China Across CSIS: The Influence of Xi Jinping’s Father, Xi Zhongxun
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Hello, loyal listeners to the Pekinology podcast. And if you are new, welcome. Pekinology is hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., which is home to many great podcasts. This week, we are excited to feature an episode by the CSIS China Power Project. Podcast host Bonnie Lin meets with Dr. Joseph Torrigian to discuss his newly released book, The Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Xi Jinping, Father of Xi Jinping.

I'm Bonnie Lin, Director of the China Power Project and Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In this episode of the China Power Podcast, we will be exploring the life of Xu Zhongxun, Chinese leader Xi Jinping's father. We will be discussing Dr. Joseph Turigian's upcoming book titled, The Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Xu Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.

Who was Xi Zhongxun? What impact did he have on the life and political views of his son? How can Xi Zhongxun's life provide insight into contemporary Chinese politics?

To explore these questions, we're joined by the book's author, Dr. Joseph Terrigian. Dr. Terrigian is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.

Previously, he was a Stanton Nuclear Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton-Harvard's China and the World Program, a Postdoctoral and Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

a pre-doctoral fellow at George Washington University Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, and a scholar filling with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research has been supported by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, MIT Center for International Studies, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, and the Critical Language Scholarship Program and FLAS.

Joseph, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Bonnie. So I know you spent a decade writing this book, but can you explain to my listeners why you decided to write a book about Xi Zhongshun, aside from the fact that he is Xi Jinping's father?

Certainly he came to my attention because he is the father of Xi Jinping. And I thought that by writing a book about him, it would give us insights into how Xi Jinping thinks about the world. But as I worked on the book, I realized that the life of Xi Jinping can tell us something about Xi Jinping, but that in fact, the more meaningful lessons that

that emerge from looking closely at Xi Jinping's life are about how the party works. And the reason I say that is because we already have wonderful biographies on leading figures like Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but we haven't really looked closely at the deputies, at the people who are tasked with actually

taking the guidelines as set by the top leaders who often aren't really attentive to the minutiae and turning them into real policy. And Xi Zhongshun was someone who did that, both at the regional level and in the party center. And the areas

where he focused happened to be extraordinarily interesting ones. So when you read the book, you will learn a lot about the United Front, about religious policy, about Tibet and Xinjiang. You'll also, I think, learn a lot about what it was like to be a member of this organization. So Xi Jinping was someone who was persecuted by his own party five times. That's twice more than Deng Xiaoping was. And so understanding

Why Xi Zhongxun remained so dedicated and loyal to such an organization, I think, is enormously revealing about what a Bolshevik political organization is all about. And Joseph, as you mentioned, Xi Zhongxun's life was marked by struggle and sacrifice, and you mentioned him being purged five times.

What would you view as his most important achievements or political measures that he put forward that we are still seeing today or where we saw implemented that had significant impact on China's trajectory? I think even casual followers of Chinese history have probably heard of the Long March, which of course was when Mao Zedong fled China.

with the central leadership from the South to the Northwest. And the base area that he found was one that he didn't know existed, but it was crucial as his landing pad at this moment of crisis for the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Zhongshan, as I mentioned before, for much of the revolution was deeply involved in united front work.

And in the early years of the People's Republic of China, when he was head of the Northwest Bureau, which was a giant expanse of Chinese territory that included Xinjiang, as well as many Tibetan areas, his incorporation of those territories into the new regime

is a story that I think is very important. When he was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, his first job was as the party boss of Guangdong. And this was the era, of course, that saw the initiation of the special economic zones.

Then in the 1980s, he was the right-hand man to Hu Yaobang on the Secretariat. In the 1980s, the Secretariat's power was just absolutely awesome. It was essentially the institution that ran the country. Once again, he was the person who took what

Hu Yaobang determined. Of course, Hu Yaobang was also guided by Deng Xiaoping and figured out how to actually run the United Front, how to actually run ethnic policy, how to actually run Beijing's relationship with foreign leftist, communist, and revolutionary parties. He also was one of the vice chairmen of the National People's Congress. So he was deeply involved in rule of law issues and finding new ways to make the Chinese legislature meaningful after it had been essentially totally disregarded in many of the years of

Mao era. So by 1987, at the Party Life meeting where Hu Yaobang is criticized when he's removed from power, one participant accused Xi Zhongshun of having gone even further than Hu Yaobang.

