MAGA-Mao Connections with Orville Schell
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If Xi Jinping wants to come to some better understanding of who Trump is, ironically, he has a homegrown example, namely Mao Zedong, and he lived through it. You know, power is an incredible intoxicant. And once you get that needle in your arm, that's your currency and that's your realm.

It's very hard to imagine what else you're going to do with yourself. The MAGA Mao connection. To explore, we have Orville Schell, who needs no introduction, but is currently at the Asia Society, and Alex Boyd, associate editor at China Brooks Review and former China Talk intern. Welcome back to China Talk, everyone. Thanks for having us. All right, Alex, kick us off.

Well, I guess Orville, you've probably written the most prominent essay on Trump's cultural revolution, comparing Donald Trump's behavior in office and maybe personal style to Mao Zedong. So what was Maoism and who was Mao Zedong? Well, Mao Zedong, of course, was the great progenitor, grand progenitor of the Chinese Communist Revolution.

In that regard, he was a Marxist-Leninist, and he believed in Leninism, and he did like control as any autocrat would. However, one of the hallmarks of Mao Zedong also was a kind of an abiding interest in throwing things off balance.

as a way to gain even greater power. And in this regard, he became a great fan of Tung Wukong, the golden-haired monkey.

that was one of the heroes of this classic Chinese novel Journey to the West when scriptures of Buddhist texts were brought in India to China. One of Sun Wukong's Monkey King's prominent features was his love of disorder and his watchword was, "Da Nao Jian Kong, make great disorder under heaven." Mao Zedong actually ended one of his poems

with that line. I always loved this novel, Journey to the West. And so when the cultural revolution arrived, I think this was a real consummate expression of Mao's

affection for or propensity, he was drawn to chaos. And he did feel that not only did Chinese society need to be upturned, but the whole provincial, the whole political structure of China needed to be upturned. Everything, in effect, needed to be, as he said, "Fanshun turned over."

And he adopted many expressions similar to the Monkey King that expressed his love of contradiction and disorder and class struggle, of course, which became the hallmark of the Cultural Revolution was a form of deep and disturbing disorder. Where did Mao's need for constant chaos and rebellion come from? In your essay, you posit it comes from his troubled relationship with his father.

And how does that relate? And is that at all similar to Donald Trump, who had a famously domineering father himself? Yes, I think, you know, the one place we really get chapter and verse on Mao's relationship to his father growing up in Hunan in the end of the 19th century was in Red Star Over China by Edgar Snowe.

And there, Mouth tells Snow that he had a very adversarial relationship with his father. He said he even hated his father, that his father was a tyrant. And they're constantly battling. On a number of occasions, Mao Zedong actually ran away from his home. I think he did have a very sort of Buddhist-inclined loving mother who made a lot of difference. But I think

The relationship with his father clearly was one where it set off the notion of the world is an adversarial place. And he tells Snow that he learned that only by standing up to his father could he survive.

And would his father come to heal in some sense and not just sort of overwhelm him with this sort of tyrannical paternal role? So I think that that sort of characterizes Mao. And in fact, Trump, too, as we learned from his niece, the daughter of his older brother, who is a psychologist and does understand these things, that he, too, had a father who was very preemptive, very tyrannical and very judgmental.

I think that without wallowing off into the bog of psychobabble here, I think any human being who reads literature knows, you don't have to even read Freud, that a father's relationship to their son and vice versa, that sort of influential relationship. And that as a young man grows up,

And that relationship forms him during the formative year. So I have a question about what he told Edgar Snow. We know that Mao loved to speak in allegory. He often would speak about one thing, mean another, tell one story, mean another. How much can we believe his stories to Edgar Snow? And is it just a metaphor for American paternalism? You know, back the party, let us, you know, back off a little bit. Otherwise, we're going to struggle against our American father or, you know, a Russian father, as it may be.

I think at the period when Edgar Snow was doing these interviews with Mao was in the 1930s. And, you know, we hadn't started all the rectification movements and Mao had not been in power with all his mass campaigns. He had just arrived basically in Shanxi province. And I think that his...

We get a pretty unalloyed representation of his early year. I don't see there'd be any reason for him to sort of be setting traps or deceiving Snow. But throughout his life, Mao easily took umbrage at things when people he felt set upon or disrespected and other people.

Famous example, of course, is when he finally went to Beijing in the late 20s and he became a sort of a junior intern of some sort of library in Beijing University. He used to feel incredibly disesteemed.

by all the Chinese intellectuals who'd come in and sneer at his sort of Tu Baozhe, you know, hickey, Hunan accent. And if you've ever heard Mao Zedong speak or seen a film in which he speaks, he's almost unintelligible to anyone speaking Mandarin because like all of the people of his generation, Deng Xiaoping, Zhang Jiechi, Zhang Kaixue, all of those people did only speak their local dialect and

The whole Mandarin, Goryeo national language came later. I think he felt always this laid the track for his antipathy towards intellectuals.

Just like Trump hates intellectuals, he hates the universities. He thinks they're arrogant, they're elitist, they look down on people like him and down on working people, etc., etc. I think Mao felt very much that no matter what he did in his formative years, he was sort of the underclass person.

and disesteemed and disrespected. And of course, in that sense, I think he is a metaphor for the whole culture of China and its sense that it is aggrieved, it has been humiliated, it has been looked down on, kicked around, exploited, you name it. When I think about Trump and Mao and I think of the similarities, some things that come to my mind are

A lot of wives, often tumultuous ends to those relationships and new beginnings before the last one has ended. One thing too is Mao's exposure to Hunan secret societies, specifically the Red Gang, I believe at his time as an organizer in Anyuan, and then Mao's early mob ties, or Trump's early mob ties, especially in the New York of John Gotti, and then Rudy Giuliani, who was a big mob fighter back in his day. And also style of governance, you know, Mao's frequent trips outside of Beijing, he loved to launch campaigns while on the move.

and Trump's Mar-a-Lago golf trips. And then Mao's

personal vigor and Trump's trumped up golf club championships as an indication there. So in terms of these stylistic aspects, do you see anything similar between the two? Or is that just all, if you have so much information about two people, you can always draw connections between them? Well, I think it is true that both Mao and Trump had a lot of wives and a lot of ladies.

