The Party Comes First: Power & Politics in Xi's China | Joseph Torigian
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What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world.

My guest in this episode is Joseph Tarigian, an expert in the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil military relations, and grand strategy, especially as they pertain to China and the Chinese Communist Party. He is also the author of a widely talked about new book that has captivated the attention of China scholars and the China policymaking community titled The Party's Interests Come First.

The book is fundamentally a political biography, an historical analysis focused on Xi Zhengshun, father of Xi Jinping, the current leader of China and the head of the Chinese Communist Party.

In the first hour, Taragian and I trace the evolution, internal contradictions, and complex dynamics of political power and succession within the CCP, revealing the critical role that personal networks, ideological discipline, factional struggle, and narrative have played in shaping Chinese political history and culture.

We explore several key periods in Chinese Communist Party history, including Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the period of reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping, and the post-Tiananmen period following the 1989 crackdown.

In the second hour, our conversation focuses on the current leader of China, Xi Jinping, and the political lessons he has drawn from the struggles endured by his father, and how those experiences inform his party loyalties and strengthen his commitment to restoring China's greatness and its rightful place on the global stage.

If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now.

If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

And with that, please enjoy this informatively rich and profoundly enlightening conversation about the history of the Chinese Communist Party and its leader with my guest, Joseph Tarigian. Joseph Tarigian, welcome to Hidden Forces.

Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to have you on the program today, Joseph, and to speak with you about this incredible book you've written that has been making the rounds among China scholars and policymakers. I think it's going to end up being one of the most impactful books on China that's been published so far this century.

Did you start off with the intention to write a book about Xi Jinping or was your intention to write a book about the political history of the Chinese Communist Party that morphed into a biography about the current president's father? I was asked to participate in an edited edition of a political science journal.

about party history and Xi Jinping. And I thought that what I was going to do is write a short article about Xi Jinping and his father, Xi Zhongshun, but I had just finished a book on party history in China. So I had learned about how to do this kind of research. And as I was doing this article, I realized two things. One was that there was a lot of information that I could gather. And second,

The story of Xi Zhongshun was interesting in terms of what it could tell us about Xi Jinping and the milieu in which Xi Jinping grew up, but also I could do something perhaps even more meaningful, which was to tell a story about what it was like to be a member of the Chinese Communist Party in the 20th century. So the title of the book is The Party's Interests Come First. What are the deeper lessons contained in this book? In other words, what does studying and understanding the life of Xi Zhongshun and the Xi family teach us about the story of modern China?

So one thing I wanted to do with this book is tell the story of the people who suffered in this party and because of this party. And in that sense, it's not a purely instrumental book. I think that there is something inherent in terms of the value of just telling the lives of these people and what happened to them. I also wanted people to better understand how authoritarian regimes work and what it is like for people who

need to maneuver and survive in this type of system.

And also I wanted to facilitate people making their own decisions about what is one of the central puzzles of my book, which is why someone who was persecuted by his own party, Xi Zhongshun, so many times and who was forced to make decisions with which he didn't agree, nevertheless remained so loyal to the party and especially what it means to look at his son who witnessed all of that and made the same decision.

So, how difficult was it? And I am curious also about your research project, but maybe just in the interest of time, we could try to get into those later if we have time. But how difficult was it to sort out what was factually true versus what was true in only a narrative sense? It was very hard. So, the Chinese Communist Party is an institution in which its members believe that how their contributions are characterized.

their legacy is described is absolutely existential because for them the party is everything. The party is the deepest sense of meaning for them.

And so you can see already why it would be hard to do research on this kind of person. But on a deeper level, Xi Jinping is someone who believes that you need to have ideals and conviction in the party's mission. Otherwise, it all falls apart. And so if you start talking about the party as an institution that makes a lot of mistakes, especially extraordinary mistakes like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution,

He uses this expression historical nihilism to describe a kind of history that brings attention to these darker elements. So in that sense, what I did with this project is I didn't think in terms of good and bad evidence. I thought in terms of collecting as much material as I possibly could and then parsing it and then making a mosaic in which some things are better understood and some things are not.

But at the very least, if you're sensitive to possibilities and not limitations, it's actually quite an exciting time to do research on Chinese party history. There are all of these documents, primary sources, archives that have become available by a variety of different reasons. I did a lot of interviews in Hong Kong and Taiwan. There were a lot of histories and memoirs that were published outside of mainland censorship.

