Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao | Lex Fridman Podcast #466

The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Waserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeffrey Waserstrom. You've compared Xi Jinping and Maong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders and where do they differ? Xi Jinping of course is the current leader of China for the past 12 years and Ma Dong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities? What are the differences? So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. Then when he died you know there was tremendous outpouring of grief even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xiinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China the first thing you see are books by him collections of his speeches. And when Mao was alive, you you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China. But after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. I I was first in China in 1986 and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. you would know but his face wasn't everywhere. The newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him and quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xiinping you've had a a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So that's that's a key commonality and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos in turning things upside down in a sense that um you know he talked about class struggle which came out of Marxism but he also really his favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was the monkey king about this legendary figure who this this monkey king who could turn the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a was a way to improve things. Xiinping is very orderly is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up like to have people on the streets um clamoring. So Xiinping even though he has a personality cult it's not manifesting itself. He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in any anything that can't be controlled. So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways that they're they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. They're also different and this fits with this orderliness that Xiinping talks positively about Confucious and Confucian traditions in China. Um, and Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior. Whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a feudal way of thought that it hold held China back. So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party and that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them two as well. So there's some degree as you said that Xi Jinping is possesses the ideas of communism and the ideas of Confucianism. Uh so let's go all the way back. He wrote that in order to understand the China of today we have to study its past. So uh the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucious, a Chinese philosopher who lived 2500 years ago. Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucious? First of all, we we don't know that much about the historic Confucious. He's he's around the same time as you know figures like Socrates. And like with Socrates, we get a lot of what we know about him or think we know about him from what his followers said and things that were attributed to him and dialogues that were written afterward. So, you know, you can have a lot of you can have a lot of fun with these sort of axial age thinkers and what they had in common. Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers is they were trying to kind of make a case for why they should be able to educate the next generation of the elite and sort of had a way of promising that they had philosophical ideas that helped keep decide how you should run a polity. Confucious lived in a time where there were these waring kingdoms in a territory that later became became China. But what he said was that there had been this period of great order in the past. That the lines between inferior and superior were clear and there was a kind of synergy between superior and inferior that kept everything ticking along really nicely. He thought that hierarchical relationships were a good thing and that the trick was that both sides in a hierarchical relationship owed something to the other. So the father um and son relationship was a key one. And the father deserved respect from the son but owed the son care and benevolence and things would be fine as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end. And he had a whole series of these relationships. The husband to the wife was again an unequal one of um the husband being superior to the wife but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference. And he had the same notion that then the emperor to the ministers were these were all parallels and there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism. Even something that in the west we often think of as a kind of quintessential quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers. In um in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism there was only older brother and younger brother. There was no brotherhood was not an ealitarian relationship. It was one where the older brother took care of the younger brother and the younger brother showed respect for the older brother. So stable hierarchy Yeah. was at the core of everything in society. It permeated everything including politics. Yeah. And he and there was even a sense that it it connected the natural world to the supernatural world. So the emperor was to heaven this kind of non-personified day deity like the emperor was to the minister. So all of this had these relationships. So the emperor was the son of heaven. And um you know for confucious he said so we should study the texts. we should study how the sages of old um behaved that there that society was becoming corrupted and was going away from that sort of purity of the sages when the the relationships were all in order. So Confucianism was a kind of conservative or even backwardlooking thing. It wasn't trying to it wasn't arguing for progress. It was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past. So it was also a kind of conserve. So in all kinds of ways you know it's irreconcilable to many things about Marxism and communism which is all about struggle and all about actually um a progressive view of history moving from one stage to the next. So that's the interesting thing about Xi Jinping and the China of today is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism where communism Marxism is supposed to you know let go of history and Confucianism there's a real veneration of history that's happening in China of today so they're able to wear both hats and balance it. Yeah, you could say that in many points in the 