Understanding Xi: Is China’s President a Threat to the World? (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Sorrenti, and I'm joined today by head of programming, Conor Boyle. So, Conor, what can we expect from today's episode? Well, Mia, today is the second installment of our Age of the Strongman series, which is a series both you and I have been working on, exploring the leaders shaping our world in 2025. Listeners may have heard the first one with Understanding Putin, and this one is about Understanding Xi, obviously the leader of China. And we were really

blessed to have Rana Mitter, who many listeners will have heard on the podcast before, joining us in London to discuss the ways in which Xi is shaping not only China, but the rest of the world and will do in the years ahead.

As last time, this discussion was hosted by the incredible Gideon Rackman, who's the chief foreign affairs commentator for the FT. So why did we want to make sure that the second installment of the series was so focused on Xi Jinping? Well, I think a lot of media attention, understandably, has been around Putin and Trump in recent months, but no one can forget Xi Jinping.

probably the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful leaders in the world. And his rise as a strongman leader, our host Gideon Rachman, really felt very strongly about that this was someone we needed to cover and something we needed, people need a greater understanding of. So yeah, I know you've been working with Gideon a lot as well, and your key part in getting Rana and Gideon together for today's episode.

Yeah, absolutely. And Gideon, as you said, is again hosting this event and he's hosting every event in this series because it's in part based on his own book, The Age of the Strongman, which is where, you know, many years ago he kind of predicted this trend in leadership that we're now seeing kind of unfurl in full across the globe. This kind of defining strongman characteristics, very aggressive in global policy, verging on dictatorship at home, suppressing opposition. And

And these are all factors that we can see a pattern in, unfortunately, across all of the kind of biggest leaders on the world stage, which is why we're so happy to have Gideon at the helm of this series. And he does a fantastic job speaking to the experts about each leader. So let's get into the episode now. This is part one of the discussion with Rana and Gideon live at Smith Square Hall. Let's join them now with more.

Thanks everybody for showing up tonight. The idea of running a series on the age of the strongman is, I think, based around a concept that I wrote about in my book of that title, which argues that one of the big things that's happened in world politics over the last 20 years is the rise of a new generation of strongman leaders. We'll be talking a bit this evening about what that actually entails, and obviously it varies a little bit country by country,

In very broad brush terms, I tend to think it involves a strong man leader can be defined as somebody who promotes a cult of personality, the idea that the governance of the country they lead is really about them rather than a particular set of institutions or a political party or even a particular ideology. It's about trust the leader, the leader's instincts.

And I think connected with that, a lot of the strongman leaders I've written about are nationalists. And one of the reasons I think that strongmen tend to be nationalists is they like to justify the need for a strong, single person running the country by evoking a sense of threat. That can be internally or externally. But they tend to say, you know, we can't run things...

along the old lines with too many checks and balances because the situation is too urgent for that and you need a tough guy like me. So getting on to Xi Jinping, Putin, I think, was the first strongman leader, but he could be regarded, I think, for quite a while as a sort of anomaly. He came to power in 2000 and it wasn't really clear who he was. His full style of leadership didn't become apparent maybe even for a decade.

So I think it was really only apparent that we were entering something that you could call an age of the strongman when Xi Jinping takes power in China in 2012. And at that point, you then have...

Russia and China both led by leaders of this sort again with she it takes a little while to emerge and then of course you get Donald Trump in the United States and a whole rash of others Muhammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia Netanyahu in Israel and on and on but arguably she is the most important of a lot along with Trump because of the these are the two most powerful countries in the world and

So Rana, that's my spiel. Let me firstly welcome you here and welcome you back to Britain. One of the slight sadnesses is that Rana left Oxford University for the quieter pastures of Harvard just recently. I'm not sure you could have anticipated what was about to hit you there. But anyway, you're now back on safe territory back in Britain, so welcome. Rana, I mean, yeah, I painted a very broad brush idea of what a strongman leader is today.

Do you agree that she, in broad terms, fits the template? First, Gideon, thanks so much for having me here in this fabulous series. Knowing who else you've got, I feel a little overawed at having to perform tonight. But I will, of course, use the example of Lei Feng, the model worker of the Cultural Revolution, as my attempt to try and make sure that we measure up for the audience here tonight. Yes, I think that this is really...