I made a list of every time that Xi Zhongxuan met with a foreigner and I tried to go meet them or go to their archives. I spoke to the Dalai Lama. I was able to get the Tibetan language transcripts of these conversations between the Dalai Lama's emissaries and Xi Zhongxuan during the 1980s when there was a brief moment when it looked like they might be able to convince the Dalai Lama to go back to China. And I also used a lot of party published materials and that might sound strange, but

These types of materials tend to...

omit rather than actively mislead, but at the very least they can clue us into possibilities. But more importantly, if you take a sort of mosaic theory perspective, which is that the people who compiled these books might not know what I can do with a particular piece of evidence because I have been studying this man's life for so long. And so you take all of these things and you put them together. And the question is whether or not you've done enough that's new compared to the last person who looked at all of this.

and whether or not you are close enough that you can at least give a sense of what this person's life. And I hope that at least I achieved that. So one of the things that I found myself doing while reading the book at various moments was reflecting on my own society and my own political culture. And so I'm curious from your perspective, what is the role of history and narrative in revolutionary societies like that of China

And does narrative storytelling proceed more carefully with more sensitivities in these societies than our own, do you think? So in utopian, collectivist, revolutionary societies, there has always been a preoccupation about how you win over new generations to the cause. And Xi Jinping openly reflects on this all the time.

And his answer to this conundrum is something he calls self-revolution. So what is self-revolution? Well, essentially what it means is convincing new generations to spend lives...

sacrifice, to take national rejuvenation seriously, to use their words, eat bitterness. And so how do you do that? Well, one way you do it is you inspire. And for Xi Jinping, that inspiration comes from using the party's own history as moral education. So it's not so much history as how do we look at our mistakes in a way that allows us to overcome them, but how to look to history to

motivate us to work for, in Xi Jinping's mind, this inevitable rejuvenation that will lead China back to its rightful place in the world. One of the lessons I think also of the book is that the kinds of experiences like those that Zhejiangshun underwent

and the struggles that he underwent, the kinds of experience that for some would sort of turn them against the party, oftentimes made people adhere more to it in a sense almost kind of like wanting to prove that, "Look how great of a revolutionary I am. Look what great of a communist I am. I've endured so much and I'm still here."

I think this is a good opportunity to get into Zhijun Xun's own history here. Again, it's a history, and I feel like alluded to, it's a history, not just a personal biography, it's also in some sense a biography of the Chinese Communist Party and of communist China. Where did Zhijun Xun grow up?

What was that upbringing like and what were the formative experiences of this man that you think defined him? He was born in 1913, which was two years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty. And it would have been a very striking region for a young person to grow up because he was born in Shanxi near Xi'an. So many of your listeners might have heard of the terracotta soldiers, these very famous artifacts.

And the reason they're there is because the first unified Chinese state had been forged in Xi'an. And in fact, for millennia, Chinese emperors had ruled from this city. And Xi Zhongxun grew up not in the city, but nearby. He grew up in the countryside too, in a peasant family.

And he would have seen this architecture, he would have known that history, but he also would have witnessed something else, which was the poverty and the war and the famine and the banditry that coexisted with it. So in one memoir that I saw that was written by one of his childhood associates, this person described the area as a place that could really breed extreme thinking because of that really dramatic juxtaposition. And when he was first

coming up and learning about the world, it was a period during which the communists were allied with the nationalists, which were of course led by Chiang Kai-shek. But in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek betrays the communists. He butchers them across the country. And even where the school where Xi Zhongshun is studying, they're trying to understand how they're going to react to this

stunning brutality. And so his first revolutionary act as a young person, when he's only a teenager, he's told by the party to attempt to assassinate an academic administrator. He fails. He gets a lot of teachers sick, poisoned, and then he is thrown into prison and it's in prison that he formally joins the party. What were the factors that shaped his revolutionary ideals during his youth? You know, it's interesting. He admits...

that it wasn't really an intellectual attraction. It was this idea that the more radical you were, the better, even if you didn't really have a deep appreciation for das Kapital, what Marx and Engels really said. And he was even more inspired by a novel. And this is really interesting because it shows the power of cultural productions to inspire. It shows communism as purpose and meaning.

And this book is terribly written. The prose is atrocious and it's kind of a scream. It's just a series of terrible things that befall this protagonist.

But the protagonist fetishizes struggle, fetishizes resistance, and by the end of the book decides that only violence can save China. So he leaves to join the military. And so what you see is this sense that something needed to change and that communism was a possible answer. At least it was an inspiring one, even though it didn't necessarily mean that you had a systematic appreciation for the way that class worked according to...