20th century, there was a kind of a kind of struggle between different competing political groups over which part of the Chinese past to connect with. Was it to the Confucian tradition or to the kind of rebellious monkey king tradition which was what Mao connected to? um Xiinping and before him to some extent you know Hu Jun Tao we saw this a little bit at the Olympics it was more this kind of mix it all together view anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together so Xiinping says that you know Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model but so is Confucious and there's really you know they had so little in common but But they both in his mind and the minds of others suggest a kind of uh power and greatness of the Chinese past. Yeah. So this platonic notion of greatness and that you could say connects that's a thread that connects for Xi Jinping the great history multi,000year history of China. Yeah. And it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. you had, you know, the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit, you know, in 221 BC, he um is anti- scholars. He's he burns books and he he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. Um so he's very much against the things that Confucious stood for. But and Mao in a sense of having to choose between Confucious and the first emperor, he said, "Well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea." uh you know scholars can be can be a pain. So he said like if you have to choose between Confucianism and that but Xiinping I think continually is kind of not choosing and if he wants to say well look at the great wall look at this wonderful in fact that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor who by the way didn't build anything like the great wall you see today. He built walls and they were fine. You know, they were good. But the great wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that as a in many ways a nationalist above all else. Xiinping is a a supporter of the party and single party rule. That's something he clearly believes in. And he's um a nationalist. He wants to see China be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage. Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin. He was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction is is is u also permeates through through Ma all the way to Xiinping. But if you can linger on Confucious for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that quote people are pretty much alike at birth but become differentiated via learning. So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Uh can you speak to this uh Confucious's idea of education and how much does it permeate to the China of today? Sure. So there's an optimism to this. There's an optimism in the sense of a ability that people can be good and when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of of past figures and past texts that were exemplary. And it and it was it did have this this idea a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through um through education. And I think that that shows through in all kinds of things. even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that um that people could be could be remolded potentially and and China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the um the last emperor. You know, the last emperor the idea was that he could become anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this a good a good member of this polity through the kind of um education often it was a very kind of forceful form of education but I think that's a carryover from con from the confusion times and um over time this confusion idea led to the creation of uh one of the early great civil service exams. An idea that bureaucracies should be run not by people who were born into the right families but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your career. A bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing, could could set you on the road to to a good career. in China you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on on education and on uh valuing of scholarly pursuits but then Chinese leaders throughout history including up to Mao and Xiinping have also found scholars to be uh tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there. But uh to which degree this idea of meritocracy that's inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line. There's a meritocratic view of human nature there where if you work hard and you uh learn things you will succeed. And so the reverse if you haven't succeeded that means you didn't work hard and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the of the success. uh does that carry over to the China of today? There's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you know you had the civil serv exams but the question was who if you if you had a really good tutor if you could afford a really good tutor you had a better chance of passing the exams. Um, one thing that happened there was families would would pull together resources to try to help the the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the official and this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of um there was always a tension of that um so what if you don't succeed some of the leaders of rebellions against um against emperors were failed examination candidates and you know this this you you had this issue and then it became something well the system was out of whack and it needed a new a new leader and and also there was a there was something built Then it was not so much Confucious himself but one of his main um main interpreters early interpreters. dementious had this idea which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the the will of heaven if if he doesn't act like a true emperor if he's not morally upstanding then heaven will remove his uh heaven will remove its its mandate to him and then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if it's if the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if heaven has removed his uh support, then the rebellion will succeed and then a new um a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's a it's an interesting sense that the the universe in this confusion view has a kind of moral dimension to it but it also um it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is. Okay. So it's meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case maybe you can speak to that that in the Chinese education system there seems to be a high value for excellence. Uh hopefully I'm not generalizing too much but from the things I've seen there are certain cultures certain peoples that you know it's just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case with the China of today? there's been a lot of emphasis on um