And indeed, Joseph, as you mentioned in your book, Xi Jinping was viewed as a reformer. From your perspective, what were some of the things that he really tried to reform, tried to push China to reform on? After the Cultural Revolution, the party realized that it was facing a crisis. They knew that the Cultural Revolution had been a disaster.

And it was commonly recognized among the elite that they needed to move in a new direction to save the revolution. But this was a conundrum because how exactly you could move to a new approach without raising doubts in the party as a whole, that was not exactly clear. So you would see these reformist formulations like,

the famous third plenum in 1978 that emphasized economic modernization. But you'd also see these very conservative statements like the four cardinal principles, which Dunn enunciated shortly after the third plenum. So the question was,

how you would keep people loyal to the party's mission when you could no longer even say what communism was. And you were trying to figure out new ways of organizing the economy, of organizing state-society relations, seeing whether you could find a new equilibrium with the ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang. And Xi Zhongshan was at the forefront of that, and that's why he is often seen as a reformer,

But at the same time, there were some very serious conservative tendencies that we continued to see in him even until the end, partly because of his own limitations, but also because despite all of these lessons that the party drew about the danger of strongman rule under the Mao era, they were still not able to overcome Deng's dictatorial tendencies. And he ultimately was the one who got to decide what the party was going to do.

Thank you, Joseph. I'd like to talk about Xi Zhongxun, both in terms of his views, but also his impact on Xi Jinping and how his views may or may not reflect how Xi Jinping thinks of the world. Maybe let's start with the type of family that Xi Zhongxun created for Xi Jinping and what that means in terms of how Xi Jinping grew up. What, from your perspective, were some of the key values or principles that the elder Xi instilled in Xi Jinping?

Xi Jinping was born in 1953. So this is after the regime has been established. He was born in the capital.

And the family dynamics were shaped, first of all, by the fact that Xi Zhongxun was the son of a peasant. The second was this preoccupation within the elite that if they weren't careful, the younger generation who were supposed to be the successors to the revolution would be too soft because they had been spoiled by privilege.

And so there was a lot of strictness within the Xi family, both because of this peasant sensibility, but also this broader political background of not wanting to allow the

bourgeois liberalization, the sugar-coated bullets to seep into the younger generation because of a sense of entitlement and because their lives had been so much easier than their parents. And so part of that we could see in the discipline in the Xi family. They were, Ayalokan seemed to have been quite frugal, but also in the way that Xi Jinping would regale his children with tales of the revolution, which

I think we can believe when we read these essays written by the Xi family about their experiences as young people would have been very exciting, especially because they're not even just hearing it at home, but even the schools where they attended, it was electric, the atmosphere. It was this idea that they were changing the world, they were saving the world, and they were young people who were destined to participate in this grand adventure.

And of the siblings that Xi Jinping had or the children that Xi Zhongshun had, where did Xi Jinping fall? Was he one of the favorites? Was he more groomed by Xi Zhongshun than his other siblings? Or how would you characterize the family dynamics for Xi Jinping? So Xi Zhongshun had two wives and Xi Jinping was one of the children from the second marriage. And by all accounts, Xi Zhongshun was rather taken by Xi Jinping.

I think one of the reasons is that Xi Zhongshan really admired people who went through tough circumstances and came out harder on the other end. And Xi Jinping famously was a sent down youth in Shaanxi, a particularly poor region of the country, and spent more time there than most young people who had been exiled to the countryside. So Xi Zhongshan

would reflect on the fact that Xi Jinping had eaten more bitterness than his other children. And that's something that Xi Jinping admired. He said that Xi Jinping was the most clever, the one with the most ideas. He even on one occasion said that Xi Jinping had the makings of a premier. So at the same time, even when Xi Jinping started to climb up the ranks and was a young man, Xi Jinping

remained quite tough on him. And there's a revealing anecdote in the book where Xi Jinping is forcing Xi Jinping on one of their brief moments of reunion after these years of persecution. He's having him recite famous speeches and essays by Mao Zedong.