And I think what that suggests is that they need to have that kind of affirmation and those signs that they can beguile people, can win people over, which speaks to me of a fundamental lack of self-confidence.

So I think both of them derived a certain measure of prowess, their ability to win beautiful women. And Trump still talks about women as objects to be won, as almost sort of adornments. But Mao clearly was the same. I mean, there were other leaders in China who were not. I mean, Chiang Kai-shek had a lot of

ladies and a lot of ladies of the night as well in his youth. But when he got married, he was quite faithful. And so Mei Ling and there are other leaders who I think like we don't quite know what to make of Zhou Enlai, but he had one wife, whether he was gay or not is a question people do wonder about. But Mao was somewhat special and he arrogated that special right to sort of poach on women to himself.

But when his revolution came home to roost after 1949, it was not something he found acceptable in ordinary people or even in his acolytes. It was very Puritan. He was not, just like Trump. He purports to be a Christian, and yet he basically doesn't abide in any meaningful way by the notion of the loyalty that's implicit in a marriage.

Trump obviously famously vowed to drain the swamp, has railed against a deep state that he perceives as having both frustrated his attempts to exercise power in his first term, prevented him from regaining office on a second campaign. And now he's engaged in a campaign of revenge against all those purported deep state agents.

Many people, and you, Chief, among them, have made that comparison to the Cultural Revolution, where a frustrated and suspicious Mao unleashed these animal forces in China to take down a party in a state leadership that he felt was shackling his own ambitions to remake China. Is that an accurate comparison in your mind?

You know, obviously, in many ways, Trump and Xi are very different people. But I think it is fair to say that one of the hallmarks of Mao's revolution was a sense that, particularly when he really got rolling, and its quintessence was, of course, the Cultural Revolution, was that somehow the party which he himself had helped build and state, which was the handmaiden of the party, were ultimately the refuge of rivals.

And he had great antipathy against bureaucratism. And this also speaks of his love of disorder as a creative force. So when he started the Cultural Revolution, one of the first things he did was to issue a wall poster that said, Bombard the Headquarters, Pao Dao Si Ling Buu.

And what he meant by that was that he felt that the party had become ossified, become the refuge of bureaucrats who were living high on the hog, but didn't want to make revolution anymore, found class warfare too disruptive. And he felt that it was time to destroy it. And how did he do that? Well, he gave permission to young people, idealistic young people, to attack bureaucrats

you know, most leaders that were his potential adversaries. Many of them died, many of them were purged. Xi Jinping's father was one of them, a vice premier who had a very bitter urging. So in that regard, Mao Zedong took, I think, great satisfaction in overturning even his close revolutionary comrades. And here Trump is not too dissimilar. He seems to take, be invigorated by the idea of destroying institutions,

that he views as the refuges of people who might be against him, and of firing people he's hired, turning against people who he perceives as potential rivals, that he demands complete fealty and loyalty, or you're in trouble. So here, too, I think there's a kind of a similarity in the way the two relate both to other leaders and to institutions of government.

The deep state is the equivalent for Trump of what the party and the state that he himself helped build were in China. He saw them as slowing down his revolution, as harboring his adversaries, and as being overly bureaucratic, you know, having become, you know,

a victim of what he called sugar-coated bullets, the bourgeoisie. In other words, they'd given up their revolutionary vigor in favor of staid bureaucratic forms of government.

If there's an attack on the bureaucracy, does that make Elon Musk and Doge a new Kuaidafu and the Red Guards? Elon Musk is older. Kuaidafu was one of the earliest sort of Red Guard leaders at Tsinghua University when Mao issued his order to bombard the headquarters. But I mean, Elon Musk should know better. But I think he too has a kind of innate impulse that chaos exists.

is a creative element. It's one step away from the Silicon Valley mantra of, you know, failure is positive. But I think he does share with Trump this idea of somehow you need to clean out the Augie and stables of the government.

and that I don't know why Musk might feel disrespected or disesteemed when he's been so successful and is the richest man in the world. But here too, I think we have to remember that these leaders are human beings. They're not just rational creatures who look at the national interests of the country or read reports and make rational decisions. I mean, we know from Euripides and Sophocles and Shakespeare

Some leaders are completely crazy. They do astounding things. I mean, read Stephen Greenblatt's book, Tyrants, which is about six great plays that Shakespeare wrote about tyrannical leaders. And there's nothing new here. It's just that policy people...

And I think many academics are loath to sort of recognize that we're also dealing with something very human here, namely leaders with deep tragic flaws, which Sophocles and Euripides nailed, hubris, arrogance, overreach, all of these things. You know, when Croesus, we've derived the expression riches Croesus,

went to the Oracle of Delphi to govern the state of Lydia, whether he should go to war, I forget, against the Persians or who it was. He went and he got the dictum back from the Oracle that if he went to war, he'd lose his kingdom. So what did he do? He went to war and lost his kingdom.

So there's a little of that going on here. And I think we need to sort of factor into the equation of understanding all of these big leaders like Putin, Orban, Xi Jinping and others, sort of the human dimension and look back at their formative years. And here, I must highly recommend a wonderful new book that's just coming out by Joseph Turegin on Xi Jinping's father.

And you see what a nightmarish experience Xi Jinping went through as a son of a man who was twice purged. And during Xi Jinping's teenage years, was purged the second time as a historical counter-revolutionary. And what travails Xi Jinping as a young man went through to have a father who was a member of the five black categories, the Hulé.

This is a little bit beyond the mandate of a so-called China specialist, but I do think that here's where literature and drama and some of these other representations of leadership help us understand what's going on, whether it's Trump or Mao.

Let's stay on Xi Jinping here for a second and Xi Zhongshun as well. What is Xi Jinping's view on the culture revolution today? As far as you can tell, I mean, obviously it's opaque, but I agree. Trigian's book's incredible. And I read his section on Xi Zhongshun's culture revolution. I mean, here I think it's unfair to say that Xi Jinping is like Trump. I think Xi Jinping does not like disorder.