on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at at some subjects and having um you know there isn't the civil service exam but there is um the gaow an exam that really can determine where you get what kind of um institution you get into. And I think, you know, getting back to this idea of of meritocracy, which which is strong in a lot of um in a lot of tradition, it also a kind of um what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness and who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided. This leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in in China have been about this sense of nepotism which really seems to subvert this whole um idea of kind of meritocracy and the the 1989 protest at Tiana even though kind of in the the western press in particular was discussed as a movement for democracy but a lot of the first posters that went up that got students really angry were criticisms of corruption within the communist party and nepotism and this sense that people despite all the talk I mean despite the fact that most people seem to be having to study really hard to pass these exams to get uh good positions in universities that some of them were being handed out via the kind of back door and that led to a kind of outrage not I mean that's true in in in many places but I think it gives a special a special anger against nepotism because of that um the way in which so much emphasis is put on kind of the standard exam way of of getting ahead. I hope it's okay if we jump around through history a bit and find the threads that connect everything. Since you mentioned Tianaan Square, you have studied a lot of student protests throughout Chinese history throughout history in general. What happened in Tianaan Square? So in 1989 this massive movement took place. the story of it largely suppressed within China and largely misunderstood um in other places in part because it happened around the same time that communism was unraveling and ending in the the former Soviet block. So I think it's often conflated with what was going on there. Um, and so I think one of the key things to know about the protests in 1989 was that they were an effort to get the Communist Party in China to do a better job of living up to its own stated ideals and to try to support uh the trend within the party toward a kind of liberalizing um liberalizing and opening up form uh that that had taken shape after Ma death and in a sense the student generation of ' 89 and I was there in ' 86 when there were some sort of warm-up protests there was a kind of frustration with what they felt was um a half-assed version of what they were talking about that the the government was saying the party was saying we believe in reforming and opening up we need to liberalize we need to give people more um more control of of their fate And the students felt that this was being done more effectively in the economic realm than in the political realm. And that there were a lot of sort of partial gestures that that suggested um the party needed to be pressed to really really move in that direction. And it it's it'll seem like a very trivial thing, but I found it fascinating in '86 when I was there in Shanghai in late '86 and students protested and this was the first time that students had been really on the streets in significant numbers since the cultural revolution or at least since ' 76. And the students were inspired by calls for democracy and discussions of democracy by this um this physicist Von Leur who was a kind of um often thought a Chinese sacarov um he was a liberalizing intellectual. But one of the things that students in Shanghai, which where some of the most intense protests of that year took place, were frustrated about was a rock concert of all things that um Jan and Dean, the American surf rock band, which was kind of like the Beach Boys, only not as big. And they were um touring China. And it was the first time in Shanghai that there'd been a rock concert. And the students were really excited about this because this fit in with what they thought the Communist Party was moving toward was letting them be more part of the world. And for them that meant being more in step with pop culture around the world. And at the concert some students got up to dance because that's what they knew you were supposed to do at a rock concert. And the security guards made them sit down. And for the students in Shanghai, this sort of symbolized what was, you know, a faint toward openness that really didn't have follow-through. We're going to give you rock concerts, but not let you dance. And so the the protests went on for a little while in '86. And um posters went up. The officials at at um university said, "No, this is out of hand. We had chaos on the streets during the cultural revolution. We can't go back to that." And nobody wanted to go back to that. So there were posters I saw that said this is new red guardism and and the students didn't want to be associated with that. So it wound down pretty quickly and they they they thought you know we're not like the red guards. We don't want to make chaos. We also are not fervent loyalists of anybody in power. The red guards had been you know passionate about Mao. The the the analogy partly sort of scared them and also it meant that the government was really serious about uh dealing with them. So then in 1989 this protest the protests restart and there are variety of reasons why they can restart they the space for them students are thinking about doing something in 1989 it's a very resonant year 200th anniversary of the French Revolution people are thinking about that but more importantly it's the 70th anniversary of the biggest student movement in Chinese history the May 4th movement of 1919 and the May 4th movement had helped lay the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party. Some member leading founders of it had been student activists then. It was an anti-imperialist movement, but it was also um a movement against bad government. Um and so the students thought, you know, the anniversary of that movement was always marked, commemorated in China and people took the ser the history seriously. people were reminded of what students did in the past. And so there there were sort of there were a lot of reasons why people were itching to do something. And then um a leader Pu Yao Bang who was associated with the more kind of reformist more liberalizing um group within the Chinese Communist Party. He had been stripped of a very high office, demoted after taking partly taking a fairly light stance toward the 8687 protests. And so he was still a member of the government, but he was not as high up in power. He had been very high up. He had been sort of Dang Xiaoping's potential successor. And he dies unexpectedly, and there has to be a funeral for him because