Joseph, you mentioned in your book that Xi Jinping's siblings often felt his father interfered and harmed their career. And in one case, we also saw, as written in your book, that Xi Dongxin prevented one of his daughters from working abroad as a reporter.

How did you see Xi Jinping support his son Xi Jinping and shape his career or influence his career? You know, it's very interesting. It's certainly the fact that on many occasions, Xi Jinping had a very positive impact on the rise of Xi Jinping. That can't be denied. But at the same time, the fact that Xi Jinping was Xi Jinping's son could be a double-edged sword. And on some occasions,

Xi Jinping was quite frustrated by the fact that his career was hurt because he was a princeling. And so it's very interesting that Xi Jinping was purged from the leadership in 1962. That was several years before most of the senior comrades fell at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. And Xi Jinping later said that because of that,

he suffered more than most and that when people point to his family background, actually what he learned from his father wasn't how wonderful politics was, but the fickleness of human relationships.

Xi Jinping, he tried to get into the party on multiple occasions. He kept submitting these applications, but they were rejected because of his father's status. Then in the 1980s, there was a view among many in the party leadership that their children were the most trustworthy inheritors to the revolution, because at the very least, they could be trusted not to betray their parents' legacy after the founding generation had died.

But at the same time, there was a lot of distaste for nepotism, right? Figures like Xi Jinping and others, they didn't like it when other people would think that they only got a position because they were a princeling. In fact, in one occasion in 1985, when Xi Jinping did try to directly intervene to speak up for his son, it backfired. The head of Hebei province, which is where Xi Jinping was working at the time, was furious

It caused such a kerfuffle that Xi Jinping left shortly after for another province. And in your book, Joseph, you mentioned that when Xi Jinping met his current wife and second wife, Peng Linyuan, that they shared a family legacy, soaring ambitions, patriotism, and

a fetishization of suffering, discipline, a stated lack of interest in materialism. These were, as you mentioned in the book, shared values between Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan. To what extent are you seeing Xi Jinping, at least from the family dynamic side, modeling his current family similar to how Xi Zhongxun had created a family for Xi Jinping when he was growing up? We know very little about

Xi Jinping's daughter, Xi Mingzhe. One of the very few times that she was mentioned in the media was when Peng Liyuan said that Xi Mingzhe had gone to Sichuan to help with the earthquake disaster and that this was a case of her going through forging. This idea of forging is, of course, at the center of Xi Jinping's political project,

for his own family, but he sees an ability to eat bitterness as something that China's younger generation needs to learn because of this idea that for the party to survive, it needs to achieve self-revolution. And to do that, it means inheriting the founding generation's ability to sacrifice for the good of the nation.

Thank you. Now, I want to move a little bit beyond just his family or how they view family dynamics to look at how Xi Dongxun's policies may have impacted or not how Xi Jinping thinks about politics, as well as how Xi Jinping thinks about particular policies.

So you mentioned early on that part of why you wrote the book was to be able to use Xi Jinping as a lens to describe party politics within China and the centrality of the party. But we also know, as you mentioned, that Xi Jinping suffered quite a bit as a result of the party. So a question I have for you is, how does Xi Jinping view the Chinese Communist Party? And to what extent did his father's suffering at the hands of the party influence his views? Xi Jinping...

has talked about modern Chinese history as a process by which the nation has sought to reestablish its rightful place in the world. And that there was this interregnum

during which China was invaded by imperialist powers and had collapsed because of its own inability to address structural problems and that for decades China had sought for different ways of addressing these problems and achieving rejuvenation and that history reveals that the

The only answer is the Chinese Communist Party because its organizational principles and its dedication are the only tools that are effective in his mind for holding China together and for reclaiming its rightful place in the world.