Xi Jinping is clearly one of the figures who fits this template. He's someone who does what I think also what the other people you've mentioned have done, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which is to take an existing system and essentially change it fundamentally around themselves. And I think that's one of the definitions of the strong man in that sense. It almost always is a strong man and there probably will be more strong women in future, but not so many at the moment.

In the case of Xi Jinping, what you can see up to 2012, which is the year that he started to take the first of those positions, General Secretary of the Party and President of China, and ultimately Chairman of the Central Military Commission that define real power in China. And those three, by the way, rule over the party, rule over the state, and rule over the army are the three things you need to try and keep the balls in the air.

and in doing so, made each of them really conform to his will. Prior to that, the two previous presidents slash general secretaries of the party, the Chinese Communist Party, and I'll keep calling it the CCP, Chinese Communist Party for short, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, operated on what even some Chinese scholars called a collective leadership. Yes, they were first, but they were prima centipares. They were people who had to sort of

sort out factions, sort out different interest groups. They weren't simply able to do exactly what they wanted.

There are limits on Xi, but one of the things that he did from the very earliest point in 2012 onwards was to try and make sure that there was only one pathway to power in China, and that was heading towards him with no factions, no alternative leadership possible. And that seems to me to fit your definition pretty well. It's still the Communist Party, but very much under one person's rule.

And is it fair to say that over the course of now more than a decade, that emphasis on strongman leadership has become more pronounced? Because I remember, in fact, the only time I ever met Xi Jinping was in 2013. They had a bunch of, I mean, it wasn't, there was a group of us, but we were ushered in, you know, friends of China or whatever. And at that time, a lot of the foreign leaders who were in that delegation were

Still regarded him primarily as a kind of economic reformer. It wasn't evident that he was going to be this person who really centralized power around himself. And then I suppose there are lots of purges, but he also takes a number of steps, doesn't he, to write his own thought into the Constitution and then to abolish term limits.

Yes, absolutely. You say about the only time you've met Xi Jinping. I have to say it's one more time than I've met him. So you have the advantage of me there, Gideon. Maybe there are others in the audience here tonight who've got personal experience.

I think that it's very much the case that the steps that he took are ones that push away from many of the norms that have been created in the 1980s and 1990s and instead pushed back much towards personalistic rule. So you mentioned two there. One was the establishment of a system of thought called Xi Jinping thought and

And much of the official ideology, which essentially operates in China today, is called socialism with socialism.

special reference to Xi Jinping thought. So it's very much there as an official wrapper or framework around which thinking goes. We come back to the question of what actually is involved in Xi Jinping thought. And I think it does actually have content. It's quite specific content about economics and politics, but it is very much with his name on it. The other one you mentioned is term limits. In 2017, essentially, the Chinese constitution was changed

to mean that essentially the limits actually on the presidency, which had been two terms, five years for each term, 10 years total, and then you step down, that was essentially changed so that he, or indeed successors, could take a third term and even a fourth. And that, of course, was put forward really as the idea of someone who had a job still to do and hadn't yet completed it at the end of the decade. I

I'm interested as to why he decides to do this. I mean, maybe the simplest, most obvious explanation is personal ambition. But presumably there is a sort of thought process around or at least a justification for why this has to be done and whether it meets resistance in the party because

Again, my understanding was that the at least effort to move to something more like collective leadership was a reaction to Maoism and the sense that that style of centralization had proved disastrous during the Cultural Revolution and that they didn't want that again. Well, not just disastrous in general for China, which of course the Cultural Revolution was, but actually quite disastrous for Xi Jinping personally. I think in a while we'll probably talk about some of the things that formed him. But in terms of why he would do this, I think...

two or three things come into play. One, as you've said, is power. You know, it is visible both in democracies and authoritarian states that once people get into power, they find it very difficult to let go. And we're speaking today at a time when there's a huge inquest into the question of why Joe Biden stayed in the presidential race. You may think it was a good or bad idea, but certainly the desire to stay in the job must have been part of it. So in the case of Xi, you know, that's natural.