he dies still as an official. And the students take advantage of the opening of there having to be um having to be commemorations of his death. And they put up posters that basically say the wrong people are dying. Uh Hu Yaoang was younger than some of the more conservative members. They said so some people are dying too young. Some people are don't seem like they're ever going to die. And they so they begin these sorts of protests. This is in April of '89. And the government tries to sort of get the protest to stop quickly and they use the sort of same technique of they issue an editorial in People's Daily that says this is creating chaos which is a code term for take us back to the cultural revolution. And this time the students say no you know we're just trying to show our patriotism. We believe that there's too much corruption and nepotism. there's not enough support for the more liberalizing um wing within the party and so they keep up the protests and there's a lot of frustration at this point. There also economic frustrations at this point. Um the economy is is improving because of the reforms but it seems that people with good government connections are getting rich um too easily and so it's there's sort of a sense of unfairness. The students are also really frustrated by the kind of macro managing of their private lives on campuses. So the protests at Tanaman Square and in plazas all around the country and other cities as well become this mix of things. It's an anti-corruption movement. It's a call for more democracy movement. It's a call for more freedom of speech movement. But it's also a kind of um has some counterculture elements that are like there rock concerts on the square. the most popular uh rock musician, Sue Jen, comes to the square and is um celebrated when he's there. There's a sense of kind of a variety of things rolled into one. Um and I I I brought up how it sort of gets conflated with the movements to overthrow communism in the Eastern Block. It was actually in many ways, I think, more like something that happened in the Eastern Block 20 years earlier. It was more like Prague Spring and other 1968 protests in the communist block which was about moving toward socialism with a human face. More like trying to get the parties to power to reform rather than necessarily doing away with them. So there was a kind of disjuncture happened at the same time as moves to to end communism. But of course I said there was a possibility when all the protesters were on the square. seemed that for a time that this might be seen as an acceptable kind of movement movement to just have a kind of course correction but then there's also an internal struggle within the communist party leadership and clearly the people who are more political conservatives even if they believe in economic reform are clearly getting the upper hand and there this is not going to be tolerated and the students stay on the square when s signals are given to try to get them out. Students from around the country are pouring into to Beijing to join this movement. They don't want to end the movement when they've just arrived. So, it's actually one thing that keeps it going is new new um participants are coming from the provinces and even if some moderates want to leave the square, people want to stay and then workers start joining in the movement as well and form a independent labor union. And that really the the Chinese Communist Party to a certain extent they might put up with student protesters, but they know from past experience that sometimes student protests lead to to members of other social classes joining them because they look up to students as sort of potential intellectual leaders of the country and admiration for scholars is part of this that turns people turn out when students protest. something very different from the American case where there's a kind of often suspicion of of student activists being necessarily on the same side as as everybody else. But in China, there had been from the history of the 20th century a sense of students as potentially a vanguard. So once there are um labor activists joining the movement then troops are called in and there's a massacre near Tanaman Square um on middle of the night of June 3rd and early uh June 4th and the the army just moves in and begins behaving very much like an army of occupation which is something the people's liberation of army is is supposed to be the one that saves China from foreign aggression and they're acting like an invading force. So this is where famously the tanks roll in. The tanks roll in. And I think also you have that famous image of the man standing in front of the tank. That's a banned image within China. And I really think the reason why it's so considered so toxic by the regime is because it just shows the People's Liberation Army looking like an invading force, not like a stabilizing force. Can we talk about that? who's now called the tank man. The man that stood in front of the row of tanks. This was on June 5th in Tianaan Square. What do we know about him? What do you think about him? The symbolism. It's a it's an amazing symbol. Um, you know, he's on this boulevard near the square with this long line of tanks and it's unquestionably this act of incredible bravery. And there's some interesting things about it, some that are forgotten. One is that in the end he climbs up on the tank. Mhm. And the tank swerves, you know, it doesn't run him over. And the Chinese Communist Party initially showed video of this and said, "Look, the Western press is talking about how vicious we were, but look at the restraint. Look at this. He wasn't mowed down." And they tried this whole story with Tanaman initially of saying, "Look, the students were out of control. This everybody should remember what happened during the cultural revolution." And the army showed restraint and there were a small number of soldiers who were actually burned alive in their in their tanks during once the massacre began. People got outraged and they attacked the soldiers. But by selective use of of footage, the communist party could say, "Look, actually look at this. The the heroes, the martyrs were these soldiers." And they try for the first months after it to to try to get this narrative to stick. They talk about Tanaman a lot. They talk about these things. They show images of the Tankman. The problem with it is that lots and lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that in fact there had first been the firing on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons and then and there had been many many people some students but a lot of ordinary Beijing Beijing residents and workers who were just mowed down. So lots of people knew somebody who had been killed. So that story just didn't work. And then I think the the the claim had