Marx and Engels. Something I found relatable, you're Armenian, I'm Greek, and I grew up with stories from my grandparents who endured not just as young kids, the World War II, but also, or as adults, rather young adults, but also the Greek Civil War. What I found relatable was this idea of eating bitterness and the appreciation of struggle and that meaning derives from struggle. I mean, you obviously struggled through this book. I've

struggled creating a business, something other people can find relatable, but that's very different than what Zhejiangshan's generation went through. Was this emphasis on struggle and eating bitterness just a byproduct of the nature of the world at the time, or is there some deeper significance that this carries for Chinese culture?

You know, it's interesting. Often when I give talks on my books, someone will come up to me after and say, I went to Catholic school and some of these ideas are familiar to me. Of course, there's the hair shirt, right? Which is what these monks would put on so that they would be physically uncomfortable so that they could pursue spiritual enlightenment. And so on the one hand, I think that for us, it's hard to

underestimate how difficult it is to put ourselves in their shoes and to appreciate what they went through. On the other hand, we're all part of the human condition. And I think that even though this book is a case of extremes, extreme suffering, extreme discipline, extreme self-abnegation, that doesn't mean that we can't have some level of empathy. And empathy doesn't mean forgiveness.

It just means that if we really work hard, we can at least try to approximate what it was like for this kind of person. So you mentioned his first imprisonment in, I think it was in 1928? That's correct. Where he officially joined the Chinese Communist Party and became a communist. It wasn't the last time he would be in prison, and it certainly wasn't the last time that he would endure any sort of punishment.

What lessons did Xi draw in your view from some of his early failures and missteps like the Liangdang Mutiny and the internal factional struggles that led to his and Liu Zhidan's imprisonment in 1935? Yeah. So he is released from prison and he can't link up with the party for a little while. He's covered in eczema and boils.

Can't walk. His father dies, apparently somehow related to the stress and anxiety of his son. Grief stricken while he was in prison. Yeah. Yeah. And then his mother and two sisters die shortly after. He's supposed to be the caretaker. He leaves. He goes to do something extraordinarily dangerous, which is he pretends to be a nationalist. He joins a nationalist military unit.

And he is supposed to build up ties there so that he can later on lead an insurrection. He does get a few dozen people to run away with him, but it ends in a complete disaster. And he survives. It's an interesting, actually, characteristic of him that he does go through all of these rather serious close calls, but it comes out okay each time.

And then he is detained again by the nationalists and then he goes to the communist base areas. So the communists have decided that they're not going to be able to take over the country by having strikes and uprisings in the city by centering on workers, which is what they were supposed to do according to Marxism. And so they start working with peasants and bandits and secret societies and they try to build up power.

outside of the nationalist controlled cities, but this is not an easy thing to do. In fact, it's very hard. And so it's natural that you would have different ideas about how to go about it. The problem was in these early years, they didn't trust each other, the communists, right? And so they also were susceptible to charges that if they weren't trying hard enough, that they weren't really good communists and they didn't understand communism.

And so you had these purges, you had members of the Communist Party incarcerating each other, killing each other. And so in 1935, Xi Zhongxun is arrested and put in jail again, and this time it's by other members of his own Chinese Communist Party. How similar were these experiences and the history of the Communist Party in the 1930s to other revolutionary movements like that of the Soviet Union or even Castro's Cuba?

So the October Revolution was quite different because here what you had was a coup in the city in 1917.

And so the Bolsheviks were able to take the cities quite quickly, but then needed to launch a civil war against the whites who were trying to resist them from outside the centers of power. And so the Chinese Communist Revolution was quite different, right? Because they had tried to start in the cities, but they failed.

And then they moved to the countryside and they started to develop these base areas. And it was a much more protracted, long process. In fact, it lasted decades and on several occasions they were nearly annihilated. So the nationalists, when they are able to concentrate on these base areas, were able to clean them up. And so what this meant was for Mao Zedong to emerge as a central leader,

to take all of these disparate bans and win them to his

authority and to dominate the party and to come up with a way of how to fight the nationalists without getting themselves killed. It was for these people who had seen one defeat after another, like Xi Jinping, as we just described, to find a winner for them, it was hugely, hugely significant. Well, that's why I brought up Castro's cube. Obviously, the period that Castro spent in the Sierra Maestra was not decades long.

But there was this period of sort of mounting the revolution outside of Havana and eventually overtaking it. And I couldn't help but feel like, and it's not just with communist dictators or revolutionaries we see this, I think it's revolution in general. I think that's what's so interesting about this. Just one more question about this period that I'm just curious to understand. I mean, you mentioned he was born two years after the fall of the Qing dynasty.