He does not want to create great disorder under heaven, unlike Mao. The part of Mao he does bond with and did grow up with and appreciate is the Leninist part, the organized state, organized party, control, autocracy.

But he has no fascination for the part of Mao which we've been talking about. So this is why I suggested in writing various things I've written to belate that if Xi Jinping wants to come to some better understanding of who Trump is, ironically, he has a homegrown example.

right in his own pocket, namely Mao Zedong, and he lived through it. He knows what people like that can do to a society and to even the global order.

And I think maybe he has thought this way. I don't know. But I think he uniquely, unlike many Americans who've never been through the kind of disturbance and upheaval and chaotic mayhem that Mao inflicted on the Chinese people. And thus, we're so surprised by a Trump, but we should not be.

I mean, why do we think as Americans, when Italy had Mussolini and Germany had Hitler and Russia had Stalin and Spain, Franco and Salazar and Portugal and on and on and on, why do we think that we are somehow immune from these kinds of aberrant, overreaching, arrogant, and finally, incredibly destructive leaders?

All right. So I think maybe now is the point where we reel us in a little bit. You know, China, you know, 1933, 1945, 1949, 1967 is a very different place with a very different governance system than America circa 2016 or 2025. So, yeah.

Alex, yeah, we got to do some differences here. Where do you think is the right place to start? Well, I think the first place that we should start is a rise to power, right? Trump, you know, for better or for worse, won two elections and Mao won power through civil war and various other means. So Orville, what would you say is the biggest differences between Trump and Mao?

Well, I think, yes, I mean, in this sense, Trump is more like Hitler, who came to power by being elected chancellor of the Reichstag. Whereas, as you point out, Mao Zedong came to power through insurgency, a civil war. And so, I mean, obviously, you can't completely compare these people. But I think in trying to understand the leaders of the present,

It does behoo us to look back at leaders in the past who also created disorder of one kind or another, a world war, economic crisis, a revolution, whatever. And that might help us understand a little bit about what it is they're offended by, what do they want, what would propitiate them, how do you deal with them? Can you deal with them even?

That's the question. So I don't mean to, as I said a moment ago, compare Xi Jinping with Trump, but only to say that China's historical experience of having undergone probably the most tectonic, catastrophic and destructive revolution in human history might help Xi understand what animates a leader like Trump and how best to deal with him.

how best to deal with Mao is kind of not something people really figured out. Right. You know, like, let's talk about that sort of like what the antibodies were over the course of his reign to the craziest stuff he proposed. And when you had successful pushback and when that resistance ended up failing.

Well, of course, the biggest antibody of all to Mao was death.

And many autocrats are very disruptive. That is the final solution, right? They die. Hitler died in his bunker. Stalin died. And things slowly, you know, took a while. They began to change. So I don't know what the antidote to Mao at that period would be. But I will say this, that if we look at our own country, there is a hint of similarity among the way people come to heal.

when big leader culture gets rolling. So the Republican Party is just completely supine. Now, we do have the Democratic Party still raging against the storm. But one of the lessons I think that is quite striking about the Chinese communist revolutionary period was the way in which everybody finally was sort of neutered. And those few who did speak out, and there were some,

had very bitter ends. You know, there was we all know what happened. So this is another hallmark of powerful and effective autocratic leaders is that they manage by one way or another in one way or disorder to intimidate people, frighten people into submission and silence. Why don't we do the the great leap forward in the in the sort of like response to that?

Because I think that was, you know, Mao had to do with self-criticism, right? This was like a this was a real brushback moment for him where after killing, you know, eight figures of his own citizens, there there did ended up being some pushback from the top that forced him down a policy path he wasn't really excited to take.

Yes, after the Great Leap Forward, it's undeniably true. Many leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehui felt it was too excessive. 30 to 40 million people dead, starvation, agriculture in ruins. One could go on. And they did. They did remonstrate and they did for a brief period of time a lie. And what was Mao's answer?

Well, Mao's answer was start the socialist education campaign, which is a prelude to the Cultural Revolution, which ended up labeling people like Peng Dehuai at the Lushan Conference was put out of business very quickly. Liu Shaoqi ended up in jail, the president of China, and he died there.

Deng Xiaoping was sent down. In other words, almost all the leaders from veteran revolutionaries that had accompanied Mao in the Long March in the Yan'an period ended up in the doghouse or dead.

So that was China's experience. And it turned, it made it very difficult for any voices of dissent to find any kind of a purchase. And I remember being there myself during the end of the Cultural Revolution and just thinking, well, this is the way it is.

You know, there were no voices. They wouldn't even talk to you as a foreigner. Nobody had permission even to interact in a normal human way with anybody who was a foreigner, an outsider, because they were afraid. So Mao had brought complete submission down onto society. Now, that didn't mean he'd suffocated all of the impulses that had built up over the previous decades. They remained latent and dormant, and they arose again as soon as Mao died.

Basically, the biggest argument against Trump's effort to remake America and his image to bring manufacturing onshore, that Mao, with more power at his disposal, more party at his disposal, a whole society cowed, actually failed. An even more recent scholarship, like Adarne Westad's and Chen Jian's new book, The Great Transformation, argues that opening and reform really began in the 1970s.

If Trump is Mao in this comparison, is the Trumpist effort, this great cultural revolution in America, is it doomed to fail right from the beginning? Well, we could be doomed to something even worse as an effect China was once Mao failed in the Great Leap Forward.

Then in order to regain and maintain power, he brought on the great proletarian cultural revolution. So it's hard to know. We can't predict history. But we have to say that we don't know whether American democracy will survive Trump. But what I think I want to say is that we know this archetype of leader.

And whether it's a communist, a Leninist, a so-called Democrat, a Nazi, a fascist, whatever, this is not unfamiliar to us. And I think that's why I wrote some of these essays, is to just remind people that there are examples throughout history and literature of these kinds of people that we need to better understand, because now it's America's turn to have one.