to be made to try to try to suppress discussion of the event and particularly to dis to repress that visual imagery that was that image of the man in front of a line of tanks. Whatever the tanks did to him or not, the main takeaway from it would be this idea that there were lines of tanks in a city. that was um that the the image was of the government as having lost the mandate to rule and they really didn't want to have that image um out there in the world. Yeah, we're watching the video now. He's got what like grocery bags in his hands. It's such a symbolic I've had enough like that kind of statement. Yeah. And it's probably not a student, you know, it's often described as a student, but he probably was um a worker and it is it is a powerful powerful image of bravery. And you know, I brought up the 1968 parallel for Eastern and Central Europe. There was actually a very powerful photograph of a man bearing his chest in front of a tank in Bratislava during um what we think of as Prague Spring. That was a famous image of bravery against tanks. And in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, then still Czechoslovakia, the tanks that rolled in were Soviet tanks sent down there. And so, not that people would know, but that was an image, you know, what was so powerful in that was saying, "We're not going to put up with this invasion." Again, I think you have the people's liberation of army army looking like an invading force and that's what um that's what the Chinese Communist Party in a sense can't can't deal with now even though sometimes they could tell a story about 1989 and they do tell a version of this and some people believe this I think is that in 1989 China went one route of not um not having the communist party dramatic ally change or relinquish control and the Soviet Union and the former Soviet states went another and you could say well look and after 1989 the Chinese economy bmed life got better for people in China life got really terrible for a lot of people in the former Soviet blocks maybe we actually maybe this was the right way to go and you can make that kind of argument but if you show the tanks and the man in front of the tanks you you you just have a different kind of image of heroism It's one of my favorite photographs or snapshots ever taken, videos ever taken. So, I apologize if we linger on it. Sometimes you don't understand the symbolic power of an image until afterwards. And perhaps that's what the Chinese government didn't quite understand. They lost the information war, the meme war. So, I I have to ask, what do you think was going through that man's head? Was it a heroic statement? Was it a purely primal guttural like I've had enough? It's so interesting to just speculate and we just don't know because you know he was never able to be interviewed afterwards. But I think your emphasis on patriotism is really important because one of the students main demands was then I think it might have been the thing that would have gotten them to leave the square would have been to say you we want this to be acknowledged as a patriotic that our goals are patriotic. We're not here to to take China back into the cultural revolution. We're here we're here to express our love for the country if it goes in in the right way. So will you admit that? And you you mentioned about the power of the image and I do think the Chinese Communist Party learned something to have taken to heart the power of the image after that because we saw this in um but when there were protests in Hong Kong, the government on the mainland really wanted to tell a story there of you know crowds out of control. And initially there were in 2014 and again in initially in 2019 there were very orderly crowds and it it it had trouble with that story. So they tried very hard to ban images of peaceful protests until there were some incidents as there almost always are of uh violence by crowds and then they would show those images over and over again. They also worked very hard when Hong Kong protests began in the 2010s to try very hard to avoid any use of soldiers to repress them. It was all the police and they tried very hard and managed to success because the the western press was often saying will this be another tian men? Will there be a massacre or will there be soldiers on the streets? The movements in Hong Kong were suppressed without the use of um of shooting to kill on the streets. They were shooting to to wound. Um there was bean bags shot. There were rubber bullets. There was enormous amounts of tear gas. There was even tear gas left let fly inside subway stations in 2019. And all these things are really brutalizing, but they don't make the kind of images that sear in the mind the way something like the Tanaman tankman image or the image of a Vietnamese woman being burned by Napal young woman that became another of the iconic images during Vietnam War. Those images really can um have an extraordinary power and I think the Chinese Communist Party is now aware of that. There are no really gripping. There are very few photographs allowed of the Shinjang um extralegal detention camps. There very little very little photo the there is an awareness of how much uh power a photograph of a certain type can have. So nobody knows what happened to the tank man? No. What do you think happened to the tank man? I assume he was killed. Killed? I assume he was just disappeared. It's interesting because very often figures are made an example of in one way or another. I mean Leo Shao wasn't uh was imprisoned and not allowed to you know get enough medical care so you can talk about him having you know died earlier than he should have. But there there's been relatively few of like for political crimes recently sentencing to death and things like that. It's much more just remove them, imprison them. But the tank man, there was never a trial. There was never even a trial that was a was one that you knew what the result would be, which there was for Leo Shao and others. Not even a hidden trial, but simply simply disappeared. And there's been somebody who's like another figure like this who's disappeared. Um a couple of years ago in Beijing there was a lone man who put up a banner on a bridge uh Satong Bridge in Beijing and it was extraordinary. It was it had denunciations of the direction Xiinping was taking the country. It was denunciation of of co policies but also of dictatorial rule and the banner somehow he managed to have it up and get it long enough to be filmed and to draw attention and the film to circulate. Again, another image of the power of images and he's disappeared and there hasn't been a show trial or even a secret trial. And again, you know, we don't know if he's still alive, but these are cases where I think the Chinese Communist Party really doesn't want a competing story out