team wants to make like entertaining, engaging podcasts. And obviously, there’s overlap between those two missions, but sometimes there’s divergence and maybe later we can chat about the way it most clearly manifested over Iowa.

Kaiser: Ah, wow. Yeah.

Sue-Lin: But to your other question of how we gathered the audio, and that was actually one of the reasons I was so hesitant to do this project to begin with because the way I have been explaining it to people, it’s like trying to make a podcast about Joe Biden, but not being able to go to America or speak to any Americans there. But also, say America were the world’s most powerful surveillance state, if you did try to speak to Americans there, you would put your sources at huge risk. But we were very, very fortunate, and I worked with some very, very talented journalists. I can’t get into immense detail because I want to protect them, but they really helped us find some of the incredible audio and archive that is actually publicly available. Like, a lot of it is on YouTube or on Chinese video sites.

Kaiser: Sure.

Sue-Lin: I think that really elevated the podcast. But I think unless you are born and raised in mainland China and you’re sort of immersed in all that, it’s very, very hard to find that kind of material.

Kaiser: So, Sue-Lin, when did you guys begin work on this? How long did you actually go between the time you rolled tape for the first time and the actual dropping of the podcast?

Sue-Lin: Well, we started conceiving of the project in January. I worked with the production team. There were about sort of five of us. I was working on other projects on and off but was mostly focused on this. And we didn’t start recording until around June.

Kaiser: Oh, okay. Wow. That’s pretty quick. I think it came together really, really quickly. I mean, I was just going to ask you, for a friend, whether you were able to devote your entire time to working on the podcast as opposed to your other “reporterly” responsibilities.

Sue-Lin: Yeah, I mean, I was quite fortunate that I was eventually sort of able to focus most of my time and efforts on it just because it was such a huge undertaking. Like, I really had no idea. I have so much respect for people who make podcasts of all forms, but especially, sort of long form series because there’s just so many different elements you have to think about, how people sound, do they sound interesting? What kind of archive you’re drawing on. How do you conceptualize the overall arc of the series, but also each individual episode? Both of you would know much better than me that podcasts are all about sort of creating a vibe where you are having a chat with mates over beers at the pub, which is slightly different from the style the Economist is known for.

Kaiser: Although, I think you did a really good job of combining the two types. That was really nice.

Jeremy: Sort of related to that, we will get onto the important questions about the prince himself in a moment, but first let me ask you about the most important person perhaps in the podcast, your mum. Your mother makes an appearance in the podcast and she seems somewhat bemused about it. You brought your own family into the podcast, it seems to me, to make a point about you not being able to report from China, which is now a very common or perhaps the most common experience for journalists who cover China. How did you make the decision to bring in your own family? It’s a very un-Economist thing to do, I might add. And what does your mom think of it now that it’s out?

Sue-Lin: Well, yeah, it’s a great question because when I was recording her in the kitchen that day when I was in Sydney, she was very confused about what I was doing, which might actually be reflected in the tape. She’s like, “Aren’t you a journalist writing about China? What is happening here?” But again, that’s a great question because one thing that the podcast team really emphasized to me from the very outset was that podcasts are all about creating a connection with the host. And they really wanted the B-plot, so to speak, so my own personal story, which was something that I had not even considered. I was just focused on, how do we tell the story of Xi Jinping and the story of the Communist Party and of modern China? But from their perspective, it was incredibly important to bring my own story out.

I think that was sort of one of the challenges of blending the China team and the audio team at somewhere like the Economist in terms of how do we strike that balance? Because I think I wouldn’t have felt comfortable if a lot of the podcast were about me, and it shouldn’t have been. I think we got the balance about right, and the fact that my story only slowly comes out over the series, I think is better than sort of having the whole of episode one be about me. But we did actually tease it in the first episode because there’s a line about how I found out how I’ve learned over the years how difficult reporting on China has been. So, it was very much an editorial decision. We were sort of making it up as we went. I think some of my print colleagues were a bit puzzled by why my story was in there and why my mom was featured, and why we were cooking chicken rendang together. But I think I’m sort of convinced now that I’ve heard the final cut and seen the reception to my mother that it’s probably good to have a little bit of your own story in a podcast given that that’s the medium.

Kaiser: Yeah. No, I think you guys did find the perfect balance. And Jeremy, to Sue-Lin’s point, this is exactly why every episode that you’re on, I try to introduce a little bit of biographical detail about your life, the years you spent as a Mexican wrestler under the name El Maiz Torado.

Jeremy: Yeah. It’s about establishing a connection with the listener. I get it.

Kaiser: The pie-eating contests. Oh yeah, and of course, your recent work as a saboteur, your QAnon affiliations, all that stuff. Yeah. It’s really important for people to know. Sue-Lin, really, the thing that I like, I’m serious, and I like best about the series besides, of course, the very lavish production, which I’m very jealous of, was how you did such an excellent job of introducing so many of the factors that drove Xi and drove China in the direction that it took. Since our podcast launched in 2010, Sinica has really focused quite a bit on this turn that China had already begun to take, a turn that Jeremy and I were watching with growing alarm, and figuring out why this happened has been something of a light motif for the Sinica Podcast that’s really run through now for the dozen or so years that we’ve been doing it.