It's not surprising. But beyond that, I think it's worth noting that Xi does have policy priorities. And they are quite distinctive and they are quite definable. So there's one in particular that was talked about a lot about two or three years ago and it's still in the mix. In Chinese it's 共同富裕 and it's usually translated as common prosperity. This is actually a phrase that has a certain sort of classical tang to it in Chinese called

but actually the meaning in some ways is very modern. It's basically a push, at least an intention, for a society in which very high levels of income inequality are relatively evened out. One of the things that Xi Jinping thinks, and this is quite Maoist,

that has been destructive to China in the last, let's say, 15, 20 years, is that, as Deng Xiaoping put it, some people got rich first, and they got richer and richer and richer. And it's as much a cultural thing as it is an economic thing. People around him have given it, I mean, we don't necessarily have benefit of his thinking personally, but people around him have given the impression that when they see on Chinese social media

zillionaires wearing very expensive watches or basically young people drinking cocktails and partying late into the night. This is not the impression that Xi Jinping wants to give of a society which actually has that kind of socialist ethos to it, which I think he actually genuinely wants to put forward. So the idea that China needs to be pushed in that direction would have been one motivation that kept him in the job.

Yeah, and you can see the justifications there from that, almost from a kind of intellectual policy point of view. But it does seem to me that there's been also an effort to promote a personality cult. We mentioned Xi Jinping Thoughts.

As far as I know, party members are meant to study it every day for a while. I don't know if they actually do, but that is quite Maoist, isn't it? So how much of a cult of personality is there going on? Well, you say you don't know if they do study it, Gideon, but there's a way to find out. So I'm taking it from this you do not have on your phone currently, the Xuexi Study Shi app.

I do not. Afterwards, I'll show you some folks who can get it done. I once sadistically asked a Chinese friend if he had it, and he pulled it up and said, yes, and oh my God, it only shows I haven't done my study today.

Exactly. So the thing about having it as an app rather than Little Red Book, Little Red App, is that it can tell, rather like Fitbit, how often you've been looking through the material. And I can tell you now that those people, I've talked to them, who are looking to enter the Communist Party and actually come up the ranks, they have to get their reading done.

Now, I should say that there is a precedent for this. I mean, today, obviously, it's done through apps and in a very kind of 21st century way. But actually, when Mao, who we've mentioned a few times now, and who I think in some ways is a sort of role model for how to control the party as far as Xi is concerned, when Mao was running the rectification movement, 1942 to 44, okay, he didn't have any apps at that point, but he had 22 key texts,

which all party members had to read and pretty much get off by heart, maybe not quite literally, but very close to it. And of those 22 texts,

18 were by, I'll let you guess there, Gideon, who they might have been by, of course, Mao himself. In other words, the pushing forward of reading and studying of one author as part of that cult of personality is something that she has absorbed and has brought into the 21st century. Yeah. I mean, another moment that was much more televisual was in the 2022 Party Congress, I think it was, when his predecessors are literally ushered out of the hall and

There was some dispute later about whether that had been choreographed or there was some kind of accident, but it did seem to be a kind of display of brute power, really. One of the things that I think is very, very clear is that Xi Jinping has...

made it known, I think, you know, this is something that most people who work on questions of party leadership would say, made it known that those who push back against him will find that their careers are either stymied or even their post-CCP careers will not go in a very healthy direction. Now...

One of the things that is very notable these days is that there are still people within the party who have different views. Some people are still more keen on market solutions in terms of encouraging China's tech industry, for instance. Other people say that more investment should go in state-owned enterprises. The difference compared to, let's say, 10, 12, 15 years ago is that these companies

different world views have not separated so much into different factions within the party. They all still have to go through Xi Jinping himself, or actually at least in the estimation of some, and again, we're now in the realms of sort of, the equivalent of Kremlinology in China is called Zhongnanheology, in other words, the leadership compound of the Forbidden City.

A lot of people talk about Cai Qi, who is one of the top seven, along with Xi himself, in the Politburo Standing Committee. He's someone who clearly is immensely influential, very powerful, and many people say he's the gateway in terms of getting thought, ideas, and ideology through to Xi Jinping. So let's go back to the beginning then. I mean, who is Xi Jinping? Was he kind of, in some ways, born to rule?