there. They don't want somebody to be able to answer what he was thinking. How much censorship is there in modern day China by the Chinese government? So, you know, there's a lot of censorship. My favorite book about one of my favorite books about Chinese censorship, Margaret Roberts, where she talks about there are three different ways that the government can control the stories. And she says there's fear, which is this kind of direct censorship thing of like banning things. But there's also friction, which she says she has three Fs, fear, friction, and flooding. And she says they're all important. And I think this is true not just of China but in other settings too. So what friction means is you just make it harder for people to get answers or get information that you don't want them to get even though you know that some people will get it. You just make it that the easiest way the the first answer you'll get through a search. Mhm. So, a lot of, you know, techsavvy or globally minded um tapped in Chinese will use people will use a VPN to jump over the firewall, but it's work. The internet moves slower. You have to keep updating your VPN. So, you just create friction so that okay, some people will find this out and then flooding. you just fill the airwaves and the media with versions of the stories that you want the people to believe. So all those kind of exist and in operation and I think the the fear is the easiest side to say of what's blocked. So I'm always interested in things that it's things that you would expect to be censored that aren't censored. Um you can read all sorts of things in China about totalitarian. You can read Hannah Rant's uh book on totalitarianism, which would be the kind of thing you just, you know, you're not supposed to be able to read that in a somewhat totalitarian uh state or a dictatorial state if anything, but it's not specifically about China. And so censorship is most most restrictive when it's things that are actually about China. Things about leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, there's intense kind of censorship of that. um and certain events in that way, but a sort of like something through allegory, something through um imagining a place that looks a lot like a communist party ruled state so that people are going to read it. There were things that were banned throughout up until like the very last period of Gorbachev's rule. Bathing's banned in the Soviet Union that are available in Chinese bookstores. You can buy 1984 in a Chinese bookstore. you've been able to since 1985. um you can buy again it's not about China and actually for some people within um China in the mid1 1980s where they focused on the part of 1984 that's like the two minutes of hate these rituals of denunciation of people for some people in China it seemed like it was about their past not about their present and then by the '9s 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity a place where people just aren't having fun and people said like you could read Some people would read 1984 and say, "Look, this is this is the world we're living in. It's a big brother state." But others said, "Well, that has some similarities to us, but you know, he wasn't talking about a country like ours. Look, we've got supermarkets, we got McDonald's. I mean, this is not, you know, we got fast trains, we got things are we're living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did. And this isn't like that bleak world he was imagining." Yeah. You've actually spoken about and described China as more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot. I've recently reread over the past couple years. We read Brave New World a couple of times and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st century might be more defined to the degree it is dystopian any of the nations are by Brave New World and by 1984. There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more more one than the other and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other. I think um and if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure and one thing that people forget sometimes or don't know is that Aldis Suxy who wrote Brave New World taught Eric Blair who became George Orwell when he was a student at Eden and they were sort of rivals and in fact in 1949 um Orwell sent his former teacher a copy of 1984 and said, you know, look, I've written this basically, it's kind of almost a little edible, like I've written this book that displaces yours. He didn't say that. He just said, I wanted you to have this. But he had criticized Brave New World and reviews as like not having having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before realizing the kind of totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China. Not that he mentions China, and he just said, you know, it's a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population. Basically saying more like what was in my book than in yours. I have to say I think Huxley might be really on to something there. truly a visionary. Although to give points to Orwell, I do think as far as just a philosophical work of fiction, 1984 is a better book because uh Brave New World does not quite construct the philosophical message thoroughly because 1984 contains many very clearly, very poetically defined elements of a totalitarian regime. Oh, and the dissection of language is just so amazing. No, I think you've got a point there, and I went back and reread Brave New World, and it's it's fascinating, but it it's very it's very messy. Yeah. I think there's a clarity to to Orwell's 1984. There's a clarity to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Similarly, the the the construction of the elements, and she was a big fan of both um 1984 and Brave New World. So it there there's a way they they go forward. But you know there was a kind of it's not exactly a sequel but or Huxley did write something called Brave New World Revisited. Yes, he did. In the 50s and he kind of said actually it seems and he mentions China there. He says that in Ma's China they're kind of combining the two things of this. And I I'm really fascinated by that because they published in China um on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It's called the dystopian trilogy and it's a box set where you have Ziaten's Wii who in that inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. Uh that's one book and then there's Animal Farm in 1984 is a second book and then the third volume is Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited and it was published in complex characters. You can buy You could buy it in Hong Kong, but I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland. And it's all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpled out. And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that's