Perhaps we can go through what some of these factors are and get an idea of how much, in your understanding at least, they influenced Xi Jinping in his style of rule, in the choices that he’s made. And let’s start with this one that Susan Shirk actually first kind of raised several years ago, Jeremy. I think we were in UC Irvine, and we were doing a live show, and I asked her about this. It was really the first time I had heard this articulated so clearly. But it’s a big feature in your show, Sue-Lin, which is about corruption, right? About how the decentralized deliberately collective leadership of the aughts contributed to corruption. How much did his concerns, Xi Jinping’s concerns with corruption and its related ills figure into the way that he then governed when he took power in 2012?

Sue-Lin: Yeah, great question. And one thing that became very clear as I started doing research into Xi Jinping was how formative his time in the provinces was. I didn’t really realize, when I started out this project, that he spent 17 years in Fujian Province.

Kaiser: Oh yeah, yeah.

Sue-Lin: He started when it was this incredibly poor backwards, sort of backwater, and over his time there, its economy just grew. I think it grew six times bigger than it was when he started out there. I became really interested in, how do we tell that story, but also what would he have seen? Now, of course, we don’t really know, from the man himself, what he saw and what his experience day-to-day was, but we do know about what Fujian was like in the 1990s and sort of how poor it was, but also how it was opening up to the world, and how there were millions of people trying to get to America and other parts of the world. There were like huge smuggling rings and there was just rampant corruption of all kinds.

That was sort of why we chose to spend an episode painting a picture of China in the 1990s and what Xi Jinping would’ve seen, and how that probably informed his decisions once he took power, most notably in his corruption crackdown. And how that didn’t come out of nowhere was that Xi Jinping… What is really interesting about Xi Jinping is that he sort of started at the bottom rung of Chinese politics as a young guy, obviously helped along by his father and his family’s name, but to work your way up through that ladder, you will have seen a lot of really, really crazy stuff.

Kaiser: Yeah. Speaking about stuff that he’s seen, there is that fantastic section in one of the early episodes about Lài Chāngxīng 赖昌星, who ran this gigantic smuggling operation, and an empire, really, in Fujian, where, as you say, he spent 17 years, where Xi was there. I mean, I was glad to hear the familiar voice of Jim McGregor in that section because I think he had one of the most vivid accounts of Lai Changxing in his book, 1 Billion Customers, with the red mansion, and all that. I highly recommend that people go back and visit that because that’s… McGregor’s book is just such a good portrait of that era. Now, Xi Jinping, as we know, and so he was an official in Fuzhou, all around Fujian Province, and in fact running the province through much of the time that Lai was active there.

Where do you come down on this question? You put it in… It’s like whether Xi himself was tainted by corruption in his many years, in the go-go ’90s and or the early aughts, was he tainted by it?

Sue-Lin: Great question. What do you mean by tainted?

Kaiser: Right. Oh, well, I’m leaving that to you. You can decide what tainted means there.

Sue-Lin: Well, I guess, if we’re going to define it very, very narrowly, did Xi Jinping himself take cash bribes? I wasn’t able to find any evidence of that. But I know that there are very, very talented journalists, the New York Times and Bloomberg who have looked into Xi’s family wealth, and they have found that, while there was no evidence that they found of Xi himself being corrupt, his family members are a different matter. But I think what was also very interesting in my research was that WikiLeaks cable that was leaked in 2009 based on an American diplomat interviewing a family friend of Xi Jinping.

That family friend says that, “Xi Jinping probably isn’t going to be corrupted by money. He doesn’t have to be because he comes from such a wealthy family that he doesn’t need the money in that way. He can always call-in favors based on his family name. But what he could be corrupted by is power.” And so, that was, again, one of the themes we really wanted to explore in the podcast.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy: That seems like a very pithy and accurate answer to me based on my deep insight into what’s going on inside Zhongnanhai. Related to corruption, Sue-Lin is the near-death experience that the Chinese Communist Party went through in 1989 when corruption was a really important and powerful issue that the student demonstrators used to gain popular support. And, of course, and what Kaiser and I like to facetiously call the Golden Age of Chinese liberalism and the Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 and Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝, there was truly outrageous corruption on a massive scale. It was very obvious to anyone living in China. And as occasional outbursts against officials in real life protests or online criticism made very clear this was something that the whole of society was very aware of.

Kaiser: Oh, yeah.

Jeremy: Then you have things like one of the incidents that you highlight in the podcast series is the Wukan Village uprising. How much of is Xi Jinping haunted by the fear of a popular revolt against the communist ruling class?

Sue-Lin: Interesting question. Yeah, I think Xi Jinping is haunted by many things. I think he’s haunted by his traumatic childhood and he’s haunted by modern Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution. I think Xi Jinping is haunted by political rivalries and in-fighting at the very, very highest rungs of the Communist Party. And he’s very, very concerned that that can then turn into some kind of popular uprising. And so, in 1989, we saw that, with the different factions fighting at the highest levels of the Party and that sort of spilling out into Tiananmen Square and across the country with the pro-democracy protests. That was what could have happened with the in-fighting between Bó Xīlái 薄熙来 and others in 2012. And how Bo Xilai was trying to mobilize people in Chongqing through his red songs and his sort of populous narrative and nostalgia for an idealized version of China in the 1950s.

I think something that Xi Jinping is very, very concerned about is factional in-fighting at the top of the party that could spill out onto the streets.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Jeremy: Another thing that he’s perhaps, you could say haunted by or even obsessed by is the fate of the Soviet Union. You recount the famous leaked speech in which he talked about how no one in the Soviet Union was man enough to prevent the collapse of the USSR. How much did that, and does that play into his thinking? I mean that speech and his concern about manliness always loom large when I think about Xi.