In some ways, yes. His father was a very significant figure in the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping. So in other words, Xi Jinping did not emerge as someone way out in the countryside in the way that Mao did, of course, 100 years or so previously, not quite that much, but 70 years or so previously. He was born in 1953, Xi Jinping, and his father had been one of the most significant figures in terms of

pre-power period, pre-1949 revolution period. His father was also known, relatively speaking, as one of the more liberal members, actually, of the CCP, which is not how his son has turned out. And even on some of the very sensitive questions like Tibet, Xi Jinping was known to be more willing to be flexible than his son has been. But by the time you get to Xi Jinping being born, he's actually born, of course, four years after the foundation of the People's Republic, which was founded in 1949.

The first decade or so of his life, he is pretty comfortable, I think. You know, he's growing up in these elite compounds as a young son of a top communist leader, lots of chances for education, interaction with other elites.

And then it goes horribly wrong. Basically, even before the Cultural Revolution starts in 1962, 63, it becomes clear that there's factionalism. And essentially, Xi's father is purged. He's sent away. And Xi Jinping himself essentially finds that this comfortable existence he has in Beijing is shattered.

And then within a few years of that, it's already things are going wrong. In 1966, the actual Cultural Revolution, I'm sure people here are pretty familiar with China's world being turned upside down at that point. And essentially within fairly short order, Xi Jinping is sent out to the countryside, to Shanxi Province, the far northwest. And he's there all the way through his teenage years and really into his early 20s. So that experience of being sent into exile in the countryside

I would say, and I think a lot of people would say, is one of the things that shapes him forever. I think that even today, Xi Jinping in some ways is the product of that teenage...

in the Cultural Revolution, the product of his family being purged, of his world being turned upside down. And I think it's one of the things that made him so determined that order and forcing people into certain types of ideological conformity was necessary to prevent the kind of chaos that he saw in his childhood. Yeah, I mean, his response, I mean, I assume it must be literally a formative experience, but his response is quite interesting because he...

In some ways, the way you describe it, he's sort of saying, "Never again, we need order."

But he doesn't do what might be regarded as a natural reaction and say, you know, this was the product of the Communist Party system, which is pretty monstrous, and we mustn't do that again. On the contrary, he re-embraces the party and I think applies numerous times to join the party when he comes back before they finally let him in. That's right. I think he applied six times and got in on the seventh. So, you know, this wasn't a slam dunk for him by any means.

It's always difficult to know what precisely motivates someone when they've obviously been treated so badly by the party organization and yet choosing to re-embrace it. But it's worth noting that people in that older generation as well, people like Deng Xiaoping famously, also other leaders of that period, Hu Yaobang, go through that Cultural Revolution period, are deeply scarred by it.

but come back with the idea that the party mustn't be abandoned, it must be reformed. And in fact, there's a great recent book by the historian Robert Suttinger about Hu Yaobang, a name that may be less familiar, but one of the liberal reformers inside the CCP who argued the Cultural Revolution should be used to try and make the party a much, much more liberal sort of organization, eventually purged by Deng Xiaoping. So Xi's reaction may seem a little unusual to

us, particularly from our worldview, but it wasn't unique at that time by any means. And his father, did his father live to be rehabilitated and have a sort of second run of career? That's a very good question here. I should know that off the top of my head and I'm not sure. I think, no, I think he didn't get to the kind of, I mean, he's been rehabilitated in terms of reputation, but his son pretty much had to make his way, you know, in the 1970s as the reform era emerged.