that that in that really show you how to connect the dots that gets that's taken out. And I do think the brave new world side of things I I think with China I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward brave new world except Tibet and Shinjang being more the crude boot on the face 1984 style of control. But then during the COVID lockdowns when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that it seemed much more the brave new world kind of style had their Orwellian moment. So you have it now I think it's you know there are more 1984 more Brave New World parts of the country and there also more Brave New World more 1984 moments. I see why it could give a sense after you've thoroughly internalized the fear that you have complete freedom of speech. Just don't mention the government. So you could talk about totalitarianism, you could talk about the darkest aspects of human nature, just don't you can even talk about the government in a sort of metaphorical like poetic um way that's not directly linkable, but the moment you mention the government, it's like a dumb keyword search. It's yeah it's and and I think it's like one of these really good examples of how you know China's distinctive but it's it's it's not unique. You have other settings where you have these like no-go zones that you learn. And one example is in Singapore you know there was this so National University of Singapore has a world-class history department but no Singapore historian in it. nobody who focuses on the history of Singapore because you know it's incredibly wide ranging what you can what you can do analyze but when you're actually talking about the family that's been most powerful in Singapore then it gets to be touchy in um Thailand which I've been working on recently you have this bl majeste um laws that make it very very dangerous to say certain kinds of things about the king. And so you in all of these settings you have to figure out ways to to work around it. And there's a um um there's a way in which you can say at the international the foreign correspondence clubs in different parts of Asia, you can have an event that's about the country one over that you can say basically anything you want, but if when it gets to the things in the place where you are, um you're you're it's touchy. I should give credit for that insight. Uh Shabbani Matani, who's written um uh co-wrote a very good book on Hong Kong among the braves, um she was talking about that that in Singapore at the foreign correspondence club, you could have an event on Hong Kong that could say all kinds of things that you couldn't say at the Hong Kong foreign correspondence club. But at the same time when I saw her in Singapore, she said there was a Singapore refugee, a political refugee in Hong Kong who was giving a talk at the Hong Kong foreign correspondence club saying kinds of things that he couldn't say in Singapore. And in Thailand, I gave a talk at the foreign correspondence club. And then I went to hear a talk there because I was just curious about like what the culture in this foreign correspondence club. And there was somebody talking about human rights abuses in different parts of Southeast Asia, saying things very directly and then said, "And there are things going on in Thailand that we're not going to talk about." And there was this kind of yes, self-censorship can be a very powerful thing. One of the things I learned about all of this which is interesting I want to learn more is about the human psychology. The ability of the individual mind to compartmentalize things. It does seem like you could not live in a state of fear as long as you don't mention a particular topic. My intuition would be about the human mind. If there's anything you're afraid of talking about that fear will permeate through everything else. you would not be able to do great science, great exploration, great technology. And that that idea I think underpins the whole idea of freedom of speech why you don't want in the United States, you don't want to censor any even dangerous speech because that will permeate everything else. You won't be able to have great scientists. You won't be able to have great journalists. You won't be able to have I don't know. And I mean I'm obviously biased towards America and I think you do need to have that fullon freedom of speech, but this is an interesting case study. Um, and that's actually something that you speak about that Mao if he were alive today and visited China would be quite surprised. Uh, can you give the uh Ning bookstore as an example? Can you just speak to this? If Ma visited China, let's let's go with that thought experiment. What would he recognize? What would he be surprised by? So I I wrote about I wrote about imagining a revivified Mao, you know, going to wandering this really cool Nanjing bookstore in the early 2000s and just being amazed at what you could read there and you know what what books were for sale and I I thought about how he he'd be like what what's going on, you know, is the Communist Party not in control? I mean, I've he talked about how art and politics needed to in some ways go together and you've got all these kind of things. He'd also be he also would have been shocked by all these there were all these books about like how to start your own cafe and bar and sort of celebrating entrepreneurship, how to get into Harvard. It's like, you know, all of these things just wouldn't compute from his time. Although I said it would actually maybe make him nostalgia for the time of his youth in the 1910s. He was a participant in the May Fourth Movement, which was a time of reading all over the world looking for the best ideas circulating. So he might say, "Well, the teenage me would have really, really loved this." So some of the coolest bookstores, the things that I just was amazed could exist in the early 2000s. So, you can still read, you can still buy copies in 1984 and you can still get um some of these other things, but that was a time when more and more of those things were being translated fresh. I'm not sure you get permission to translate some of those things. Now, there's more of a sense of caution. And when some of those bookstores would also then hold events that would talk about the kinds of ideas that then take them to the next level and talk about the applicability uh to the situation in China. Some of those bookstores have have closed or have had to become kind of really shadows of what they were. And one of the best ones, not the one I wrote about in Nanjing, but a similar one, Shanghai one, which was literally an underground bookstore. It was in a metro station and it had really freewheeling discussions of liberal ideas in the early 2000s and early 2010s, but then it just got less and less space to operate under um under Xiinping when things