What was the nature of Chinese society at that time? What was the cauldron in which communism ultimately won out over either competing ideologies or competing factions? What was actually happening at that time that created this vacuum and this opportunity?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So for decades, Chinese had been trying to figure out how to escape from the conundrum in which they found themselves. So the dynasty had collapsed.

There were Western encroachments, Japanese encroachments. There were bandits. There was internecine fighting. Is it fair to say that there was chaos? Yeah. Chaos is a good word for it. And so, you know, people had different reactions to this. One was this idea of...

what we really need is to shed our feudal background. And that means we need to pursue enlightenment and democracy and science, and that that is the correct answer. And then you had Mao Zedong who believed that the answer to China's problems was class struggle.

And to achieve that, it wasn't so much having people think for themselves and thereby overcome the feudal legacy, but to turn themselves essentially into members of an organizational weapon. To be able to create a cohesive force, a powerful force that could defeat the nationalists, defeat the Japanese, defeat the bandits, defeat the warlords.

and reunify China and call upon its citizens to sacrifice, to resist the imperialists and to transform itself. And so those are two rather different answers, right? One about changing ourselves and one about using force and violence to change society. So when Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, I think it was, is that right?

Was that the official... I mean, in some sense, the civil war was still going on because they were in exile, but there was still competition over the mainland. And it wasn't until what, 1979 that the Taiwanese officially relinquished their claims on mainland China? Again, please correct me if I've got my dates here wrong. So at that point, the CCP was transitioning from a guerrilla insurgency to a governing entity.

What was Shi Zhengshun's role during that period of time and how did it change from his role in the 30s and 40s? So one of the most interesting things about Shi Zhengshun's career is how quickly he climbed the ranks and how he often held positions and when people held equivalent ones, they were much older than him.

And what that meant was in the late 1940s, early 1950s, he, despite his tender age, was the leader of the so-called Northwest Bureau. So this was essentially the governing institution that controlled a giant swath of the country, just immense, including Xinjiang.

but many other provinces as well. And so he faced this question of now that the party had come to power, how they were going to incorporate

not just Han territories, but also Tibetan and Uyghur and many other ethnic minority areas as well. And so the party wasn't always exactly clear about how to do that because they had fought a revolution to create a classless society, but now they needed to figure out how they were going to

be able to change China without themselves becoming divorced from the masses, becoming bureaucratic and separated from the people that they're supposed to serve. So then you start having these rolling campaigns and these campaigns sometimes are directed against Chinese citizens.

And it's not really clear how far they should go because if it's too leftist, if it's too radical and you kill too many people, that's something that is a problem. But if you don't go far enough, that's also a problem. But how you decide what's not far enough is inherently ambiguous, especially when you have to use quotas to reach these numbers. And then you also want to have campaigns within the party to fight corruption, to fight privilege, to fight entitlement, to fight

an individualism that for Xi Zhongshun is an existential problem because what you're afraid of is once you no longer need to sacrifice because there's an obvious enemy, that it will go to your head and that you'll think, "Oh, I'm the one who took over the country. Therefore, I deserve this. I deserve that," which is a big problem for a party that is based on the ideal of people putting the collective first and putting your own interests second.

So, not long after the CCP gained governance over China, did it enter what you describe as one of two catastrophic periods. And the catastrophic period, the first one encompasses both a great leap forward, and I suppose maybe also part of Mao Zedong's cultural revolution.

Tell us a little bit about this period, because I think also it's important to recognize that most people don't really have a context for the broader story we're describing here. So I don't want to take their knowledge of Chinese history for granted.

So, in the early 1950s, it wasn't immediately clear just how fast China was going to pursue socialist transformation. And in fact, when- I mean, this is the irony also, right, of both the Soviet Union and of communist China, which is that neither country was industrialized when it

And it turned to Marxism. Right, right. And so Mao Zedong decided that communism was what the Soviet Union did and was doing, and that China was going to copy the Soviet experience wholesale. And that's interesting also for the story of Xi Zhongshun because he was in charge of this program that brought tens of thousands of Soviet technicians and experts to China to help them rebuild after the war and to make sure that what they were doing fit exactly the Soviet model and experience.

But over the 1950s, what happened was that Mao gradually moved away

this possibility that China wouldn't pursue rapid violent socialist transformation, that it wouldn't empower non-party individuals and groups to help with the monitoring of the parties so that the party didn't divorce itself from the masses. He moved away from this idea that rule of law would gradually supplant campaigns as the primary method of governance.

