Understanding Xi: Is China’s President a Threat to the World? (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part two of our event with Rana Mitter and Gideon Rackman, Understanding Xi.

This is the second installment in our Age of the Strongman series, which seeks to understand the key leaders shaping the globe today. If you missed part one, we encourage you to jump back an episode to hear more about how Xi's political philosophy has shaped China's global ambitions before we continue the conversation now. Let's rejoin Gideon and Rana now, live at Smith Square Hall. On that point, though, of Xi and Putin,

Again, it's really interesting. It's key to geopolitics, really, what's happening in that relationship. But I think a year after that meeting, Xi then visits Putin in Moscow and says something that I think Western security analysts get very nervous about because as he's leaving, I think he says in front of the cameras, the two of us are changing the world in ways unseen for generations. Was that a significant moment and was it a deliberate signal? Well, I think...

I think the phrasing was, we're seeing changes that have not been seen in 100 years. Is that right? That's right. And the two of us are driving it. Yeah. And the two of us are influencing that too. So...

So, first of all, the phrase about 100 years began to emerge in 2017 because it was meant to indicate specifically 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution. And, of course, that is a particular point of reference for both of them, even though Putin, of course, no longer evinces loyalty to the Communist Party. But certainly the idea of that revolutionary change that started in 1917 is relevant to them both.

I think that also when she said words along those lines, it was meant with great earnestness.

But step back for a minute and think about what that might mean. I mean, I think quite often security analysts, not for unreasonable reasons, I think, would say that this might refer to very significant changes in global order. Could this mean a war? But actually, I think if you look at the ways in which China is right now talking about changing the world fundamentally,

we can see them and they are not things that are in any way secret. I would say number one, maybe even number two and three, is technology.

Huge amounts of what is making the world, and I mean the world generally, this includes the global south, an awful lot of parts of the world outside the global north, very different from what it was, is different aspects of Chinese technology. Number one would be green energy transition. Now that the United States has essentially explicitly really decided that it's not going to leave the fossil fuel route,

Lots of countries around the world who are interested in solar, interested in wind turbine tech, you know, these things, they have to go to China. The United States is essentially saying China can actually have dominance of that market. That's a fundamental technological change. Number two, artificial intelligence. Now, of course, the U.S. has a tremendous lead in various aspects of AI, but it's also clear that China is catching up in a very, very big way and is using AI

its type of social system, authoritarian, top-down, to make extremely advanced use of AI in a way that lots of other countries are also drawing on as well. One more, 5G in general.

outside the Western world, Chinese companies are still very dominant in terms of 5G provision because they're cheap, heavily state subsidized, of course, one of the reasons that they're cheap. And by installing that equipment, they create a path dependency that that means the next 5, 10, 20 years of tech development will go with China. So,

Russia is in a slightly different category. I think they're probably coming more along for that ride. But when China talks about those changes, it absolutely means it, but it doesn't necessarily mean in terms of starting World War III. In fact, I don't think it means that at all. It does mean in terms of dominating all sorts of frameworks and mechanisms that will be crucial to the next, if not 100 years, at least 10 or 20.

Yeah. I mean, since you use the dread words World War III, I mean, one of the reasons I think people... I took that from President Trump. I think he mentioned it. Yes, he's very preoccupied by it. But one of the reasons that I think people were so interested in the Xi-Putin relationship was this sense that you'll pick up all the time in the US that...

if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, Xi will make a move on Taiwan. Do you think the two situations are analogous? And how do you think the Chinese are thinking about it right now? I don't think they are analogous, certainly not in Chinese minds, for reasons I'll explain in a moment. Just to stick to the Russia connection for a moment, though, I do think...

that China is very invested in both the financial and indeed in a kind of ideological sense in Putin's Russia as it is. They are, I think, you know, I think they'd rather that there were a solution to the war in Ukraine, but they haven't done a huge amount themselves in terms of coming up with one. But essentially, any Russia other than the Putin-

type of Russia that exists now is probably not good for China. If it's another authoritarian state that's not run by Putin, they have to get to know another leader and work with him, and that's difficult. If it's a Russia that becomes miraculously more liberal and democratic, that's definitely not good for China. So actually, Putin is someone they have quite a lot of reason to want to back up, I would say. More broadly speaking, I think that there is, at the moment, a sense that

Because the United States has changed so fundamentally, at least in the eyes of China in a short time, that maybe questions like Taiwan might also be part of a kind of new grand bargain. They might be part of a new shaping of Asia.