Sue-Lin: No, I completely agree with you. And actually, it was in the studio that when I was recording one day that I was sort of struck that often I listen to podcast series, and three months later I struggled to remember anything. I just remember like, oh, it was interesting. And so, we got to the bit about the Soviet Union and I decided to add in a sort of signpost to say, if there’s one thing you’re going to remember from this series, let it be this, that the collapse of the Soviet Union haunts not just the Chinese Communist Party, but Xi Jinping himself to this very day. Because I was sort of thinking of my friends in Australia or America who maybe don’t know that much about China, but they see lots of headlines because China is increasingly in the news.

I think if we all just remember how haunted Xi Jinping is by the collapse of the Soviet Union, it actually explains quite a bit of sort of what drives him and how he’s tried to seize control of the Chinese Communist Party and enforce ideological discipline throughout, and also some of China’s broader actions in the world. Yeah, I think the collapse of the Soviet Union is an incredibly important way to understand the motivations of the party.

Kaiser: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I could not.

Jeremy: There’s another speech that you include in the podcast that I’ve remembered since I first saw it on the internet many years ago. So, Xi was in Mexico in 2009, still just vice president, and he told a group of Chinese business people about the foreigners with full bellies, with nothing better to do than point their fingers at our affairs. The video of that speech is quite remarkable. Xi seems to be speaking off the cuff, and it seems to reveal some of his personality in a way that we don’t normally get to see in his public appearances. As you point out in the podcast that, in some ways, was the speech that people should have been paying attention to when trying to figure out what kind of ruler he would be.

Kaiser: Well, him and every other Chinese person ever. Right? I mean, this is something I heard a million times in different forms.

Jeremy: About foreigners with full bellies. Yeah, sure.

Kaiser: Yeah. Well, basically, I mean, in different phrasing, but the idea is the same. Yeah.

Jeremy: No, absolutely. I mean, I sometimes am completely sympathetic to that point of view. You see the conformists of Twitter who immediately glam onto whatever’s the politically correct talking point of the day and then go and get the McDonald’s. But enough of my prejudices. Sue-Lin, you point out that this was a speech that people should have been paying attention to. Are there other speeches of which we have any kind of video that are similar to this? Or is this the only such thing you found in your research for the podcast?

Sue-Lin: You mean in terms of Xi Jinping’s attitude towards the world, or just any speeches that he’s made?

Jeremy: His attitude and his somehow… It felt to me like that speech was you got to see…

Kaiser: Unguarded. Yeah.

Jeremy: He was less guarded. You could kind of see what he really thinks.

Sue-Lin: Yeah. No, that’s a really interesting question because one thing I had to sit down and figure out, sort of early in this process was, what are the ways we’re going to think about Xi Jinping, and how are we going to tell his story, given I can’t just walk into Zhongnanhai and do a sit-down interview with him. And so, one of the most important things we relied on were his own words. So, Xi Jinping, in his own words, whether they were leaked speeches or prepared speeches printed by the people’s daily, or candid interviews that he gave earlier in his career in the 1990s that are available on YouTube. And then a couple of other things just quickly that we relied on were global events that shaped him. So, the Arab Spring, the rise of the internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but also events in China that would’ve shaped him like the Cultural Revolution in 1989.

Then a third category, beyond just seeing his own words and global event events that we wanted to look at were the people who influenced him, which I can get to later if you are interested in. And I think also, we ended up realizing we had to find people who shared similar life experiences. So, the Lǐ Nányāng 李南央, who features in episode one, who is the daughter of Máo Zédōng’s 毛泽东 private secretary was someone we decided to include because her father was purged when she was nine years old, the same age that Xi Jinping was when his father was purged. So, we sort of had to get creative, thinking about the different frameworks we could use to learn more about Xi Jinping. But to your question on speeches, I do think the Mexico speech is particularly revealing in terms of speeches he’s given.

But in terms of other candid moments, he’s done some very, I think relatively candid interviews with Chinese state television, sort of local Beijing TV and things when he reflects on his time in Liangjiahe, when he lived in a cave for seven years, or he reflects on what it was like when he married Péng Lìyuán 彭丽媛, and he and her were separated for many years as they were trying to raise their daughter. I mean, it’s slim pickings, but given sort of how many limitations we were working with, we sort of tried to latch on to any moment that seemed to be candid from the big man himself.

But just the other thing I would add on the Mexico speech was that speech came about in our episode that really looked at Iowa, and that was something that my producers were very, very keen to look at because Xi Jinping spent two weeks traveling around Iowa in 1985, and we ended up actually going to Iowa and interviewing a lot of people who sort of met him then. But as a China correspondent, I was incredibly hesitant because I just wasn’t really sure what the point of Iowa was. I had no idea what we were going to find out about him, like what it would reveal about his personality. The team and I had many, many debates to the point that I sort of was using the, I don’t know if the two of you are familiar with that joke about “the drunk man trying to find his car keys under a streetlight”?

Kaiser: Yeah, sure.

Sue-Lin: And I was like, we don’t want to be the drunk people trying to find Xi Jinping in Iowa, because that’s the only place that is available to us. But I think that episode sort of… I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out because we do go to Iowa, but then we say “actually his speech in Mexico is much more revealing about his personality rather than the fact he slept in a bedroom with Star Wars posters”.