And this all erupted in absolutely dramatic form during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, where there's no rule of law, nobody who is not a very high ranking party official can speak out.

By 1959, nobody would dare to go to Mao and tell him that they understood that something had gone deeply wrong. Not everybody even knew that. Many people, because Mao had won the revolution, despite all those odds that I just described to you, they had total faith.

in what Mao was doing. And for them, if you didn't understand what Mao wanted, it was your problem, not Mao's, because there was something wrong with you. That was the kind of devotion that he commanded. And so he slipped away from this sort of round table approach, right? Where he had the final decision making Mao into one where the only thing people did was try to figure out what Mao wanted and bring it to him better than anyone else. And that's what facilitated the famine of the Great Leap Forward. And then later on also the terrible violence and suffering of the Cultural Revolution.

Yeah. I mean, that's the other thing that comes across while reading the book, which is the trauma, the sort of apparent trauma that so many of these revolutionaries must have endured. And I'm not just talking about physical trauma here. I'm talking about psychological trauma, trying not only to thread the needle of fulfilling the wishes of your superiors, but actually trying to intuit what those wishes were. Exactly. Of course, this is also a period in which Shi Zhengxun fell victim to additional persecutions.

Tell me a little bit about this and also what impact at this point now, Xi Jinping, the current president of China and the head of the Politburo standing committee has been born. So he's beginning to bear witness to some of these persecutions of his father. Walk me through what happened during this period. Why did Xi Jinping come under scrutiny? And what lessons do we begin to see his son take from these experiences?

Yeah, that's a great question. One of the most striking things about the book is that Xi Zhongshun has personal relationships with all of the early targets of purges in the years after 1949. And so the very first great target of Mao Zedong is this man named Gao Gang. And this happens right around when Xi Jinping was born in 1953. So who is Gao Gang? Gao Gang, like Xi Zhongshun, was another Northwesterner.

They were two of the guys who had helped build the base area that existed in the Northwest that saved Mao Zedong and the other Long Marchers who had to flee from Jiangxi. And so when Mao gets to the Northwest, he kind of adopts the Northwesterners and he picks Gaogang as their representative.

And allies with him and says rather flattering things about Gaogang. Now, Gaogang, he doesn't like the guys who were mostly in the cities. He doesn't like the guys who were doing underground work against the nationalists. He doesn't trust them. And their leader within the elite is Liu Shaoqi, who is the number two leader, who is Mao's named successor.

Mao, as I mentioned a moment ago, he decided shortly after coming to power that the party actually was going to pursue socialist transformation quicker than he had originally said. Leo Shaoqi was slow. He didn't realize that Mao had changed his mind. Mao Zedong starts complaining about Leo Shaoqi to Gaogang, and then Gaogang goes too far and gets in trouble. People complain about him, and Mao is forced to give up on him.

Now, what's interesting about Xi Zhongxun is he warned Gaogang. He said, "These people, they're long marchers. We're just Northwesterners. They're never going to take us seriously. You need to make sure you understand what Mao is asking you to do." And then Xi Zhongxun witnesses how all of these figures who would be leading the

individuals in the regime for decades all turned against Gaogang together. And Xi Zhongxun nearly went along down with him. And it was Deng Xiaoping who was the one who actually forced Xi Zhongxun to do all of these self-criticisms and tried to extract all of this information from Xi Zhongxun about Gaogang.

Tell us when you say those self-criticisms, can you elaborate? Yeah. So when you're in trouble in the Chinese Communist Party, whether because you actually did something wrong or because somebody more powerful than you decides that you did something wrong, then what you need to do is explain to the party why you made a mistake. And these are really hard to write.

very, very hard to write because on the one hand, you intuitively recognize that the party is always right, but then you still need to get over yourself. So that's emotionally not always an easy thing to do. You also want to make a sincere self-criticism. The worst thing you can do is write a self-criticism and have people think that you're not serious.

But on the other hand, you don't want to go further than you really need in how you admit your crimes. And you also need to worry about what other people are writing about you, because if you don't admit to everything and it comes out later that there's something else you should have talked about, that's a problem.

So you really need to think about how to do these things, right? And they're not easy. And so for Xi Zhongshun, he had to make sure that his self-criticism passed muster. And the person who reviewed them, in fact, several times because he didn't get it right the first time was Deng Xiaoping.