I think from what I can gather, and again, you know, one has to sort of listen to echoes of rumors of what people think. But I think I can say that people in Beijing at the leadership, at least in the think tank level, they feed into the leadership, don't know what to think at the moment. And that is making them quite cautious in many ways. Certainly the idea that Taiwan is going to be a prime military target in the near future, I think, is overstated.

The capacity is certainly being built up. Make no mistake about that. You know, every time satellite pictures come back or intelligence comes back, it's clear that in terms of creating the capacity for a major amphibious campaign off the coast of Fujian to get to Taiwan, the capacity is being created.

But even then, it would be a fantastically difficult operation, even with very, very strong naval capacity, which China does have these days. There's a reason that full-scale amphibious attacks exist.

anti-amphibious campaigns that work out can be counted on the fingers of probably one hand, D-Day, Iwo Jima, Incheon, can't think of that many others, because they're hard to pull off. And so I think what's happening now, which is continuing, say, to influence the social media environment in Taiwan in a pro-Chinese direction, economic coercion, other tactics that can be used to try to

Push hard against Taiwan maybe even thinking about you know naval blockade one of those things all of those are in the

But the one thing I think that isn't happening is them looking at Putin now and thinking, this basically opens the door for us to do more on Taiwan. Taiwan is thought of by them as an issue that's been there for a long time. They don't see a direct analogy with Russia. And right now, for reasons I was saying before, I don't think they regard, even if there were to be a ceasefire at some point soon, I don't think they'd regard the Russian campaign as being a success.

Okay, before I turn it over to the audience I just want to ask a couple more questions about his domestic base because One of the characteristics of his period in power has been these repeated purges

it purges. And initially it was people said, oh, well, it's just an anti-corruption thing. He's getting, you know, he needed to do that. But it seems to be going on and on and on. And just, you know, even when he's got his own guys in, they then get purged. So the foreign minister, Qin Gang, was purged, the defense minister and so on. What's going on there? Again, as with many, many aspects of elite Chinese politics, it's hard to know exactly.

But one interpretation would be that in many areas of Chinese life, particularly what you might call the civilian end of the party, the last 10 years plus, 12 years, has essentially been a process of getting the party to operate under Xi's desires and framings.

And it could be argued alongside that, that the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, including, of course, the Air Force and the Navy, and I say the Air Force and the Navy because actually these days,

A lot more of the money, care, attention and strategic interest is not so much the land forces. China doesn't really have major land disputes except to some extent with India these days. But in terms of blue water naval ambition and air force capacity, say for the Taiwan air zone, these are really where the interest lies. So the PLA is very, very important in terms of Xi's vision.

But because it's important, it also, I think, has still maintained in some ways more autonomy, not necessarily in terms of policy, but in terms of, you know, corruption, meaning that people can get rich on procurement deals and so forth. And I think from all accounts, he's found it, you know, perhaps surprisingly difficult to control that. So at least some of that seems to be a genuine attempt to try and get the armed forces simply to do what he says.

In terms of the civilians who've been purged, so Li Shengfu, the defense minister, would be an example of that. In terms of like Qin Gang, the foreign minister who was basically mysteriously disappeared about a year and a half ago, this from all accounts was, I mean, I think FT amongst others has covered the kind of lurid details, the supposed personal life of the foreign minister, which turned out to be more colorful than perhaps Xi Jinping would have wanted.

And as far as we can tell, this appears to be a genuine act of anger on his part. That's someone who he had handpicked

promoted very fast through the system leapfrogging other people who would otherwise have been in that position and then basically you know when he was in that position Jingang was said to have had you know personal affairs and things that you know breached protocol and so forth you know it's been reported fairly fairly widely so it may be that in that particular case this was basically wanted to send a message saying if you were one of my protégés if I pull you up through the system at top

top speed, you do not get to essentially disrespect me by playing around. That's the interpretation I think that most people have. But it is a sign that, as I say, sometimes because Chinese politics is so opaque, we assume that it's always highly rational. And considering the politics in our own countries in the West has all sorts of peculiar elements to it, there's no reason why Chinese politics shouldn't be quite similar that way as well.

Right. Now, how effective a leader has he been? Obviously, I mean, the official narrative is that he's been an absolutely marvelous leader of China. But you could make the other argument that the economy has slowed under him, that he's been at war at various times with some of the leading tech companies in ways that are not necessarily helpful. But the one I particularly want to ask you about is the handling of the pandemic.

where for a while, you know, first of all, it originates in China, which is a kind of national humiliation. And there's still questions about the lab leak and so on.