And that special sauce includes this idea of suffering being something that shouldn't be avoided, but inevitably is part of this life of dedication and sacrifice. Now, his father suffered extensively, not just at the hands of the nationalists and bandits, but at the hands of his own party. And the question becomes why Xi Jinping put up with it.

And I think it's because he saw himself as a member of an organization that was a manifestation of a historical inevitability.

And it was exciting to be someone who is at the leading edge of history, which is for him what the revolutionary party was. And so when you suffer at the hands of a party like that, your reaction isn't to be turned away from it, but you want to double down and work even harder to show how committed you are. And you want to show that even when you are persecuted, you don't lose faith in the cause. So I think for Xi Jinping, who's witnessing something like that, his reaction is probably

I think probably that if his father went through all of that and still remained loyal, then why wouldn't he? And also, if the family went through all of those humiliations, you can imagine why Xi Jinping would want to show his stuff, why he would want to prove his ability and his dedication and his contributions to this mission of national rejuvenation.

And would you say that Xi Jinping shares his father's view that the CCP is a manifestation of historical inevitability, or at least the CCP under Xi Jinping's direction is destined to bring China to greatness? Xi Jinping talks about the rise and fall of previous dynasties.

as a scorecard. He knows how many years they all existed. He knows how long the nationalists were in control. He knows how long the Soviet Union was able to exist before it collapsed. So he's constantly thinking in these civilizational terms of how you are able to maintain 5,000 years, these are his words, of Chinese culture. And his response is you do that with self-revolution. And what that means is you take

He takes his father's generation stories and he teaches it to the young generation to inculcate in them those values that he thinks need to be passed from generation to generation to make sure that China continues this, in his mind, inevitable march to greatness.

And when you look at how Xi Jinping looks at this inevitable march towards greatness and how revolution is key, the way you said it, it made me wonder, does Xi Jinping believe that he is leading China into one revolution or is he talking about a need for multiple revolutions? He's quite cautious about this in a way, right? Because he is infatuated with this idea of self-revolution.

And he thinks it's very dangerous if you don't take ideology seriously enough. But his life and his father's life is also a story about how dangerous it is if you take ideology too seriously. And during the 1980s, Xi Jinping openly and repeatedly said that the reason he wanted to dedicate his life to the party was to stop something like the Cultural Revolution from ever happening again.

And so the party has always struggled to manage this dilemma between ideology and revolution, but also the need for economic growth and to be practical and flexible. And so you look at what Xi Jinping says he is trying to do and the people around him say he's trying to do at the macro level.

They say that he's trying to avoid the extreme radicalism of the late Mao era, but also recognize that after Mao's death, even though the party didn't want this to happen, it moved too far in the other direction and didn't care about struggle enough. Xi Jinping, what he's saying he's trying to do is find some kind of a middle path, but of course,

What is a middle path is kind of an ambiguous concept, right? Because struggle is not a legal idea. It's kind of an arbitrary concept. So how you have enough struggle but not too much struggle, how you are able to win over people by getting them jobs and meeting their material needs, but also...

Telling the story of the need to understand the value of eating bitterness. These are things that you can kind of see make sense theoretically as being a holistic approach, but in practice can be very hard to execute.

And Joseph, you mentioned earlier that Xi Jinping has a particular worldview that was quite influenced by the treatment of his family, but also his view of politics. Elsewhere in your book, you also mentioned that you characterize Xi's view as a Hobbesian view of the world. How does that influence his view of Chinese domestic politics, but also U.S.-China relations?

So Xi Jinping, when he experienced the Cultural Revolution, the lesson he seems to have drawn isn't the danger of a strongman leader with total power. It's what happens when people are allowed to do whatever they want.

And in 1989, he gives this very interesting speech during the protests. And he says essentially that there's no such thing as true democracy, as pure democracy, that when people are allowed to do whatever they want, they abuse that privilege, which is why you need to have a strong state.