Kaiser: Star Wars posters. That was a great Star Trek memorabilia too. Star Wars-

Sue-Lin: Yeah. Exactly. And took a boat down to Mississippi. That is like less revealing of who Xi Jinping really is than his speech in Mexico.

Kaiser: What I thought, I mean, it was probably lost on people who don’t speak Chinese, but just listening to him on those state TV interviews, talking like a normal person instead of speechifying, what a different. I mean, just the whole register of his voice is different. I think that, yeah, unfortunately, probably people who don’t understand Mandarin and kind of the nuances of it, that’s going to be lost on them. It’s a pity. But it was great. It was interesting to hear that stuff. Speaking about stuff that sort of leaked or candid or not intended for the public consumption, there’s this remarkable document, Document Number Nine. You talk about it a little bit, where he really does, it’s a response to some of these other factors that you mentioned, like, the Arab Spring uprisings, beginning of 2011, but even before that, the color revolutions of the late aughts. And relatedly, how he really feared what he described as the potential of the internet to amplify destructive forces.

That’s all very much, all part of this Document Number Nine, which we saw in 2013. I guess I kept thinking, well, was he far off? I mean, given the assumptions that many Chinese elites had about the intentions of Western liberal hegemonism and how it was on the march and ultimately sought regime change in China, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that he would behave as he ended up behaving. I mean, all of this taken together, my point is the idea that, okay, so he had to address the fatal vulnerability of corruption, he had to prevent the kind of collapse that he saw in the Soviet Union, that he had to avoid that kind of regime change through color revolution, and to try to tame the internet.

To what extent do you think that this is mainly what Xi Jinping himself thought? And to what extent do you think this is really what the leadership more broadly concluded, had concluded already by, say, 2010, 2011? In other words, do you think that somebody like Xi, who was like personalistic, and autocratic, and highly centralizing, was he inevitably going to emerge as China’s leader at that time, or do you think that we should be looking more at Xi, the individual and how his biography and his personality put their stamp on Chinese politics, and ultimately really, on China’s history? I know you’ll say it’s both, but in what proportion?

Sue-Lin: Yeah. And that was another big debate that we had at the Economist throughout this process, which was, how much should this podcast be about Xi Jinping, and how much should it be about the Chinese Communist Party? Obviously, within sort of the China watching world, there’s this huge debate, and that is an open question, and yes, I do think it’s both. But in terms of the particularities around Xi Jinping, I think the dynamics have really, really shifted while Xi has been leader. And I think it’s become a lot more about him, himself. Now, do I think he sort of is a man of destiny? Was he always going to become China’s leader? No, definitely not. I think there was so much randomness in his rise. We can chat about it a bit, but there was so many factors that sort of contributed to him becoming China’s leader.

One thing I would say is that, when he came to power, the Communist Party was genuinely in crisis. I mean, we’ve spoken a little bit about the corruption and the hundreds of thousands of protests around the country over corruption, but over so many other things. We also mentioned Bo Xilai. There was sort of factional in-fighting at the very highest level of the party. And so, I think what happened, based on our reporting and Chris Johnson, the former top China analyst at the CIA told us in the series, the party elders needed someone who was sort of a sexier Hu Jintao to come in and save the day. And they thought that was Xi Jinping. In many, many ways, Xi Jinping has really seized control of the Chinese Communist Party and seized control of China. I think he’s just gone much further than even maybe the party elders expected.

Kaiser: No, that’s a great way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Jeremy: On a related question, just I think about halfway through the series, you asked the question, “Is Xi Jinping the most powerful man in the world?” And you mentioned that there are two sides of the debate, but in the podcast itself, you survey the various reasons why he could be thought of as the world’s most powerful man, unquestioned command of the Chinese Communist Party, a roughly a 100-million-person strong organization that is bigger than just about every company, that’s in charge of the biggest army. He’s in charge of the biggest army in the world, and China’s the top or the biggest country by many measures. But you don’t actually cite the reasons why he might not be the most powerful man in the world. What’s your own personal take on this question? Are there cracks in the armor?

Kaiser: I’m glad you said cracks rather than the other word, because that would have been inappropriate.

Jeremy: Well, oh yeah, I have experience with that other word.

Sue-Lin: Well, interesting you ask because I did tweet about the fact Xi Jinping is the most powerful man in the world, and it caused quite a stir on Twitter. I mean, yes, we sort of lay out the reasons he arguably is the most powerful person in the world. Why would he not be? Well, I think, actually the next few weeks and all the debate we’re going to have about the Party Congress is connected to this. As he consolidates his power, and if he doesn’t name a successor, does he become more and more fragile? I mean, what if he has a heart attack in office? What if he dies in office? He’s obviously not going to be the most powerful person in the world in that situation. So, we try to sort of justify why we are making that claim, but obviously there would be many, many people who would argue that there are other more powerful people in the world. For example, Joe Biden.

Kaiser: Eh, okay. Well, I do think he’s undoubtedly powerful and then quite plausibly the single most powerful man in the world. I was chatting with my friend Graham Webster, and we were talking about Xi, about this question that we’ve already kind of put to you, about whether it’s really Xi or about bigger historical forces. I was thinking, or he suggested, and I think this is very, very clever. I wish I could claim credit for it, but this is Graham who said this, but he said, “You could turn the question around. You could sort of flip it and ask, could Xi Jinping, after taking office in 2012, could he have actually stopped this lurch toward more assertiveness globally, more repression domestically, more swagger, more confidence, all the rest of that?” It’s the counterfactual.