And then for a while, the Chinese portray it as a sort of a triumph of national discipline that they don't really have COVID at home because they've got such strict procedures. But then it all breaks down very chaotically and with very unusually for China, you know, big public demonstrations. So what do we learn about Xi Jinping and his security and his style of ruling from the pandemic? So in terms of the pandemic and the scorecard that you're mentioning in terms of effectiveness, I mean...

so much we could say, so let me try and do it fairly concisely. I think if you looked to people in China to ask what would you put to Xi Jinping's credit, I think probably the thing that most people would say is anti-corruption.

One of the things that was said very widely, not least by the party itself when he came into power, was that because, not least of economic boom and therefore the opportunities that come with it, that China had become deeply corrupt, particularly, you know, provinces such as Shandong, you know, naming names of provinces there, apparently become known as one of the most corrupt places in China. And one of the things that happened very quickly with a huge crackdown on the military and civilian establishments was that that anti-corruption campaign was real.

Now, that had both good effects on the grounds that obviously, in most senses, less corruption is better than more corruption, but it also actually suppressed an awful lot of the more entrepreneurial economic activities that have been going on during that time as well. There's a Chinese, a little Chinese phrase which rhymes in Chinese, bù zuò, bù zuò, which

which means if I don't do anything, I won't do anything wrong. And it led to a freezing of bureaucratic and government activity in many senses too. So you can read that as a sort of plus with a strong minus attached to it. Another quick example, you have, as you've said, I think a strong...

quite personally driven suspicion about market economics. I don't think Xi Jinping's happy place, unlike Jiang Zemin, you know, two presidents before him, is in the idea that there needs to be more markets. So when he talks about market socialism, Jiang Zemin was really interested in the market. I think Xi Jinping is really interested in the socialism part, hence the common prosperity I mentioned. And he believes with the tech entrepreneurs that they need to be kept in

in line to stop them getting too big, certainly bigger than him and Jack Ma being disappeared for a while was an indication of that. Having said that, people would point out that today China is the second most important tech

ecology in the world. It has huge amounts of innovation. Some of that, of course, is taken from taking or stealing technology from elsewhere and working on it. Other parts are taken from the use of 10 or 15 years of reinvestment of 2.4% a year of GDP in research and development, setting up new research institutions, commercializing very successfully much of that science as well. That's also true. And that also happened under Xi Jinping. Finally,

COVID. I think if you talk to an awful lot of ordinary Chinese, they will talk about the mishandling and they will say the mishandling, particularly of the last year of the COVID epidemic as one of the biggest black marks against the government and therefore against Xi Jinping, who associated himself with it very explicitly. I think that did do a great deal to essentially drain confidence in what he was doing. What I think needs to be seen now is whether or not

the economic doldrums that China is in will recover, whether or not, in fact, it's going to be possible for that kind of aspirational consumerist middle class lifestyle that, you know, many, many Chinese had come to expect in the middle class that emerged between the 1980s and the 2010s.

If that can be triggered again, perhaps by more domestic consumption, then I think that his reputation, just by definition, will probably rise again. If the economy doesn't recover, it will be more difficult. Yeah. So final question before I ask the audience. I think one of the weaknesses of the whole strongman model is its personalism. And obviously, she's in his 70s now. We don't know how long he's going to live, but...

Do you think when he goes, there will be another period of sort of turmoil in China? I think you've just written a piece for Foreign Affairs on what China will look like in 20 years' time when probably Xi won't be around anymore.

Although, as I pointed out at the beginning of the article, Deng Xiaoping managed to last and be influential into his 90s. So you should never know quite what's going to happen. And I think Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia actually kind of ran for office again and won at the age of 93 or something like that. Anyway, let's not go down that road. Yes, so thank you for mentioning that, Gideon. So this piece called The Once and Future China, which is in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, the magazine, is

essentially argues that whether or not Xi Jinping is there in 20 years' time. Actually, there are trends emerging now, including China's continuing growing dominance in green energy transition. Its ability, I think, more and more to try and make a sort of global ideology around what I call welfarist authoritarianism, trying to push both for the idea that people want those kind of more comfortable, middle-class, dependable lifestyles back,

and that they're actually moving in a quite anti-liberal direction around the world to do that. That gives China, I think, an opportunity to tell a story about itself that may get more traction in the next 5, 10, 15 years than it has done in the past when liberalism was more dominant. So those sorts of ideas, I think, give opportunities for China, along with its science base. But I also put one big note of caution into this piece, and this is something that might not necessarily deal with Xi Jinping himself, but certainly around the system.