And he thinks that the party is exactly the kind of institution that allows China to think about its challenges in a way that doesn't privilege one group in society and doesn't allow one class or one type of person to exploit or hurt other people in Chinese society. He contrasts that

Xi Jinping explicitly with the capitalist system in the United States. And he says that in the United States, because capital is able to

dominate, that you have material wealth but spiritual poverty, you have the law of the jungle, you have one group of people who rule over another group of people, and that those tensions are only getting worse, which helps explain, in Xi Jinping's view, why there is an increasingly aggressive, ambitious, and gambler-esque aspect to American foreign policy.

For Xi Jinping, his view is that because the party is better at handling contradictions in Chinese society and by its superior capacity to call on people to sacrifice for a greater good versus the United States where

As I said, you don't have those spiritual values. Again, this is kind of an interesting thing for a communist to say, but also the fact that the tensions in society are getting worse because of capitalist dominance that he sees over the long term.

certain strengths in the Chinese system. Now, at the same time, I think that Xi Jinping is a politician. He's tactical. He's flexible. There are lots of reasons, I think, for Beijing not to want the relationship to go over a cliff. I'm sure there's lots of reasons that they don't want the competition to be too intense.

They're also ambiguous about how long this transition will be before China is powerful enough that the United States gives up these brazen attempts to prevent a country with a different ideology from becoming a great power.

It's hard to use these worldviews to predict how he's going to act in any given situation, but they're useful for giving some context to how he thinks about these issues in a broader sense. We had also discussed earlier, Joseph, that Shi Dongxin's legacy was of a great reformer. And you mentioned that Shi Dongxin also had these conservative tendencies within him.

How do you see that affecting Xi Jinping's current political direction? Because part of the book, both in your intro and your conclusion, as well as scattering between, you do provide some commentary about how Xi Jinping is not viewed as the same type of reformer as his father. When Xi Jinping first came to power,

Among these circles of pro-reform intellectuals and revolutionaries, there was hope that Xi Jinping would be a reformer. Part of that was based on their understanding of Xi Jinping. As I describe in the book, there was a surprisingly long period before certain figures like Li Rui, the former secretary to Mao Zedong and an associate of Xi Jinping, reached the conclusion that Xi Jinping wasn't going to be the kind of person that they hoped

and thought he was going to be. They describe Xi Jinping as someone who has rejected the legacy of reform and opening, rejected Deng's move towards collective leadership. I think that when you look at what Xi Jinping is doing, he certainly is talking about himself as the

Arbinger of the Third Era, right, and talks about Mao and Deng as being the leading figures of those earlier ones. But he's been very careful to say that what he's doing isn't a rejection of who came before him, but rather achieving what his predecessors wanted to do but could not. So that's a very clever way of not

saying that the people who came before were wrong, but stressing continuity while still justifying what it is that he wants to do because of it being something that the party had always wanted to achieve.

With this idea of whether he's giving up on Deng's more institutionalized approach, as you see in my book, Deng was not really the institutionalizer that many people think of him as. In many ways, the 1980s were a tragic era because of the failure to overcome the legacy of the strongman leadership that marked the late Mao era.

When Xi Jinping, you know, whether he's actually rejecting reform and opening, that's one question. But the way he talks about it, I think, is actually much more cautious than people give him credit for. And why do you think he's so cautious in talking about it? Because I think he understands that party history has always been a third rail in Chinese politics and that it's much more safe if you only move gradually and you talk about things in vague terms and you stress continuity.

And I think he recognizes the people who don't like him use the legacy of reform and opening as a weapon against him. And Xi Jinping's response is to say, I'm not rejecting reform and opening. What I'm doing is recognizing that reform and opening created certain problems that weren't resolved.

And so that is at least the way that he talks about what he's trying to do and what he actually thinks and what he's actually doing are other things that we can discuss. But if we look at the words he uses, when he says that neither of the 30 years can be rejected, meaning the 30 years before and after reform, that means also that the 30 years of reform also cannot be rejected, right?