If he’s so powerful, if it meant it was all down to him as an individual, could he have prevented this? Could he have really significantly changed the direction that China was moving in?

Sue-Lin: I mean, yeah, I think he could have, I think it would’ve been about who he elevated in the party and what kind of policies they implemented. For example, what happened to Hong Kong I don’t think was inevitable. I think that was very deliberate choice over many, many years. Not just sort of 2019, 2020, but I don’t think that it was always going to be that the Communist Party had to turn Hong Kong into a police state. Just taking one example.

Kaiser: Sure. Okay. Oh, great. Okay.

Jeremy: Sue-Lin, so China’s influence over the NBA is one of the illustrations of the extent of Xi’s power that you hinge an episode on, together with the terrifying tale of one Uyghur man who was detained and abused for running a language school and having overseas connections. I found the NBA parts of the story interesting because, although it’s a frequent complaint of journalists covering China, that it’s very difficult to get Chinese people to talk to them frankly, or even at all about subjects of interest. The American business community is perhaps the most cowardly community in the world when it comes to talking the truth about China. How difficult was it to get anybody who knew anything about the NBA to talk to you?

Kaiser: You besides Enes Kanter Freedom?

Sue-Lin: Yeah. Well, I’m not sure if you noticed, but everyone else who we… All the other audio we use about the NBA, they’re not interviews that we did. We sort of clipped interviews from other podcasts and from sort of The Wires and things like that. Yeah, we didn’t speak to anyone about that. One thing we really wanted to do with that episode was sort of raise questions about the West’s moral complicity and the fact that, before Xi Jinping took power, I think there was this dominant narrative of engagement and the importance of sort of engaging with China, which I think was a very convenient narrative for anyone who wanted to make money in China. Whereas now, it’s become like a much more difficult narrative for people to hide behind and sort of now raises many, many more difficult questions for people who are sort of still trying to find narratives to use if they want to just sort of make the most of the Chinese market, which is something…

Yeah, I’d be curious for both of your views on sort of the questions. So, I’ve been getting lots of private messages over Twitter over the past few days about the podcast series. One question I’ve been getting is, so what do we do? What does the West do about this and how do we deal with China now? Given that Xi Jinping himself has just shown that our narratives, our previous narratives engagement are total rubbish, where does that lead us?

Kaiser: Whatever. I challenge that assumption, but…

Jeremy: I know that you’re pulling a journalist trick on us and trying to turn the tables as to who’s asking the questions.

Kaiser: We’re not having… Yeah.

Sue-Lin: I mean, no, no. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. There’s more and more debate now about the extent to which the West should engage with China, and how, and every day we’re seeing more and more news items. It’s interesting to see what America has just announced about semiconductors and sort of not selling advanced technology to China, but still selling sort of lower-grade semiconductors to China. I think it’s a really, really tricky question. I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I think we’re going to have to increasingly grapple with.

Jeremy: Absolutely. I would, in fact, try to answer that question of yours if I had any clue what to say. But I think this is one of the most difficult questions facing the West broadly, is how to talk about China and how to talk to China. And in some ways, I mean, this drives a lot of what we do at the China Project, is trying to figure out, what is the right way to approach this country that is not going to behave like a Western country?

Kaiser: Well, I’ll bite it here. I will bite and say that the West needs to answer, especially the United States needs to answer a question about itself first. It needs to decide, are we a country that can tolerate the very existence of a peer competitor that is not, sort of a carbon copy of us in terms of its political culture? Are we able to tolerate that? Can we make room or is it sort of in our DNA to be the global hegemon for all time? I don’t think we’ve given an honest answer to that question as a nation. Anyway, let’s get back to your podcast.

Jeremy: Before I start pushing back and completely arguing with Kaiser about that, let’s get back to you, Sue-Lin.

Sue-Lin: No, I mean, I think it’s a really, really fascinating question and something I was just thinking about. I like my iPhone, and my iPhone is made in China. If it wasn’t made in China, it’d be much, much more expensive. And I like listening to my podcast, Sinica or the Prince, or whatever podcast on Apple Podcasts. But as the series, my podcast series looks at, there are accusations that Apple is using forced labor in Xinjiang. And even if those accusations are not true, Apple is engaging with the Chinese Communist Party. That raises a bunch of really, really tricky questions. If we believe, as I do, that the Communist Party is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, how do we square that circle?

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s tough one. Let’s get back again, to the actual podcast itself, which is what we’re here to talk to you about. There is a really great kind of arc that the whole thing takes, where the first four episodes really, you’re setting up all these things that we’ve been talking about, the reasons, the forces that shaped Xi Jinping as he is. Then you do a couple of episodes, which I was joking with Jeremy, kind of come down to the litany of Chinese perfidy, where you go into internet censorship and oppression of this and that. And yeah, all very real stuff. And then, at the end, you bring in some of the big guns. You bring in David Rennie, who kind of just… I think some of the things that he said were profound and utterly great, like when he talked about China as this gigantic experiment in utilitarianism.

What a golden line that was. That they can maybe take 24 million people in Shanghai complaining about dynamic COVID-zero lockdowns if the 1.4 billion people in the rest of the country are really happy about living in the country, where basically they do not fear, they don’t have the threat of COVID-19. Really great. Talk about David’s role in this.