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And so he then joins the party and then it's a very, very long route to the top. I mean, which I suppose says something about how the Chinese Communist Party promotes from within. I mean, it's a series of, you don't sort of, as you might in China,

the US or the UK, get a cushy job in London or Washington and just stay there. He moves around the country quite a lot, yeah? Yes, in some ways he's a template for the way in which Deng Xiaoping's party reinvented itself in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction against the Cultural Revolution. And indeed in some ways it's a template for how China's bureaucracy operates today. If you want to get to the very top in Chinese politics,

essentially you have to do your time first out in the provinces. And Xi Jinping in some ways was actually quite a low-key sort of figure within the party as he moved up its ranks in the 80s and 90s. So one of the formative experiences appears to have been when he was party secretary in Zhejiang,

which is one of the more go-ahead provinces in China. Amongst other things, it's the place where Alibaba, one of the hugest corporates in the world today, let alone in China, eventually emerged. But the point about that is that Xi at that point had to be in charge of significant market-driven economic reform. And again, that's interesting considering these days one of the big debates is how dedicated he really is to market opening in China as opposed to state-owned enterprises.

But that trajectory through the provinces and making his way up the party over time was clearly the making of that wider worldview. He even spent a very short time, and it really wasn't very long, but a short time, I think a couple of months, in Iowa. That's really his only period of living, I mean, if you call it, it wasn't a very long period, but residence in another country,

How much interaction he really had with people there is still not very clear, but it was one of the brief experiences of America that he had. Right. And you say, I mean, he wasn't, you know, a particularly rebellious figure, kind of standard party figure, but then at what point do people start saying, okay, this guy could be the next leader of China? You're absolutely right that he doesn't particularly,

particularly, as far as we know, stand out as someone who was an up-and-coming person. You might find a contrast there with someone like the famous, or you might even say notorious, Bo Xilai, who became the source of one of the party's greatest crises in 2012, when he was at least accused of trying to actually overthrow the party, or at least overthrow the existing leadership in favor of his own rule. Xi Jinping was never associated with anything along those lines, nor do I think it would

would suit his style particularly. But he sort of plugged his way up the party. And my suspicion, it'll take a long time and probably some quite deep level archive work by a future historian to find out, but my suspicion is that he was making a good impression where it mattered, which was within the confines of the party itself.

In other words, by showing that he was able to adapt to the new combinations of politics and economics that marked China in that 90s, 2000s period, that he was able to talk to foreigners, that he was able to talk to people bringing foreign direct investment to China. Lots of things that mattered at that point.

Bearing in mind also the way at least at that point in which succession planning happened in the party, and again it's changed under Xi who doesn't want to name any successors very explicitly, is that the successor was actually known, it was nominated and made known a few years before he actually took office. So I would say, I don't know the exact date right, but I want to say about 2009, 2010 certainly, it was known including in the Western world that Xi Jinping was going to be the next leader.

What people didn't know at that point, I think you've indicated this from your own encounter, Gideon, is quite what sort of leader he would be. And even some pretty astute Western observers were saying he's going to be a Gorbachev, he's going to be the great new leader who liberalizes China. Actually, of course, we now know that Gorbachev is one of the people that Xi Jinping then and now most despised and had decided quite early on that should he get to the top,

Gorbachev was the one model that he would not use. Yeah, and was that not, as I recall, a kind of early sign that, yes, this guy was no liberal at all, that he gives, I think, a speech quite early on saying, examine the collapse of the Soviet Union and makes everyone read it. And he uses a phrase which, in retrospect, I think actually is quite indicative because the language it uses. He uses a phrase that basically means...

when talking about why the Soviet Party collapsed and why it happened, he said the problem was...

There wasn't a single real man who would stand up and save the party in the Soviet Union. And the use of this very sort of masculine revolutionary language is something that you see even more today in China, where there's a big pushback against feminism and quite an emphasis on the idea of, you know, I've got to say this sort of revolutionary bro culture. In some ways, it's got some similarities to what you see in Russia and in the United States these days, where actually a very masculine type of confrontational politics

is being, to use an academic jargon word for a moment, valorized. I think Xi Jinping, you know, early on was making it clear that he regarded the kind of

confrontational pursuit of the right type of politics as being something that he would embody and thinking about your strongman series Gideon that seems to be something that some of your other Completely, I mean in writing, you know without a shirt on a horse and with a gun and all of that and Didn't Zuckerberg say we need some masculine energy to us around the American economy plenty of that - to be fair. I've not heard of Xi Jinping

ever being anything less than perfectly dressed when he was carrying out his political duties. But... But, yeah, in fact, isn't there a thing that because they're so careful about curating his image, they're a little sensitive that he's a bit on the fat side and they don't like the image of Winnie the Pooh, which is...