There's something else that's interesting when thinking about how Xi Jinping attempted to navigate the internal contradictions of the party. And this is also just a, you made a point to emphasize that he embraces campaigns early and then he would try to moderate them. Why was it important to point this out and what did you mean by that?

So what is a campaign? A campaign is really a central element to how the Chinese Communist Party works. So a campaign is you come up with an agenda, a goal, and then you recognize that when it first starts, it's going to go too far because you need people to be motivated and you need them to recognize the seriousness of whatever the situation is. And then it's sort of a feature, not a bug that on some occasions there are going to be mistakes, right?

And that has been one of the all time greatest sources of power in the party, which is to get people to do violent, ambitious things in the face of resistance that often is quite resilient.

And so for Xi Zhongshan, it wasn't so much that he opposed these campaigns or opposed the goals that they were trying to achieve, but he also recognized that often there were better or worse ways of achieving them. And so he would never dare go to Mao and say, "Look, this is too radical. This is too leftist and therefore it's a mistake." He was cautious in

in his management of the politics of course correction, which are really hard to get right. Because if you want to be safe, it's easier to be more of a radical or a leftist than someone who is saying that things aren't going well. Because if you say things aren't going well, then you might be accused of not being on board with the policy and opposing the top leader. But every campaign, there is also a recognition that when it does start to go too far, that's when you rein it in. The

and what you do about it when it does. And so when the evidence is really obvious and the top leader you recognize is also getting a little bit unsure, then you can go and say, look, generally speaking, the campaign was a huge success. Everything is going really well. There have been some problems in implementation that you have already recognized. Here's some more details on things that I think we could do better.

So, it's really hard to get right, right? Because also it's not like a question of people rationally coming together and looking at pros and cons. If you have a divergence, it's very easy for you to be accused of ideological heresy. So obviously, the comparison of a mafia is not a really good comparison because one is that mafias don't have ideologies the way that we have here in the case of party politics. But there are elements that do seem to resonate there.

And one of them is that Xi Jinping himself almost sort of plays the role of an underboss. It's like he seems to be the sort of executor, the tip of the spear. How important was it that you chose a character or a person's life to study who was on the sort of executing end of these broader policies that shaped Chinese society? And what did that reveal to you about the history of Chinese politics that you think would have been elusive otherwise?

I'm really glad you asked that, Dimitri. So on the one hand, you might read the...

brief outline of Xi Jinping's life and see that he often was a very powerful figure in the regions. And then when he was in Beijing, was always working for someone more powerful than him. And you might think to yourself, well, the Chinese Communist Party is such a disciplined institution. He would have just gone and done what other people told him to do. Why wouldn't I just read biographies of his superiors?

And the answer is that in the Chinese Communist Party, implementation is so much more than that.

It's so interesting because it's so, so, so, so hard to get right. And what my book tries to do is put people in the position to better understand what dilemmas these implementers faced. And this also, I think, has relevance maybe for your listeners who are trying to understand how politics works in China today. So these deputies, these implementers, often what they're told to do is this and that, but they're not told which matters more and they're not told how to achieve them.

And they want to do what the top leader wants them to do, but they also- But they're not even sure what that is. They're not sure what that is. And also, they don't want to make a hash of the situation, right? So if they're told to do something that they know would blow up the economy, they might try to do it in a way that is less costly for the economy, but also could make them vulnerable to charges of not doing what the top leader wants. And what you just said is so, so, so, so true, which is often the top leader-

that doesn't know what they want or doesn't even want to be understood, right? Because they're mercurial, they change their minds. So Mao Zedong was the kind of person who liked to be a sage king, right? He liked to be distant from day-to-day decision-making so he could think big thoughts. And so if you're the deputy-

You need to figure out when you should report, because if you don't report, you'll be accused of creating a new headquarters within the party. But if you report too much, then mom might think, oh, I want to think big thoughts and you're bothering me. Or why can't you even get this right? You need to ask me this question too.

And so you also have these other people in the party who might not like you, who might be going to the top leader to complain about you. So you need to be worrying about one possibility is you lose your control over the economy and it goes to somebody else. In a worse situation, it's you're completely purged. And so for people who are trying to do this implementation, it's just a huge, huge, huge, huge problem. So in what ways did the catastrophes of the

Great leap forward and the ideological extremes of the Cultural Revolution lead to the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era. What role did Xi Zhengshun play in these later reforms? So everybody knew that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster and they knew that ideological speaking, they had been too leftist, that the search for class enemies within the party had gone too far.