I think that if there is a violent attempt to try and unify Taiwan with China, it might succeed. You know, in the end, there are a lot of military factors on China's side, including proximity and technology. But I think it would do China's reputation, deal them a shattering blow. Because the argument that they couldn't essentially unify what they claim are compatriots in a peaceful and consensual way, which is what that will have meant,

is actually a sign that China's major message about itself under Xi Jinping, which is that it's creating, to quote his phrase, a community of common destiny,

doesn't even work across the straits at home. So stay away from violent action against Taiwan and then I think actually the next 20 years potentially have these longer range stories that might end up for good or ill being very successful in terms of China's new position as a sort of global south leader that's talking about issues that people in the wider world do consider important such as energy transition.

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Lots of people out in the audience and I'm sure lots of questions, so let's take some of them. I think somebody's coming to you with a mic. As a commentator on China, are you viewed as a friend of China? Can you still go to China? Who do you talk to or is it more interpretive, your thinking on China?

Well, thanks very much for the question. I think it's not for me to define whether I'm a friend of anyone or not, but I would hope very much that, as I have been doing for decades, that I continue to have a lot of dialogues with people in China about what's going on there. And I'm certainly planning to visit in just a few months' time for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in China, which is an area that I've been interested in in terms of research for quite some time.

In terms of talking about contemporary Chinese issues, I find that the most productive place to talk is Chinese think tanks, of which there are quite a few. Think tanks in China are not the same as in Brussels or London or Washington, D.C., in that although they may nominally be counterproductive,

disconnected from the government. In practice, they're usually going to have some sort of links with some parts of the government and the party. But that's part of the point. In terms of trying to get an idea of what the line is, what people are saying about particular issues, those are places where you can get some feel for that. Because

be honest, people in my kind of position, unlike Gideon, don't get to meet Xi Jinping or people of that sort. So that sort of level, I have to confess, is not open or hasn't been open to me. But in terms of speaking to people who work in the academic and analytical sphere in China, I

I have been and continue to talk to those people in detail, and I hope to do so for many years. Yeah. No, that was a total one-off, I have to say. But, yeah, I mean, you're also part of a community of historians. Do you find that sort of Chinese historians are doing the same sort of work as you are doing? And is it like a normal conversation between colleagues in that sense? Yeah.

Very much so, yes. I mean, I'm actually a historian in terms of my research interests, particularly the 1930s and 1940s is my area. And again, I've been working with colleagues in China for years.

you know, 20 years or more in those sorts of areas. Absolutely. You know, in terms of contributing to conferences, journals and discussing many obscure questions, which I'm sure we won't bore the audience with tonight, like, you know, what was the precise nature of the leadership group inside the Chinese Nationalist Party between 1927 and 1937? These are things that excite historians, if not necessarily intellectuals.

everyone else and a conversation so you can certainly and do have in detail with with Chinese colleagues in Beijing Shanghai or elsewhere yeah I think right at the back there thank you um talking about Putin and Xi how relevant or or not relevant is the fact that there's no communist party in Russia anymore is that factored you think into his view of Russia today

So, I think, I mean, it is, well, first of all, it's an interesting question, and Applebaum, who I think you're going to have later in this series, is much more qualified than I am to talk about the Russian side of things. I briefly mentioned that

event which has become quite well known in which she certainly mourned the downfall of the Soviet Communist Party. And to that extent, yes, I think he clearly does regret the fact that the party there fell. That said, I don't think there's any sense in which he regards Putin as a less reliable partner or activist.

actor to engage with because there's no longer a communist party as such. Well, of course, there is a communist party in Russia. I think it's still led by a guy called Gennady Zyuganov who gets sort of, you know, 11% of the vote in parliamentary elections such as they are in Russia, but he's not a serious power player. I think that, again, going back to Gideon's thesis,

The level of personal connection between Xi and Putin matters. Because if you think back just 70 years, Khrushchev and Mao were respective leaders of their own fully communist parties. They were part of a socialist alliance which had formed in 1949. And 10 years later...

between the two were so bad that essentially the Sino-Soviet split, the moving apart on a very long-term basis of the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties happened. And it wasn't really until the late 1980s that the two sides came together again. So socialist...

ideology did not prove to be a sufficient guarantee that the personalities in that case would gel together. And today, I think the much closer personalities of Xi and Putin probably matter more than the fact of the party being existence or not in Russia. Do you think actually that the Putin regime, if I can use that word, is even more personalist than the Chinese one simply because the Chinese do still have the party?

Yes, I think undoubtedly so. Essentially, the Putin, rather the Russian political system as it now exists, is an invention of Putin personally. When he came into office 25 years ago, which is an astonishing thing to say, I think, has he not quite outlasted Stalin, but almost actually. Anyway, when he came into power...