I think another one of the big differences that Tanner Greer pointed out on a show earlier where I tried to pitch Hitler to him was the ideological commitment level that Trump has versus someone like a Mao or a Hitler who, you know, deeply believed in his bones in, you know, class struggle or Lebensraum or, you know, the international Jewish conspiracy or whatever versus Trump. Like, yes, he's got some views on trade policy, but like,

I mean, he lifted them after the bond market changed. And, you know, it's the sort of the level of focus which he can bring or has shown the level of focus that he's shown he can bring to policy stuff is just...

so many orders of magnitude lower than what you get out of some of the other sort of world historical figures that you've referenced to, you know, maybe have some personality traits, but also kind of have a real like agenda behind them, whereas our current president, you know, not so much. Yes, I agree with that, Jordan. I think that Marxist-Leninists...

Mao included, had a very highly evolved ideological agenda and analysis of how the world worked, where history was going, what the dynamics would be. They did hew to that in various ways, sometimes rather opportunistically or in a utilitarian fashion. That's communism. But fascism is a very different animal. If you read Thomas

Paxton's book on fascism, you begin to understand people like Mussolini. He had no ideology. He was sort of inventing himself as he went. And I think that's one of the big differences between Trump and Mao. Mao was a very intelligent man and actually a good writer, good poet. And he thought

Whereas I don't think Trump thinks. He acts almost like an animal. He feels this today and he acts, he responds. But he certainly has no ideology or no sort of political commitments to principles that guide him in what he does. It's more what he feels like doing. He feels someone doesn't like him. He feels threatened, whatever. He's almost animal-like in his responses, which are completely, they're basically irrational.

It's a different tact. And I found curious about Mao's foreign policy and Trump's foreign policy. A curious similarity is that Mao stated, I like rightists. You know, he met with Richard Nixon. I think in general, he found them easy to deal with, perhaps because he understood the ideological motivations of, or he perceived himself to understand the ideological motivations of capitalist right-wing politicians. And Trump himself meeting today in the Oval Office with Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, said,

And earlier saying something like, I like the left, in reference to him not wanting Pierre Polivare to win in Canada. So why do you think that Mao liked rightists or claims like rightists? And what sort of thinking does that, insight does that give us into Trump's foreign policy? Well, I think in many ways, I mean...

Mao could be a rightist, but I don't think he liked anyone who opposed him. And he viewed rightists as opposing him and as opposing his ability to control thinking and ideology. And so this is why you get the whole idea of zhizhang gai cao, thought reform, that there's a correct way to think. And Mao helps limb that, describe that, lay the boundaries for that out. And if you don't want to think that way,

then you're a rightist or maybe even a leftist, and then you deserve to be defenestrated. So I think that it wasn't... Yeah, Mao, I say he likes rightists because he thinks they're practical and he can... It's a bit of kapo-a-kapo business, right? You could deal with a thug, but...

even if he's called a rightist, but I don't think he had any affection for rightists or leftists. These are categories of convenience into which he put people when he needed to get them to move off the stage.

Yeah, I feel like the kapo a kapo thing is it's less him liking Mark Carney, which I just truly do not believe in more the ease and like excitement where he gets talking to, you know, big, powerful, strong leaders as opposed to democratically elected ones.

And I think that, Jordan, if I may say, when Nixon and Kissinger went to China in 72 and 71 to set it up, I think there was a certain thrill for Zhou Enlai and Mao to have these people come hat in hand.

to Beijing to talk to them. Because remember that even though they were opposed to imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, America, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, there is, I think, in my experience at least, amongst Chinese particularly leaders representing their country, a deep and abiding wish to be still respected.

And they speak about that all the time, mutual respect and understanding, as if to say, can't you just respect us as a dictator? You know, come on, give us some, show us some respect. We've got a good economy. We've done a lot of amazing things, which is true. So I think that, again, autocrats, one of the things that really bridles them is that they are cast out. They are disesteemed.

not considered proper company for liberal democratic states. And that is, you know, when China is the aggrieved, humiliated, kicked around, sick man of Asia, they want nothing more than to be respected. And that is a complete contradiction, because if you don't act respectably, it's very hard to be respected. And yet that is something they deeply crave, even though they would never acknowledge it.

Yeah, I think it kind of works the other way as well, where you just like see how big Trump's smile was when he was first, you know, in his in his 2017 visit to China like that kind of like. Yeah, I went on that trip. Oh, you did? Yeah. I mean, and yes, I mean, what was that trip all about? You know.

I've been on several presidential trips, for instance, with Clinton, which is completely different, very informal and open and cheerful. But Trump's trip, it was all about pomp, circumstance, awe, ceremony, and ritual. Both leaders were trying to impress each other, and Xi Jinping wanted to impress Trump.

Trump. And you remember he took them to the Forbidden City and they had a banquet and all the rest of it. But there were no moments of bonhomie, of personal, you know, smiling and back slapping and, hey, we'll work this out. No, it was all about sort of who is the bigger dog with the most impressive, you know, marching band and most impressive great hall of the people and on and on and on. And I think that's very characteristic of both Trump and Xi. Trump wants to have a parade.

just like she gets to have parades with a lot of tanks and missiles going by. So there's an element of similarity of, I think, both deeply insecure men, I think, fundamentally, and nothing like a good parade to puff up an insecure leader's ego.

Can we talk about the sort of red versus expert dilemma, which I think we're seeing play out, particularly in the second administration, where you see good people that Laura Loomer gets to fire because they went to a wedding like seven years ago? Over to you, Orville.

Well, remember that during the Cultural Revolution, there were many, many struggles going on in campaigns. And one of them was the struggle between being read and expert. And experts, of course, were people who knew how to do something. They were the intellectuals, they were the scientists, the technicians, the people who ran institutions and could be accused of bureaucracy. The reds

were the people who were wholeheartedly embraced Mao Zedong and were dedicated to overthrowing the institutions of the experts. So in that period, not only was expertise disesteemed and diminished in standing as a societal avocation, it was a hallmark of those first people being insubordinate.

It was a kind of a different kind of loyalty, not to Mao, not to Maoism and Marxism-Leninism, but to rationalism, you know, to scientific experiment, all of these other things that had a kind of a logic that defied complete and total loyalty to the great helmsman and whatever else.

He represented at the time whether the party was intact or not, which during the Cultural Revolution it was not. But the revolution, loyalty to Mao and the revolution versus loyalty to whatever other thing you might be, a scientist, a businessman loyal to profit and policymakers who are loyal to trying to figure out the national interest. So that was a huge divide. And we see that now with Trump.