Sue-Lin: I mean, David’s just very, very brilliant as our Beijing bureau chief and the Chaguan columnist. I mean, it was more like throughout the podcast series, and actually, throughout my time as China correspondent, I would just constantly be calling David up to talk through story ideas or ask for advice about, sort of how to work, approach sources, or think through whatever it was that I was working on. And so, I just knew that we absolutely had to have him in the series. And given he’s been in China throughout COVID, it made sense, and also that he very, very closely follows China’s foreign policy among many other things. It just sort of made sense to have him in the last two episodes. Which actually I think worked out really nicely because one thing we thought a lot about was how we wanted to end the series.

I think one thing I struggled with was the lack of Chinese voices and the fact I couldn’t interview ordinary Chinese people in China, which is sort of one of the reasons I became a journalist because I just really, really like doing that. And I want to sort of amplify other people’s voices, not necessarily mine. And at the very end, we end with a song from people in Shanghai as they come out of lockdown, but also we reflect on this giant utilitarian experiment. And what David had already sort of alluded to, 10 minutes beforehand in that final episode, that China is a sort of techno-authoritarian, majoritarian state. And for many people, they’re having pretty good lives and their lives have improved year on year. But what happens if you’re a Uyghur or an idealistic university student, or just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? And sort of what the implications of that kind of society might be.

Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: Sue-Lin, one of the most interesting books about China to come out in recent years was Red Roulette by Desmond Shum. But reading it, I certainly wasn’t the only one who came away with the intense desire to have a shower. Both because he appears to have profited vastly off his corrupt activities and kept all the money. And because I mean, he just says mean things about his wife, which I think is just really awful.

Kaiser: Ex-wife.

Jeremy: How did you feel about interviewing him and what he had to contribute towards the discussion about Xi Jinping?

Sue-Lin: Yeah, so I also had similar concerns, and I don’t know if you noticed, but we used him in a very limited way in the series, where we just wanted him to talk about his own personal experiences, engaging in that kind of corruption in the years before Xi Jinping took power, because it’s just so difficult to verify many, many other things that he writes about in his book, which is really, really fascinating. I wish there were like 10 types of Red Roulette books out there in the world. There should be more books like that so we sort of have more data points to draw on. But obviously, as a journalist, I’m very concerned about how we use information and the extent to which we rely on sort of second and third-hand information.

Kaiser: At the end of this, I mean, what would you say are the insights that ordinary folks, people who are just really familiar with a standard take on Xi Jinping that’s on offer in the Anglo-American media, what would you hope that they come away with after listening to the Prince? And what about you personally? In the course of your reporting this, did you have any kind of “aha” moments where you learned something, whether some biographical detail about Xi or something about the circumstances under which he took power, where it just clicked for you, where the pieces suddenly fell into place?

Jeremy: And Sue-Lin, are there any common beliefs about Xi held by people in the West that you think are just basically wrong?

Kaiser: Yeah, that’s a good question too.

Sue-Lin: Yeah. So, Okay. I’ve thought a lot about all of that. What I started out… Sorry, let me back up. So, I think the main thing I wanted to do with this podcast series was deeply understand Xi Jinping on his own terms. I think the risk often with China reporting, and I guess reporting in general is that we bring our own world views and our own assumptions to a subject. And we sort of start our analysis from that framing. And I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to start with Xi Jinping is stupid, or Xi Jinping is evil, or Xi Jinping is insane. Because I just thought that, that was not going to end well. What I really wanted to do was understand the context in which he grew up in, in which he sort of rose through the ranks, and try to understand the Chinese Communist Party, a system that has so shaped him.

I wanted to do all those things, and then, of course, I wanted to engage in sort of critical analysis and do good journalism on top of all that. But I was very, very sort of conscious that I wanted my starting point to be as rigorous as possible. Because yeah, I think, if you start with the wrong thing, then everything else sort of is wrong that follows. That would be the first point I would make. I think that then meant I was really stunned by his childhood. I mean, I think I sort of knew about the Cultural Revolution in sort of the context of his Chinese history, but I didn’t really understand how it specifically impacted him. I found out a about bunch of memoirs that had been written by family friends and, as I was mentioning earlier, Xi Jinping’s own accounts. Some of the stories of what happened to him are just absolutely mind-blowing.

There’s a story of him when he’s 13 being hauled into a yacht and being forced to wear a dunce cap, and being condemned as a counter-revolutionary, and his own mother shouting slogans like down with Xi Jinping. I mean, what does that do to any 13-year-old? And then I found these stories about how his dad raised him and his brothers and sisters to be revolutionaries. And so, he was sort of raised in this incredibly frugal way. He would have to bathe in his dad’s used bath water and wear hand-me-downs from his sisters that were covered in like floral prints and kowtow to his parents every year at Chinese New Year, which I guess is not uncommon in traditional Chinese families. But all of that sort of meant… I had this picture of him that I didn’t previously, of someone who was raised, as I was saying earlier, in this like revolutionary family to believe he was also going to be a revolutionary.

But also, so deeply traumatized by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. But then a man who believed that, that chaos was created because the party lost control, not because the party, in and of itself, was bad. All those things, I think those stories from his childhood and youth really were quite enlightening for me and helped me better understand who he is today and sort of what motivates him.

Kaiser: So, what do you think people are getting wrong about him?