That certainly seems to be one of the ones that has been removed from Chinese social media. I think particularly because there was, I think Obama originally appeared as Tigger sort of in this. Having said that, the Disney Corporation, from what I understand, still actually is pretty profitable in China and has Disneyland's there. So they're probably going to make sure that nothing too offensive to any of the leadership appears from one of their cartoon characters. Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting that he latches onto the idea of the collapse of the

Soviet Union as this terrible warning and the route that China mustn't take. Because, of course, that's something that Putin is even more obsessed with. And the idea, I think he also said, you know, we lost faith for a few weeks or months and everything collapsed. So is that common view and the old relationship between Russia and China kind of key to why Putin and Xi appear to get on so well?

Yes, I think that that's absolutely it. Well, I think there's a few reasons. And actually, one of the things that people have noted is that, again, as far as we can tell...

Xi and Putin have quite frequent conversations with each other. They genuinely, you know, maybe not quite call each other out for a chat, but they're having conversations in which there's clearly a commonality of interest and of personality. And that may have been, again, we don't know, but that may have been important in some recent events, such as when Putin was threatening that he might use a technical nuclear weapon in Ukraine back in about 2022, 2023.

There are some indications that it's possible that Xi Jinping got in touch and said, like, you know, you really don't want to do this in a way that Putin would pay attention to, which he might not have done from a Western leader.

But yes, I think more broadly speaking, both Xi and Putin have the idea that Washington is the real enemy, that they've got their backs against the wall in both cases, and they need to look out for each other in that sense. You know, a lot of this is vibe rather than reality. China is a very powerful country these days. Russia is not as powerful as it used to be, but its troubles are of its own making at the moment after the invasion of Ukraine. But having the United States as a foil...

is something that brings them together. And one of the reasons why a tactic that I suspect you've written about actually, Gideon, but it's been talked about recently, the so-called reverse Nixon or reverse Kissinger in which the US might be able to peel away the Russians from China. I personally think that's unlikely for various reasons, but one is that the bond between Xi and Putin, I think is genuine in many ways. Yeah, and thinking about that bond, I think it's three weeks before the Russian invasion, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Yeah.

that Putin visits Xi in Beijing, which I'm sure future historians, if they can get hold of the papers, will be poring over what was actually said at that meeting. But yeah, just talk us through. Obviously, it was Putin's decision. Do you think he would have told Xi what he was going to do?

I have tried my very best to find answers to what is a fascinating question. And at least people who operate at my level, which sadly is the academic rather than the kind of insider level, can say that we don't have a definitive answer, but...

Having said what I've said, and I would stick to it, I think that Xi and Putin are very close in many ways. There is still a level of caution between the Russian political establishment and the Chinese political establishment, more broadly speaking, and they're not co-identical with the leaders. In Russia, that is actually more of an identity similarity because essentially Putin has created the Russian system as it is. That's not really the case in China, where the party does still remain very powerful and embedded in the country as a whole.

So in terms of what she would have told Putin, my sense is that Putin

certainly indicated that something was going to happen. The reason I can say that is also that, you know, I got told by various people, think tankers and others, that there were questions around the eastern part of Ukraine and whether or not it was really a Ukrainian territory or a Russian territory, which seemed to me sort of talking points that had been put into the ecology by people who wanted to at least raise this question.

I still would say that if pressed, I'm not sure that he would have known that Russia was actually going for a full-scale, full-country invasion in the way that it did go for in February 2022. And what I'd also say is – and here I'm stretching slightly more, but, you know, nobody's listening, right? No, okay. Glad that so many people are here listening.

I would say that Xi probably wasn't that impressed by Putin saying that he would invade and occupy the whole of Ukraine within three days. And three years later, he's got like 20% of the country, but essentially is still fighting. So friendship is one thing, but I'm not sure that Xi looks at Putin's Russia and thinks this is a role model for how I ought to organize a country.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and Connor Boyle. It was edited by Mark Roberts. If you'd like to come along to the next installment of the Age of the Strongman series, you can find all of our live events online at intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend. Come along to the audience and have your questions answered by the experts.