What he wants is not people who know something in the FDA or the FAA. He wants people who are loyal. So you got Laura Loomer, like, you know, Kang Shung or Chun Bo Da or someone running around, you know, firing people and putting people in prison. Like what was that? What was the upside for Mao of getting rid of the experts?

I think because experts, you know, Lil Viggen, the great writer of the 1980s, wrote a book called Second Kind of Loyalty. And what that was was an analysis of people who felt a loyalty, whether it was through religion, technology, science, intellect, just ideals, to something else than the revolution and the leader. And what Mao rejected and recoiled from was loyalty.

Those professionals who were experts who said, no, this revolution does not make sense economically, scientifically, or in any other way. It's mayhem.

So that made them, put them right immediately in the enemies list. So that's why intellectuals, and they categorized them into many, many, many different categories. And they were pilloried because they couldn't be as religious people were because religious people owe a different loyalty to their God and to their principles and to their morality, not to the leader. So Mao couldn't stand that.

So he waged war against those people. And we've seen sort of, I think, hints of that happening now in America, where people like Fauci

in the first administration of Trump were not respected at all. He was a very good scientist, very devoted public servant. So we see attacks on vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy of science, it's been proven, measles vaccines. We see a lot of things like this looming up again, where what's important is not logic, but it's loyalty to the leader.

But Mao also resented his need, right, for these bureaucrats, for these technical experts. And chief among them was his own Confucius, right, Zhou Enlai. So even though, you know, he was fighting against these empiricists and, you know, scientists, cultural leaders and everything during the Cultural Revolution, he was still fighting against these bureaucrats.

Probably the number one empiricist of all was right next to him. Although at the same time, many Chinese spoke about him like we spoke about John Kelly in the first term. Oh, he'll be able to restrain Mao's worst instincts. How do you read Zhou Enlai? I mean, Zhou Enlai was a restraining influence. He was also a complete factotum.

And when you see what he was put through, like in the rectification campaign in 1942, where he sat before the Politburo for five days, wrote self-criticism, self-immolations, the most humiliating, pusillanimous kind. He paid a bitter price as a human being to keep in Mao's good enough graces

But still, Mao endlessly tormented him and humiliated him. Very smart man. And he took it. Why? That's an interesting question. Did he think he was doing good like Matt Pottinger in the first administration of Trump? That if he just kept his head down and tried to do a good job, he could restrain Trump? Did Mao, Joe think that? Probably.

But there was also probably a lust for power, an urge towards power, which kept him there. And he once got that needle in his arm, it was very hard to get out or he'd end up like Liu Shaoqi, his friend and the president in prison, dead. So these kinds of leaders demand not one-time propitiation or declarations of fealty and loyalty, but continual.

And the leader keeps ramping up the ask. And if the leader wants to stay in their graces, they have to keep becoming more and more genuflective. And we see an awful lot of people left the first administration of Trump, and now he's already lost

I mean, look, look all the people he's lost. I mean, Rubio's everybody. He's taken over positions of Waltz and David Feith. And I mean, you know, they drop like flies because finally it's very difficult to satisfy the demands of autocrats who require, you know, 200 percent loyalty.

is part of that coalitions of the week. This is a thesis put out by Victor Shea about how Mao would often rehabilitate disgraced cadres, right? You saw that with Deng Xiaoping, you saw that with Zhou Enlai, and you'd constantly send people down, bring them back, criticize them, humiliate them, purge them, restore them, and it ended up necessitating their

they're both, they created psychological dependence, but also political dependence. Right. And especially I think with, uh, Victor Shih, he's talking about the, the fourth route army in the long March, uh, I believe jungle at house. Right. Um, but maybe my history is off right now. Um, is that a similar coalition with Trump and, and, and Mao and how did Mao's coalition of the week work? Uh, and is that an effective governance tool? You know, we might be skeptical of it, but, uh,

is having Rubio, you know, who has no basis left in the GOP has basically been entirely kneecapped, uh, was humiliated. He's Joe and lie. No way. He's Joe and lie. Exactly. Um, but he could also be, you know, you could say, I don't know, maybe we don't know our Doug shopping. Our Doug shopping is currently in a field office in, uh,

in California. If you want some good reading, go back and read Deng Xiaoping's Self-Criticism during the Cultural Revolution. It's long, pusillanimous, and astoundingly slavish. And say over and over again, I didn't read enough Chairman Mao. I didn't appreciate the brilliance of Chairman Mao, and on and on and on. So even he

went through the ultimate humiliation, but survived enough intact. And I think he was a person, I was in Washington, I went on the whole trip when Deng arrived in 1979 to normalize relations. And you did get the sense of somebody who had his own sense of gravity about him and wasn't a deeply insecure person just craving slavish loyalty. And that's it. Deng Xiaoping was different. And I would say Zhao Ziyang too and Hu Yaobang were different.

So you look through the different leaders, and again, you want to get back and judge character. Yes, times were different. But Deng Xiaoping was special because he had seniority. He did get cashiered twice, but he never lost his fundamental sense of himself, which I think many other people did.

So that's actually a great question. So let's hope, let's be optimistic here and say there'll be a post-Trump GOP. How did those Chinese survivors like Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, et cetera, make it through Mao's Cultural Revolution? And what could that tell you for, you know, an aspiring politician today hoping to make it through Trump 2.0 and still have a political career in 2028? Well, Xi Jinping made it through and it's done all right.

You know, there's no simple answer. I mean, in the good old days, when you also had imperial autocracies in the form of emperors, if you ran afoul of the government, you could run up into the mountains and become a Buddhist monk or a Taoist priest and just sort of mind your own business. But that wasn't possible under Mao.

And we'll see about what happens in America. I suspect we won't get to such a state in America, but who knows? So the question is, during these interregnums of autocracy, authoritarian rule, what should good people do? You stick your head up, it gets chopped off. You can run abroad and become sort of just almost you're just like in waiting.

There's not much you can do. So it is a good question, and I'm not sure I know the answer to it, but I think you just want to keep...