So in that sense, he is emphasizing continuities with his predecessors in a way that I think are significant. I think when you look from the, particularly from the outside in terms of Xi Jinping's current power and his control of the Chinese political system, it's hard to find...

a major figure or another center of gravity that can be used to challenge Xi Jinping right now within the Chinese political system. But does that even matter or shape Xi Jinping's views in terms of how he may view what he needs to do or not do? Because if he does have a Hobbesian view of the world, is he constantly

Worried about, you know, potential challengers or lurking enemies. Like, how does that Hobbesian view sit with where he is now in terms of how we assess his power? So the Chinese Communist Party has always been an extraordinarily leader-friendly system.

And the leading figures like Mao and Deng have always believed their system is superior to the American system precisely because it had a core. And what that means is you can make very, very, very decisive actions without having to worry about whether they are popular or not.

Now, that doesn't mean that you don't worry. Why not? Well, one reason you worry is because you need to delegate some authority. And then the question becomes whether or not the people to whom you are delegating understand what you are asking them to do.

And you are constantly worried that people aren't getting it or they're setting up shop on their own and trying to do things that are building up their own prestige at your expense. Now, what's really quite interesting is when we look at party history, we never actually see that happening in practice. We never actually see the deputies trying to buck the core, but the core often believing that they are.

And so sometimes we see the people closest to the top leader, precisely because they think they're trusted, they make mistakes because they think they have more space than they really do. And this of course gets into succession politics, right? Because you want to pick someone that you trust, but there's every reason not to trust them because for these systematic reasons that are inherent to the nature of politics and

zhongnanhai. And also, just because you are extremely powerful doesn't mean that you think that there are no dangers to the regime itself. And Xi Jinping has been very reflective about what he sees as existential dangers to the regime, everything from the American-led comprehensive encirclement, containment, and suppression

Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, what he calls Uyghur terrorists, to the rights defenders. He sees all of these as big problems that can, under the right circumstances, either combine with each other or suddenly become much more serious. He talks about these butterfly effects. He talks about

black swans and gray rhinos. He talks about how small problems can become big problems, how social and economic problems can become political problems. So just because you're very powerful doesn't mean that you don't worry. That's right. In terms of United Front, your book talks a little bit about some of the last work that Xi Zhongxin was trying to do on Taiwan and how he hoped to achieve unification with Taiwan during his lifetime.

Interestingly, when you mentioned Tibet and Xinjiang, there actually seemed to be quite a bit of direction that Xi Jinping was moving to give more freedom in both areas. Please share your thoughts in terms of how you would characterize Xi Jinping's policy in those three areas and where you see Xi Jinping is heading in all three areas.

Several chapters in the book are about the United Front. In a way, Xi Zhongshan's life is a microcosm of the history of the United Front in the People's Republic of China, but also in the decades before the regime was established in 1949. Xi Zhongshan was deeply, deeply involved in ethnic politics in Tibet and Xinjiang.

And so for Xi Jinping, he would have witnessed this because the United Front was a very personal...

And what I mean by that was it really emphasized the relationships between the Communist Party cadres doing the United Front and the targets. So people like Xi Jinping appreciated that to win these people over, you needed to establish a certain level of trust. And that meant drinking with them, it meant partying with them, it meant being polite to them, it meant being friendly to them, it meant meeting their families.

Xi Jinping would have witnessed this because it was a sort of family business, the United Front. And he would have seen how deeply his father cared about making the country whole and keeping the country whole. So even the...

representatives of the Dalai Lama who met with Xi Zhongshan in the 1980s felt that Xi Zhongshan had some sense of responsibility for Tibet because of his role in incorporating Tibetan regions into the People's Republic of China. And so since that was part of his legacy, and also because he was a Chinese nationalist, he really wanted to ensure the long-term

unity of the Chinese state. And so it was existential for him. And also because Xi Jinping was so deeply involved in Taiwan affairs, this was definitely unfinished business, not just for the party and for the nation, but for his family in particular. So we can see how this would be very emotional. You asked me what exactly were Xi Jinping's policies on ethnic politics.

He was involved at various times. The 1980s are an especially interesting moment because here at the beginning of that decade, it was recognized by the party elite in Beijing that they had really screwed up. And they needed to find a new way to reach an equilibrium with ethnic minorities. And they decided because...