Russia still had dodgy but real competitive elections which have now completely gone. It wasn't guaranteed but it was possible that another presidential candidates could stand even if they didn't win. No longer the case. Provincial governors were elected. That ended to

ended up being appointed quite early into the 2000s. And civil society in Russia, which existed in some form in, you know, sort of films, small numbers of broadcast organizations, having a certain amount of freedom, had disappeared certainly by the time of the Ukraine war coming together. So I think that that was all Putin's personal reinvention of a system which had broken down, you know, under Yeltsin in the 1990s. China...

is very much a country which has been shaped and continues to be shaped by the continuing existence of the CCP at the Chinese Communist Party. The best metaphor, I think, for people sometimes use Potemkin Village for the Russian system. For the Chinese system, think of it more as a honeycomb. In other words, that you have these sort of cells all across the country, which are the party.

Like a honeycomb, they're not filled with honey or anything sticky, but they're empty in the middle, and they're filled with various parts of what will be civil society elsewhere. Not everything in those things is about the party, but the party through those honeycomb cells contains everything going on in China.

That is something that Xi, I think, would find it very hard to break up or dissolve, even if he wanted to. And actually, since he knows that China needs structure to be able to function and do his will, I'm not actually sure that he wants to break it up anyway.

Yeah, more questions. Oh, lots of hands now. The lady over there. So, two questions, actually. The first being, given that we knew the die was cast quite early on, so 2012, as you said, how misguided do you think it was in the Brexit campaign in 2015 and 16 to rely on China as a growing kind of trade partner for the U.K.?

And then second, how tolerable do you think it is for countries such as the UK to have trade partners that include the US and China that are both competing but also ruled by these strongman leaders? I think in a sense, I mean, the Brexit and the US, well, the Brexit element is almost separate from the question of China because there's an extent to which the way that the world has been set up during the era of globalisation is

is such that it's almost impossible right now completely to exclude China from any kind of manufacturing chain. And, you know, the classic example that people tend to use is smartphones, where Apple has just promised President Trump that they're going to move production of all smartphones

iPhones that are going to the US market to India. But what that actually turns out to mean is the final assembly is in India, but actually all the components are still from China, so it'll be hard to do. And the UK is again in a position where, like many internationally oriented open economies,

It is dependent on significant amounts of foreign direct investment and on innovation and services to keep itself going. I mean, Chinese students in British universities are a good example. The U.S. is very different. It's getting all the FT guys. Is it like 11% of U.S. GDP is based on foreign trade?

I see. Now you've got me. No, I don't know. But it's less trade dependent than the UK. Significantly less anyway. So in a sense, the question really, I mean, if you find it for me to tell you what your question is, that sense. But I think it's really about the nature of if you're going to run a very large liberalized economy that's very largely based on trade and open.

open markets in a world which is rapidly moving against that kind of globalized framework, how do you actually reach a kind of successful and sustainable international trading environment? I mean, right now, you could argue the British government has just done

deal with the United States which at least lowers tariffs a deal with India which may open up new sorts of engagements in the next five ten years have not immediately signed up to the CPTPP which is Asia Pacific agreement that again is probably limited right now but has importance in terms of things that are important to the UK such as norms on digital services and of course this new EU reset which may come together so

all of that suggests that there are ways and means of dealing with minimizing or lessening the impact of China on the economy. But essentially, there's pretty much no economy in the world that I can think of that could move to removing everything Chinese from its supply chain within a relatively short period of time. There are a bunch of people who want to ask questions, but just a

quick follow-up to that I mean which I think you may have been sort of alluding to the whole Cameron Golden era period the state visit from Xi Jinping and so on I mean briefly but do you think that was a mistake were we too sort of rosy-eyed about China or in fact should we go try and go back to something more like that particularly if the U.S. is going to be more hostile?

No, I don't think we should go back to that. I think the period itself was always more rhetorical than real. If you look at the levels of trade that the UK has done with China...

Weirdly enough, the two years before the Golden Era, and the Golden Era phrase I think was only ever used by the Chinese. I'm not sure that Cameron and Osborne ever actually used it or they got stuck with it. In the two years before that, the reason why it suddenly emerged is that the two years before that, Britain's diplomacy had been put in the deep freeze by China because Cameron invited the Dalai Lama to Downing Street. If you look at the trade figures...

Trade with China continued to go up during those two years. So how much difference actually declaring a new era of investment really made was never particularly clear. The UK and China will do business with each other in areas where the security establishments of both countries allow it to happen and where there's a vested trade interest in doing so. I don't think sentiment really comes into it.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, 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.