While you can, while we can't hear, keep saying what we need to say as we are here today. In China, that was not possible under Mao. It was not possible under Mao ever since the early 40s when he began lowering the boom and beginning to want to create a new man, bringing on thought reform, rectification movements, and all the rest of it.

So let's stay on this on this dilemma of the officials who know that they are living in crazy times, but still, you know, want to help the people or whatever. I mean, let's start on the Chinese side. Like, ultimately, what's the right way to kind of look at what, you know, Deng and Zhou and others did in the Mao period? Well, I think they're always dancing on a razor's edge. A lot of

A dance I would care to do, but some people do care to do it because they're drawn enough to power and they get sort of stuck in it and they don't know how to get out of it. Fair enough. I understand that. And some of these people, and Joe and I had a measure of this, I wager, you know, want to do good by the people.

But the cost of staying in the game is very, very high. And the people in the Trump administration in the first go around, there were a few. Some quit, and they did, in some significant measure, keep their integrity intact. And they did do some good restraining things. I think this administration is much harder because he's just bringing in the

I mean, you know, Elon Musk is like a leader of red guards and the Proud Boys are red guards. I mean, you know, equivalents. So it's a very difficult human dilemma to know if you want to be in government and you are drawn to political power. How do you do it now? Can you do it? Or should you just become a Buddhist monk or a Taoist priest and just go up on your mountain and wait?

I don't know the answer to that. I mean, for us who are writers, okay, we have not been in political power, don't want to be in political power. We're not drawn to that flame. So we do what we do, right? Yeah. And another kind of nice thing comparing America 2025 and 2020.

I don't know, any time in Mao's reign is that the downsides of recording a podcast like this are much lower than they would be. Well, for now, Jordan, but, you know, people have long memories and there are archives and there are a lot of people. The way Xi Jinping's father fell the second time was over a book written about big leader in northwest Shanxi province, Liu Zhidan, that he he allowed to be published.

And Mao said, well, you're trying to put too much emphasis on him as the hero, not me. Anyway, it's a long, complicated story. But just simply to say that, you know, sometimes small things done in the past in regimes like China or any autocratic regime are grounds for you being pilloried in the future.

Well, we'll, we'll get into that arc with, uh, Joseph, um, later on this summer, but, um, I don't know. I'm still, I'm still feeling okay about our, uh, our freedom. And what the hell, you know, listen, uh, I mean, my virtue that you don't have is I'm a little older and, um,

don't need to be so worried about my future. But I think that puts all the more burden to speak as truthfully as one can. I mean, I agree. I think what's the phrase in Michael Berry talking about Fang Fang and Chinese people? It's a means of Bolshong.

or means of Baoshan, which is like, you know, don't speak out in order to preserve yourself through the thing. And I personally think in the United States, we have a great privilege to be able to speak out and you should exercise that privilege. Yeah, we still do. And that, I mean, I think with the government sort of in the shape it's in, it puts all the more burden on the institutions of civil society. Like this one, yours, Jordan and Alex, and universities, think tanks, churches,

You know, libraries, whatever, community organizations that do not owe fealty to the central government, but owe fealty to what they do. Media would be another very important example. Cultural organizations, orchestras, operas, whatnot. Well, speaking of orchestras and operas, Trump has shown an immense fascination with the Kennedy Center in D.C., which is where I'm based. So, yeah.

I wouldn't call it immense fascination. You desire to dominate? Yes. Okay. I don't think he gives a damn about culture, except he doesn't want a lot of drag shows and stuff like that. Well, he often says, you know, he talks a lot about Broadway shows that he loved. I think it was Cats is one of his favorites. Producers he loves. I mean, who doesn't love these shows, right? I mean, I don't like Cats, but... But...

But, but can you know, can you do the bloodline? Okay. Well, so, okay. The bloodline. Okay. So, okay. So lion King, can you go for that? Oh, I went to lion King and that's how I figured out I needed glasses actually. Yeah.

I couldn't see a damn thing the whole show. My parents were like, oh, well, time to get those. But so bloodline theory. Let's talk, Orville, what was bloodline theory during the Cultural Revolution? Why did it matter? And I find it kind of similar to Trump's commentary a lot. Now, Mao kind of himself wasn't an endorser of bloodline theory, but it did have a lot of influence. But Trump always talks about, you know, the genes. It's all in the genes. And quite recently, he weighed in on the NFL draft.

about a quarterback who's sliding, Shadur Sanders, and saying, you know, he has phenomenal genes. They should have picked him because his dad was such a good player. What was bloodline theory and is Trump's kind of eugenic bent at all related? Yes. I mean, during the Cultural Revolution, the notion of bloodlines went like this, that if your father is a hero, so are you, or if it means you're good to go. But on the other hand, if your father was someone of a questionable background, then...

then you bore that stigma and you were then in that class category because families were categorized as being in some class background. And as you all remember, Mao Zedong had this notion that certain classes had rights and were revolutionary and certain classes like the bourgeoisie, landlords, et cetera, didn't have rights. So the bloodline thing was very pernicious because that meant that

And here this has relevance to someone like Xi Jinping, that if your father was pilloried as a counter-revolutionary, a rightist, a capitalist, or a bourgeois element, whatever, so were the children. So the stigma passed through blood to the children.

And that's why I think it's so interesting to delve into the familial relationship in any family in China. Xi Jinping here is the most important case because he's now leader. But I should say also that in my experience,

And again, this may be better done in literature than in nonfiction. There is a cascading effect of all these harms and all this damage and all these attacks that were done throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s in China that I have seen in my Chinese friends go from grandfather to father to son to grandson.

And they endure like some kind of microplastics in the ocean. They're forever chemicals in a way. And I think we've paid no attention to it.

the way in which deranged families, an ability of people to respect and love their parents, the betrayals of friendships, the incredible savage attacks that people did on one another, that red guards did on their teachers, and on and on and on. This stuff is not something you get over the next day. And I think it lives on.

in ways that are very, very hard to analyze. There's no data. And China does not have a very vigorous sort of psychoanalytic tradition, which helps people kind of understand what influences may have been

handed down to them through their experiences with their parents who had suffered and became certain ways and maybe raised their kids in certain ways. So anyway, it's only to say that this revolution is deep and its consequences are enduring. And that's why when Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 and 79 and waved his wand and rehabilitated people and said, you know, new era,

I felt incredibly skeptical because I felt that there was a whole residue of impact that was deeply embedded within society and human beings are doing so much damage. And not just Mao and the party treating people badly, but people forced to treat their wives and husbands badly, their kids badly, their relatives, their friends, their colleagues. And this is something that endures.