The Cultural Revolution had been so disastrous that they needed to win people over by addressing grievances, empowering powerful individuals who had a respect in their community, economic development, more cultural rights, bringing religious activities into the open so they could be controlled better. Then there was this explosion in religious activity that made Xi Zhongxun also a little worried.

You see him as early as 1985 trying to scale those policies back a little bit, but I think to stabilize the broader agenda that he was pursuing, as I've just described it. And by 1989, Deng Xiaoping decides that no protests at all are tolerable. And there's this dramatic crackdown in March of 1989 in Tibet.

right shortly before the crackdown at the end of the square just a few months later and the party comes to view the 1980s as this period of experimentation and that when you give people more space you don't actually make them like you and make them choose to take their problems through in their mind the right mechanisms but that they just use that as an opportunity to hurt you to become splitists and

That is how people tend to remember the 1980s, and that is when Xi Jinping was essentially running ethnic and religious affairs. So just to make sure, basically what you're saying is that the current CCP assessment of the ethnic policies that China had toward Tibet and Xinjiang in the 1980s were largely not successful, including Xi Jinping has that view too, because the party afforded Tibet and Xinjiang a little bit too much freedom.

So Xi Jinping has been very explicit that he is not rejecting the legacy of how the party has historically managed ethnic affairs. He said, we're not getting rid of the autonomous regions, but he is speaking a lot more than his predecessors did about the need to have integration and co-mingling and education and

and to see these different ethnic groups as more historically integrated with the Han interior, this idea of these various races of being variations on a theme, for lack of a better term, to win over people and ending this danger of ethnic separatism permanently. And that, of course, has reached quite frightening levels. As we see in these documents that describe how they see the problem in Xinjiang,

They say that often you have situations where people are not breaking the law, but nevertheless, they've been infected with the wrong idea of thinking about ethnic relations and that to save them, they need to be reeducated. That essentially, you need to transform people through these sometimes concentration camps to ensure that these people don't oppose the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

And so that certainly is a very different approach than the more co-optation economic growth agenda that marked the 1980s. Xi Jinping, in one of these speeches he gave that was leaked, he says something very interesting, which is that the Baltics were the first countries to leave the Soviet Union, but they were the most economically advanced, which shows that ethnic problems are not purely about economics. There's an ethnic dimension there too. And part of that can only be resolved by changing how people think.

Joseph, thank you so much. I think there's just so much history that your book covers that I think it would be very useful for readers to actually read the book themselves to be able to understand all the up and downs that Xi Zhongxin went through. One question I have for you is, when Xi Jinping looks at what he's facing now, what period do you think from Xi Zhongxin's life may be most relevant for Xi Jinping in terms of dealing with current situation or current challenges he faces?

Shortly after Xi Jinping began his third term, he brought the very top party leadership to Shaanxi to visit revolutionary heritage sites. He talked about how the legacy of the Yan'an rectification, which of course was this campaign in 1943,

that transformed party members into people who were totally loyal to Mao and were able to put organizational interests above their own, that this was what the party needed to study. This is what the Chinese people needed to study. They needed to learn from that period in order to steel themselves

to be able to overcome the challenges that China was going to face in the future. So he's drawing upon that period of not just the party's history, but his own family to

pass on what he calls these red genes to the next generation. So he's using party history to inoculate people against the dangers of Western liberalism and bourgeois liberalization and this danger of what he calls peaceful evolution, which

which in his mind is this attempt by the West to destroy China, not with force because they're too afraid in his mind. So he calls it a war without gunpowder, which essentially is the West's attempts to win over the third and fourth generation

with Western values. And he sees the antidote to that looking to the past and looking specifically to that place and that period in Shanxi in the 1940s and calling on people to re-inherit those lessons for a new generation. Great. Well, thank you very much, Joseph. Really appreciated this wide-ranging discussion on Xi Zhongxun, his life,

his values, his career, and how that has an impact or not on Xi Jinping. And congratulations on getting the book out after a decade of very deep research. Thank you for having me, Manu.