They knew in terms of elite politics that this strongman rule of Mao Zedong had brought terrible, terrible, terrible outcomes to the party. Even Xi Zhongshun himself was quite blunt when he said that we need to figure out a way of preventing another strongman from appearing. He worried about this futile thinking within the party that might facilitate something like that from happening again.

But on the other hand, even as you're recognizing that ideology had been too radical in the past, you needed to figure out a way of making people continue to believe in socialism. And why was that important? Yeah. So you, as a member of the Chinese Communist Party, always believed that to motivate people and to keep the system going, you needed to tell a good story.

The story that had just been told was obviously a disaster. Then how do you get people to sacrifice and put the party's interest first after they've seen the party do these terrible things to you and to the rest of the nation? Also, what's going on as well is you recognize that the social economic system did not provide the growth that you wanted. You need to be able to talk about the economy in a way that justifies the use of market signals.

And so how do you admit that the Cultural Revolution was wrong? How do you say that you need to move into a market direction, but also say that we need to continue to believe in communism? We need to continue to build a spiritual civilization? And how do we allow these criticisms of the past to not go so far that people think that there's something inherently wrong with the Chinese Communist Party? And that is really hard to manage.

That is really hard to manage. And so Xi Zhongshun comes in here for two reasons. One is when he is first rehabilitated after 16 years in the political wilderness, which is kind of a euphemism for incarceration and struggle sessions and internal exile, he goes to Guangdong, which is right on the border with Hong Kong. And so all you need to do is look across the border.

And in fact, one of the first things he has to manage is the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing from the socialist mainland of capitalist Hong Kong. And then he goes to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, which is sort of like the party's brain.

to work for a man named Hu Yaobang, who is the general secretary of the party. And together they need to figure out how they are going to justify the party's rule, tell a good story for why people serve the party, even as they're explaining why the party needs to change in a fundamental way. So I was not prepared to ask you the question I'm about to ask. So if it comes out a little jumbled and incoherent, please forgive me and I hope the audience will forgive me as well.

The last question I asked you and your response made me think about the comparison between communist China and the Soviet Union, and two particular periods, which was one comparing the cultural revolution with the period of de-Stalinization in Soviet Russia.

and the reform period under Deng Xiaoping with the period of Gorbachev under the Soviet Union. What important lessons can we learn about the way in which these two different communist societies approach these periods and how those different approaches ultimately shape the different types of outcomes we saw in these two countries? That's a really good question. The Chinese have always looked to the Soviet Union as they reflect on their own challenges.

And after Stalin died, his initial successor, Mending Malenkov, who was the premier, was pushed out shortly after. And then by 1956, Khrushchev gives his famous speech. He criticizes Stalin. And so Mao is watching this and he's drawing lessons. One of the lessons he draws is that, well, I need to do everything I can so that there is no Khrushchev-like figure after I die.

And so he looks at Malenkov and he says, "Well, the problem was that Stalin should have more clearly identified Malenkov as legitimate successor and given him time to develop his strength before Stalin died so that Malenkov wouldn't have been pushed out by Khrushchev." And so that's why Mao Zedong delegated so much authority to this man, Liu Shaoqi, who I mentioned earlier as a enemy of this close associate of Xi Zhongshun.

But the problem is that Liu Shaoqi is then given all of this power as a deputy. He's the named successor. And then he blows it because he doesn't pay close enough attention to what Mao wants. And he thinks that Mao trusts him and counterintuitively that's a bad thing because he then does all of these other things that makes Mao lose his trust in him. And so what this means is for...

they can't really figure out how to get the succession story right. And they can't really figure out how to get this leader deputy story right.

And so when you get into the 1980s, once again, the Chinese are looking at the Soviet Union and they're drawing conclusions about what's happening. Xi Jinping writes this very funny notification after he reads a book about Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster there, where he says something along the lines of, oh, we have many similar problems. It's really true that bureaucracy is worse than radiation. And in fact, according to a document I saw in the Italian Communist Party archives, Xi Jinping was quite a fan of Gorbachev.

Now, Deng Xiaoping thought that Gorbachev was an idiot, famously. And Deng Xiaoping thought that Gorbachev should have concentrated his attention on the economy and not politics. And I want to say one more thing about this. People weren't quite sure who Xi Jinping was going to be when he first came to power. The first big sign that he was going to be different from what they thought, more conservative, was a speech he gave on the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he says two things. One is that they lost control of their ideology.