And so, you know, when you say this endures in China, in your observations, in your most recent trips back to China in 2019 or 2017, I mean, when was your most recent trip back to China and how do you see it enduring today? Well, my most recent trip was just before the, just as the COVID pandemic was hitting. Well, all you have to do is talk to your friends.

I have a friend, for instance, a young woman who went to Harvard and had a very difficult time with her parents who grew up in China. And she set up a group for Chinese women similar to her to discuss this.

And I found that incredibly interesting. And some of the things that they sort of stumbled upon as they were trying to analyze how did the relationship that they have with their parents, how was that influenced by the relationship their parents had to their parents and to society and to power and all of these things? Very few people have wandered into this field.

There were a few. I mean, actually, Robert J. Lifton, a wonderfully brilliant psychoanalyst who wrote Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism in the 50s and then Revolutionary Immortality about Mao's quest to make himself immortal.

so that his legacy would live on. I think it's very insightful. But there have been very few people, Lucian Pye, Richard Solomon, they've dabbled in this, but who've actually looked into the human element. That's why I wrote a novel, because I felt I couldn't touch it as a nonfiction writer. I couldn't get to the question of

you know, role of religion, music, culture, love, you know, family, all of these things that are abiding human concerns. You titled the novel after a Lu Xun essay. How come? Oh, I love that essay, Gu Xiang, My Old Home. It's a very wistful essay about returning home when things have changed. And I just liked it.

But the novel was about a classical musician and what happened to him when he returned back to China in the 50s. And a lover of Bach, and if I may say so, there is no human being who I think is more antithetical to Chairman Mao than Johann Sebastian Bach. In fact, I want to write a play. My dinner with Johann and Zidane,

see what they could talk about. Because, you know, these things, Bach was all about religion in here, right? His relation to himself and being a good person and to God. Mao Zedong was all about out there. Something wrong, it's out there, not in here. And yes, Confucianism did have a notion of shoushen or self-cultivation, but it's not like a Christian.

So I wanted to explore things like that. And that's sort of what I did, what I tried to do. I guess we have to end with the chat GPT imagined conversation between Bach and Mao Zedong. Wouldn't that be a good one, Jordan? All right. Well, we're getting it live.

There was a Robin Williams show that Henry Kissinger went to, and Robin Williams started wandering down the aisle afterwards, and he passed Kissinger. He was saying things to people as he went. They were all famous people. And he said, oh, he said, Henry, love all your wars. I could imagine Bach starting off and saying, oh, Zidane, love all your revolutions.

All right. Okay. So, uh, okay. That's how we're going to start. Okay. So we're re write and start with box saying sarcastically to Mao, love all your revolutions.

Okay, Alex, you're Bach. Let's go. Love all of your revolutions, Chairman. Really, tossing the world upside down seems to be your favorite key signature. Upside down is where history finds its balance, Herr Bach. The masses must turn the old order on its head to set it up right. Now you're talking like a robot, like a propaganda minister. I think he'd probably say something like,

Tell me, Johan, what is this? What's all this about Jesus? Why are you so obsessed with Jesus? And that would get Bach rolling. You remember when Clinton was in China, where he went into the Great Hall of the People for the press conference, and it was just an incredible press conference, broadcast live all over the country. At one point, Jiang Zemin

completely sui generisly said to Clinton, you know, he said, Mr. President, I have a question. Why are so many Americans so interested in, and then he was in Chinese, he said, and then, of course, Clinton went on a tear. But I thought that was a sort of interesting question to ask, you know? You can't imagine Xi Jinping asking it.

With Lama Jal? Yeah. Why are Americans so interested in Buddhism? The Dalai Lama. Yeah. Yeah. What did Clinton say, by the way? Oh, Clinton going on a tear. He said, Chairman Jang, I think if you had a chance to meet the Dalai Lama, you'd really like him. Oh, my God. At which point...

Jiang, who'd been off script and bantering in a very nice human way with Clinton, grabbed the podium and said, as I recollect, he said, well, with your permission, Mr. President, shall we close this section?

What are you reading now, De Orville? Well, I'm reviewing this Tarijan book for Foreign Affairs. I'm reading that. But I'm also reading a lot of these, just reading William Shire's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and read this guy, Timothy Ryback's book about 1931 and 1932 in Germany.

And what else am I reading? The Thomas Paxton book on fascism I just read. It was good. Let's talk rise and fall of the Third Reich for a second. What stuck out to you about that? The reason why I'm reading all of these books about the early 30s was I'm very curious where we are on this sort of scenario of how did Germany head off into war?

Nazism and the Third Reich. And it's pretty frightening when you look back at the various steps that what happened and who didn't say anything, who just shut up. Everybody was there's a wonderful diary by what's his name? Victor, not

famous conductor, not Ormandy, the nephew, I'll think about it in a minute, but he kept a daily record of what happened. He was Jewish. His wife was Catholic. And he lived in, I think it was in Potsdam. And just, my God, they keep saying, well, surely something will happen. Surely someone will come and that can't be accepted. Surely the allies will come in. And of course they didn't.

And we ended up with Hitler being elected vice chancellor. And then we're off to the races. So I'm very interested how things slide into this state where you do get an autocracy. And, you know, remember, Germany was the highest form of European civilization. And yet you ended up with Hitler.

I'm also reading a Hitler specifics these days. I'm reading Ian Kershaw's two-part, two-volume biography of Hitler. I just finished Hubris and now I'm on to Nemesis. Hubris, so that's good because that gets back to the Greek tragedies.

Orville, do you know him? I've been trying to find his email address. I can't. Who? It's been difficult. Ian Kershaw? I don't know him. No. Okay. But I think he would be great to get on and just walk him through the steps. But any of these guys, Timothy Ryback and Shira's dead, but there's some wonderful, wonderful books about that period that I think we need to know more about because you see...