Sue-Lin: I don’t think he’s crazy. I think what he does is highly rational from his perspective, even if I personally disagree with a lot of what he’s doing because my value system is different from his. I was in Hong Kong for several years, and I heard a lot of Hong Kongers dismiss Xi Jinping as insane. But I think a sort of more productive way to understand what has happened to Hong Kong is to study the Chinese Communist Party, how they see the periphery, how they see Hong Kong itself as this base of so-called foreign forces. Even if there is no evidence that the CIA sort of meddled in the protest in 2019, I think, to deeply understand what the party fears about Hong Kong and what Xi Jinping is considering when he makes his policy on Hong Kong, for example, is sort of a more useful way of understanding what drives China’s leader.

Kaiser: So, this is just amazing. If you just had a couple of minutes to brief Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken about what makes Xi Jinping tick, what are some of the things that you would say? What would you say about what are the best ways to deal with him, or even to reverse this slide into confrontation between China and the U.S.? I mean, I feel like at the end of this, you must have insights into him. You kind of know him. You’ve gone beyond the sanitized and meticulously curated image of himself that him and his party propagandist put out. I don’t think he’s puzzling to you so much anymore, and he’s not enigmatic or inaccessible to you anymore. So, you’d be like in a great position to brief them. What would you say to them?

Sue-Lin: I mean, I would first say there is still so much I do not know about Xi Jinping and I am still very, very puzzled by many things about him. But that having been said, I think he is a man driven by history and shaped by history. And he deeply understands his history and he understands China’s history. He is motivated by power, and he deeply believes in the sort of new China that Mao Zedong founded, and he believes he is the inheritor of that revolution, and he wants to make China even stronger through the Chinese Communist Party. And he believes that the party is the only way to do that. They would be some of my briefing points.

Kaiser: Yeah. No, all very much things that I agree with. How do you think he would respond if you were to ask, if Biden were to ask you, how is Xi Jinping going to respond to what we’ve just announced, these new strict controls on semiconductors and related equipment exports to China? Does he respond to shows of strength or to threats like that?

Sue-Lin: Well, I guess the question is, to what extent is the US’s recent policy a response to China? Isn’t Macron’s new French industrial policy literally named like France 2030, which really seems like a direct illusion to Made in China 2025? I guess I would maybe question a little bit your framing of like, to what extent is it that the West is now trying to respond to what China is doing as opposed to sort of China responding as to what the West is doing? But I think yeah, it’s an interesting question and Xi Jinping clearly has a vision for China. One thing that has become very clear is that he’s trying to push for technological self-reliance, but also increasing sort of independence from the international financial system he kind of sees the direction of travel.

Which I guess I would add is I don’t think just something that the sort of bad relations between the West and China aren’t just the West’s fault. I think there are many, many things that China has done that have caused this sort of downturn in relations between China and the West, but I think the path ahead is pretty grim and it doesn’t seem like relations are really going to improve between China and the West anytime soon.

Kaiser: No, indeed. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Jeremy: Since we are about to go onto recommendations, Sue-Lin, at the very end of the last episode, you give some shoutouts to books you read on Xi Jinping, including one by Alfred Chan, with whom we ran a Q&A a few weeks ago. What are the books out there that you think paint the most accurate picture of the great leader?

Sue-Lin: Specifically on Xi Jinping or just like books that I relied on?

Jeremy: Yes. I mean, well answer it as you like.

Sue-Lin: Okay. Well, I think it’s impossible to understand Xi Jinping without understanding the Chinese Communist Party. And I was very happy that we ended up having a whole episode just looking at the party and the series. It was something I sort of really pushed for, I think that it sort of… For me personally, studying the party has, I think, enhanced my understanding of Xi Jinping. In terms of how to understand the Communist Party, I mean, it’s still Richard McGregor’s The Party, which says something about how difficult it is to do reporting and journalism on the Party now that we all still turn to a book that came out, what? Over a decade ago.

But in terms of books on Xi Jinping, I mean, Alfred Chan’s biography is stunning. It’s so comprehensive. I mean, I thought it was interesting what he left out. He didn’t mention, for example, that Xi Jinping’s daughter went to Harvard. I wonder why there was that omission. I thought some of his framing around the Uyghurs in Xinjiang was different from how we write about it at the Economist, for example. But still, it’s an incredibly comprehensive account. And then I think actually a lot of the Chinese language texts that I relied on were really illuminating. So, Xi Jinping himself has written a couple of pieces, including Son of the Yellow Earth, about his time in Liangjiahe, and also How I Entered Politics. So, I think those two texts are very, very interesting. I also relied on some memoirs written by people who knew him. And so, there’s one that’s kind of just like a scattered collection of memories from Xi Jinping childhood and memories of Xi Jinping’s father and how Xi Jinping’s father interacted with Xi, written by a family friend, that is also really interesting. I’m happy to share them with you guys if that would be helpful.

Kaiser: That’d be great. Yeah. I was really glad to see that you had interviewed Joseph Torigian for this, because I feel like he’s really brilliant, and I’m reading his book right now, and it’s really eye-opening. I mean, I think that the comparative approach, looking at Soviet politics and at Chinese elite politics is really very valuable. So, I’ll be getting him out of the show in the not-too-distant future.

Sue-Lin: Yeah. He’s so good. And I agree completely. Honestly, actually, having made this podcast on Xi Jinping, I sort of feel like I want to now go and do a master’s on the Soviet Union or something. I think that would really enhance my understanding of China.