And part of that problem was they lost control over their own history. And the second was that they lost control of their military and that there was no real man who came forward to use violence to resolve the situation, basically saying that Gorbachev was not a real man. Man, this ties together the two questions I had in my head. So let me ask you the first one, which is, was Deng's main criticism of Gorbachev that the reforms that he initiated extended into the political realm?

and ultimately led to the unrestrained self-criticism and rewriting of history that led to the downfall of the party? It's interesting. There were significant reforms going on within China in the 1980s. They weren't as dramatic as what we saw in Perestroika and Glasnost in the Soviet Union, but they were very significant. In some ways, it mimicked the 1950s, this period where there was more serious discussion of rule of law.

was a recognition that you could achieve change without the violence that later emerged. And so it created a puzzle, right? Which is, do you save your system by reforming fast enough that you keep ahead of its challenges? Or do you need to avoid reform in the first place because it opens up weaknesses in your system that you can't control?

This is really an almost philosophical question in a way, but it's not a question that has an obvious answer. Xi Zhongshun in a very interesting meeting with these representatives from communist Poland told them that reform waits for no one. You need to get ahead of it. It was on that day for the first time in years there were more protests by Solidarity. Solidarity was legal just a few months after that and there was no more communism in Poland in just a little bit longer period.

And so I think that for Xi Jinping, he has this view that, yeah, there are problems with our system, but...

If we are too aggressive about solving those problems, it could turn over the entire house of cards. And yeah, we need to think about co-optation. We need to think about ways that we can win people over without repression. But how you do that without creating space for people to cause trouble is also kind of a big problem that's hard to think through entirely clearly. No, I mean, I love this. And I think maybe subconsciously the comparison...

between China and Russia came up during the course of reading this book. I love how, I mean, this way you're describing here about how you need to be able to reform, you need to be able to criticize because otherwise you'll stagnate. But if you

If you reform too much, you risk collapsing the entire edifice of the system. This is also true when it comes to economic reform and progress in China, when compared to the Soviet Union, which was more protectionist of its industries.

And in China, what we have seen is this kind of controlled competition internally where winners emerge through hard won competition that are ultimately capable of taking market share on the global stage. Is there a deeper principle that is at work in Chinese culture as it sort of has existed over the last hundred years in particular?

that explains this distinctive approach when compared to the Soviet Union? Because these were lessons that were, it's not like they had the entire history of the rise and fall of Soviet Russia to pull from. This was happening concurrently. Yeah. So your question also gets at something else that's very interesting.

which is how we think about inevitability because of endemic structural features in China and the Soviet Union, and how we think about contingency and change and possibilityhood of other paths that China or the Soviet Union could have taken. And for people who look at these countries, they...

wonder how much of the entire trajectory of the Soviet Union could have been understood in something inherent to their ideology, something inherent to the October Revolution. And then other people say that, well, actually the Soviet Union could have taken a different path if this man Bukharin and not Stalin had become the leader in the 1920s and 1930s.

And then many Chinese wonder in the 1980s if Deng Xiaoping had not been the top leader that these incipient moves towards reform would have been successful and China would have moved to a new equilibrium that was more about co-optation and institutions and rule of law. And it's hard to manage these questions because leaders in the Soviet Union and China are so strong.

Right. And so you can ask whether if somebody else had come to power, if they had pursued something, maybe they would have been successful. My own sense is that we can't give real good answers to your question because there's this

dialectic, to use a Marxist term, there's this tension. On the one hand, in both China and the Soviet Union, we kept seeing the same things over and over and over again. So there's something about the Bolshevik-Leninist system that really explains a lot. But also at the same time, there are so many surprises and contingencies and accidents that make any particular outcome very hard to predict.

So, you're asking a question about a counterfactual, which is what if this changed and how determined was this particular outcome? And I think that those are fun answers to discuss, but that they're also very challenging. Well, I have a few more questions to ask you in that vein. And I also, I want to draw one additional comparison, and that is between the protests and massacre at Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both happening within a few months of each other in 1989.

And then of course, I want to bring us to the present. First of all, to the lessons that Xi Jinping learned during this period. We've mentioned him only a few times in this conversation. Of course, at this point in the 1980s, is it fair to say that his political career began around the 1980s during the reform period? That's right. Okay. So I would love to talk about him, the expectations that people had for him, given the fact that he was the son of such a prominent official.

Also, the challenges, ironically, the challenges that he faced being a princeling, being the offspring of a leader that wasn't necessarily a benefit in other words. And then also what lessons, especially US foreign policy makers, but the world can draw about the direction of China and what we can expect from a leader who has consolidated so much power in this country. And we're going to get into those in the second hour, Joseph.

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