How a slow erosion, step by step by step with a kind of charismatic crackpot leader leading the charge and how it happens. And how people just don't rise to the occasion to protest, to stop it. And they think, oh, the courts will do it. Oh, something will do it. But then sometimes they don't.

So, I think this is a little bit why I think comparing Trump to Xi is interesting and worthwhile doing, although I know some of your more rigorous scholars may think it's no data, no theoretical constructs, you know, blah, blah, blah. But for me, it's the heart of the matter. And I think it has a lot to do with how people grow up. You know, big leaders...

write themselves very large. Democratic leaders don't have that opportunity as much. So when you're in big leader culture land, whether it's Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, Orban, whoever, it really matters who they are and where they came from and what their sort of operating system is and who installed it and when.

So I think you can say fairly safely, although there are a lot of amazingly wonderful people in China, I have to say, and I married one. But, you know, the Cultural Revolution created massive amounts of personal, psychological, intellectual damage. It wasn't just people got killed, people got put in jail for a little while, and then Xi Jinping waved his wand and it was all over. No.

That's not the way trauma, historical trauma works. So that's why I find Turesian's book so interesting. And to his credit, I think, he doesn't do what I've just done, which is draw conclusions. He just spells it. He just tells the story and what people said. And it's a monumental job of research. And you can draw your own conclusions. And that's what I intend to do in foreign affairs.

You know, in reading that book, I believe Xi Zhongshun, upon hearing of the Cultural Revolution, actually asked for his soul to be lit afire by it, which I found both some incredible research, obviously, on Triton's part to get this. I forget who he's quoting, but it was Xi Zhongshun saying it in his research. And I guess a question for you, Orville, there is, does that indicate that Xi Zhongshun, for whom the Party always came first...

was unable fundamentally to connect with Mao because the Cultural Revolution was ongoing. He was already purged, and he yearned desperately for this, but, you know, it's kind of like a priest who doesn't hear God's voice calling, right? Like, is that a correct analysis of Xi? I think, you know, and Zhou Enlai suffered from this too. They all did. I think some of them did have a sense that something was deeply awry, but there was no other show in town

except the party and the revolution. And they were veteran revolutionaries. And I think Xi Jinping, no matter what they did to him, and what they did to him was pretty horrendous, but not the worst. He never lost his belief in the revolution and the party. And I think that's what he imbued his son with.

Yes, bad things happened and we can't have chaos again, but the party was fundamentally right. The revolution cannot be questioned. And I think it's classic case of where people, there's no other place to turn except run off into the hills if you can't.

We see this in our own government now. People desperately wanting to be in the limelight, in power, in government. And they have all kinds of rationalizations. I mean, Rubio, my God, he used to think Trump was a buffoon. And now he's sold his soul. Read Dr. Faustus.

My favorite line with Rubio is there's like an old New Yorker profile of him where he reads The Last Lion, the Churchill biography. And he said he read it twice and that he saw himself as Churchill, like, you know, warning about the Nazis. And I think the analogy was like, you know, Iran getting the bomb or something. But to go from that to where we are today, it's something. You know, power is an incredible intoxicant.

And once you get that needle in your arm, that's your currency and that's your realm. It's very hard to imagine what else you're going to do with yourself. That's why as a writer, I've always said, no, not going there. I'm just going to stay a lowly scribe. And I don't even particularly yearn to go to China now because I know if I did yearn to go there, it would circumscribe me.

It would make me feel I couldn't say certain things because I know there'd be consequences. I'm about to publish, by the way, a book. In 1991, I did a year-long project with 60 Minutes on forced labor and the Lao guy system. And it aired. It was incredible. We got into prison camp. I won't tell you the whole story. Anyway, I kept a diary of it. And, uh,

I edited it and sent it to the New Yorker who I was then writing for and they edited it and were about to go into print. And I looked at it and said, I can't publish this. I was a younger man. I had a Chinese wife. I had a house in law in China and I threw it in the box. I pulled it out two years ago and thought, my God, the question of fourth labor is more relevant than ever. I took it out and did it somewhere. But that will be the...

end of me in terms of grace from the Chinese Communist Party. But that's okay. I'd rather that than I can't write and say what I think. I think I was right to put it in a box then, but I don't think that's a healthy tendency for any society. You remember that? Draw literature, things that people could only write for putting in a drawer.

I'm going to do a show about Sam Zadat and comparing that to sort of like Chinese dissidents today, which I think will be a lot of fun. Benjamin Nathans, he just won the Pulitzer Prize for this like really, really awesome book. To the success of our hopeless cause, the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement, which folks should all read. Well, I mean, Perry Link is sort of the avatar of the Chinese version of that.

Yeah. And just, you know, his book on Neo-Jabot, and he's just written another book, you know, The Anaconda and the Chandelier. But I think that's a really important question. You know, intellectuals are poor, weak creatures.

And those who stand up, read blood letters. Alex, will you send Jordan the Elaine Pagel's Banshee program we did on the comparison of Jesus and Ninjal? Whoa.

We had them both on stage talking about the role that faith plays when you're in adversity and in prison and in a revolution. Yeah, if you can do that, that would be great. We started off with some Bach, a beautiful aria from one of his cantatas just because I wanted Bach as the avatar of a different way of being to be in the mix. You'll enjoy this, Jordan, because it's totally weird.

Okay. All right. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Well, don't put it in the show notes. You can if you want, but it's hard to explain to people, but if you watch it, you'll understand. Okay. If we're talking show notes and on Orville's note about publishing and not publishing, at CVR, we just published an excerpt from Perry Link's forthcoming book. Yeah, it's a nice- And so it's a beautiful essay. Perry Link's done it again. Yeah.

You ought to have him on, Jordan. We'll get him on. He was just at Harvard with our Chinese Language Fellows Program, and he was great. I told you, he did this crosstalk. This old Beijing language, he's really good at it. Wonderful performance, just accidentally. All right. Thanks so much for being a part of China Talk Horrible. As always, it's a great pleasure. You have a great program, Jordan. I'm glad you got Alex and gear here, too. Go for the gold.

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