Kaiser: Yeah. No, totally, totally. That was brilliant. So, thank you so much. And wow, congratulations on the series. It’s it’s brilliant. I cannot recommend it more highly. I think everybody who listens to this show just needs to spend time. It’s a very, very fast paced, and it was over in no time. It was really great. I really, really loved it. So, thanks so much for taking the time, Sue-Lin. Let’s move on to recommendations. First, a super quick reminder that I’m going to actually hand over to Jeremy, since you’re on this show, why should people be supporting Access, and what does that do for us?

Jeremy: Well, the first thing is that many of the listeners of this podcast might like to get the ad-free version on Mondays that comes out four days before everybody else gets it, and it doesn’t have any ads, so that’s a great benefit if you like Sinica a lot. But we offer two daily newsletters, a business roundup in the New York Morning and a roundup of all the news every afternoon, and a huge range of both original reporting and summarizing and aggregating of the best coverage of China out there. So, please do subscribe to Access.

Kaiser: Really does help us out here on Sinica. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. Jeremy, you always go first when you’re on, so let’s do that.

Jeremy: Well, I was going to recommend this great podcast called the Prince, which I was binge listening to. Anyway, seriously, an article just came out, I think yesterday, on a website that I used to be one of the editors of, thechinastory.org from Australian National University, and it’s by Neil Thomas, and it’s called A Matter of Perspective, passing insider accounts of Xi Jinping ahead of the 20th Party Congress. And he, to some extent, pours a bit of cold water on how much we can learn from accounts from insider spills guts type accounts of the, like the one we mentioned previously, Desmond Shum, and Cài Xiá 蔡霞 is the other one that he talks about.

Kaiser: Cai Xia, for everyone who doesn’t know him, was a former professor at the Party School, who is now a very, very vocal, very vehement party critic and living in the United States. She published a piece in Foreign Affairs recently that got quite a bit of controversy around it.

Jeremy: I think the point that Neil makes is that Western observers, particularly in the United States, tend to see what they want out of insider accounts, particularly insider accounts from people who appear to be liberals. It appeals to a certain American sense of the way the world should be ordered, but it doesn’t necessarily give you an accurate picture of what’s actually going on in Beijing.

Kaiser: Right. Absolutely. No, I have tons of time for Neil. Neil Thomas is one of the great ones. So, that was a great, great recommendation. Sue-Lin, what do you have for us?

Sue-Lin: I have a game.

Kaiser: Oh, good.

Sue-Lin: So, my fiancé and I are huge nerds, and during COVID, it’s just the two of U.S., and so we decided to try to find the best two-person board game in the world. I probably spent far more time than I should have on Reddit, trolling through like best two-person board games. We played a whole bunch, and so we’ve saved you the time because we discovered our favorite two-person board game, if you and your partner are looking for something, we would recommend Race for the Galaxy. It’s a card game. It’s as nerdy as it sounds, but the one caveat is it took us a little bit of time to learn how to play. But once we figured out the rules, I mean, we play it like all the time. It’s amazing. It’s very, very elegant and clever, and it’s like hours and hours of fun.

Kaiser: Race for the Galaxy. I’ll have to check it out. That’s great. Hey, Jeremy, let’s play. Oh, that’s great.

Sue-Lin: There’s also an iPad app, so you guys can play remotely.

Jeremy: Oh gosh.

Kaiser: See, this is the kind of recommendation that I love. It’s not just some another, yet another paper or whatever. Yeah, that’s great. Thanks, Sue-Lin.

Jeremy: As opposed to mine. Yeah. Okay.

Kaiser: … Pop culture. I have a new show that I’ve been watching. It’s on AMC. It’s the remake of Anne Rice’s, kind of vampire gothic New Orleans novel, Interview with the Vampire. And it’s a series, and before you write it off, it’s just… It’s got like 99% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m not the only person who’s raving about this because the production of this thing, it’s so lavish. The detail costumes of belle époque, pre-First World War New Orleans, it’s just lavish and lush. And the sets are amazing. The acting is… it’s sublime. This guy, his name is Jacob Anderson, who plays Louis de Pointe du Lac, and then the guy, I can’t remember his name right now, who plays Lestat, they’re just amazing. And what it does is it brings out all the queer stuff, the homoerotic elements that were in the original novel that aren’t in the 1994 movie version.

And it’s updated. So much thought went into this thing, so much energy and thought. It’s brilliant. It’s really, really, really great. I cannot wait each week. There’s only three episodes. I highly recommend that you check out the inside, the making of or whatever, because that’s out on AMC too. It will enhance your enjoyment of the show. It’s fantastic. So, yeah. I’ve been looking for a new show to get into, and this is it for me. Yeah, check it out. Anyway, thank you, Sue-Lin. What a pleasure talking to you.

Sue-Lin: Lovely talking to both of you, Jeremy and Kaiser, thanks so much for having me on your show after I’ve listened for so many years. I remember when I was an exchange student in China, I used to listen to your podcast back when podcasts weren’t a thing.

Jeremy: Well, I have to admit the same, having just spent the weekend with your voice inside my head, it’s really an honor and a delight to talk to you.

Kaiser: Absolutely, absolutely. Congrats once more. Jeremy, as always, what a pleasure.

Jeremy: Yes, let’s do it again sometime.

Kaiser: We will soon.

The Sinica Podcast is powered by the China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.