started narrowing and it then had to close in Shanghai and it's just been reopened in um DC as JF Books and it's becoming this really interesting cultural hub and I'm I'm really delighted It's where I'm going to hold the launch for my next book um when it comes out in June. This book on the Milk Tea Alliance um about struggles for change across East and Southeast Asia, including in places that are worried about the kind of rising influence of Beijing. And it seems just perfect to be um to be holding it in the kind of place that can't exist in Shanghai. So places like that, they they stopped being able to exist on the mainland. Then they could still exist in Hong Kong, but now in Hong Kong, one of the coolest bookstores has had to close up. It just didn't feel like it could continue operating and tightening control there. And it's reopened in upstate New York. So you have this phenomenon of bookstores. There's also a few bookstores called the Nowhere bookstores that opened in Chiang Mai and Taipei and the Hague. And I heard one is maybe it's going to open in or is open in Japan too. Uh my sometime collaborator Amy Hawkins uh who covers China for the Guardian wrote a great piece late last year about this overseas bookstore phenomenon sort of carrying on the conversations that people thought they might be able to have in China and then couldn't and imagine someday being able to hold in China but maybe can't. So, first of all, boy, do I love America. Uh, and and second of all, it makes me really sad because there's a very large number of incredible people in China, incredible minds, and maybe I'm romantic about this, but books uh is a catalyst for brilliant minds to flourish. and without that. So I guess maybe this is a good time to mention something that I I do think about and sometimes people would will think because of censorship and that there's an idea of sort of brainwashing within China population with control and I periodically will get students from the mainland and I have a lot of students from the mainland in my classes. I teach Chinese history and I feel like okay now I'm contradicting the version of the past that they've that's been drumbe into them but I'll still get students who are incredible freeth thinkers who have come through that system and it just it just doesn't hold or there are limits to it and this is kind of I mean some of them are people who just got curious by something and it is a poorest system even you know it's it's it's more porous than a North Korea things like that. So there are even if there's that like fear, friction and flooding which you know um Roberts talks about that ends up keeping lots of people on the same page as the government. There's still people who take the time to go over the firewall or get intrigued or they see they see an image sent by a friend of theirs on social media, you know, we'll share them uh something on um you know on on WeChat that it doesn't it doesn't get picked up by the sensors but they look at it carefully and they say oh well wait a minute that under that contradicts what the official line is so there is there's still ways in which that you know creativity and freedom of thinking persists. I mean that's that's really beautiful to hear. I mean fundamentally the the human spirit is curious and wants to understand and in some especially the young people as we mentioned are suspicious of authority in the best kind of way and so they're always asking kinds of questions but we always have the child the young person inside us always asking like uh that maybe I'm being lied to in all these kinds of ways but still it's sad because it there is um if you're not deliberately doing that or if there's not a spark of possibility that comes before you as just a regular citizen of China. You might never really ask maybe a whole there's a whole different perspective on history on world history. To be fair, I think United States is is often guilty of this very United States ccentric view of history. I mean similar with Europe. Europe has a very Europe sense of history. I often enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds from different parts of the world, talking to them about World War II because it's like it's clear that the emphasis you've read certain chapters of the story a lot of times and not the other chapters of the story, the Western Front in Europe and the Eastern Front in Europe. And then Japan and China's role in World War II and the history around that before and after World War II of China is not often talked about in the United States. And I'm sure if I can venture a guess that the opposite is true in China. I certainly know the opposite was true in the Soviet Union and even in Europe that directly experienced France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, they all have very different ways of speaking and thinking and reading about World War II. And the same goes um across all of history and all of culture. So yes, it's always good to sort of question the mainstream narrative in your country and looking outside. is just harder to do in China based on technological based on all the reasons you've mentioned. And if I can, I just want to give a shout out. Thank you. I'll I'll look at her work, Margaret Roberts. The the fear, the friction, and the flooding her ideas. I can already tell there's a lot of brilliance here. Uh fear, this is the most traditional form involving overt threats and punishments for accessing and sharing s sensitive information. However, Roberts finds that fear-based censorship is used selectively, mainly targeting high-profile individuals such as journalists or activists. For the average citizen, the risk of punishment is relatively low, and fear alone is not the main deterrent. She goes on to describe the the friction and the flooding. The friction is attacks on information access and flooding is less visible in fear or friction but is a powerful tool for shaping the information environment. Flooding one scares me more and more. Flooding one is the brave new world. Yeah, it is. And I think it's a whole kind of the world of short attention spans and social media and how this all works. And um Chinese Communist Party leaders were I I brought up Singapore and Dang Xiaoing and some of the other leaders were like looking at that and they're looking at you know there are all kinds of things that it both going to Singapore um can sometimes make you feel like you're you're in this futuristic setting in terms of a lot of things that I that eventually came uh to other parts of the world would would be tried out there and and I think the seductiveness is that some of these things are are really they both add to convenience at the same time they strip away. They're collecting information about you which can be also something that can make your life easier at the same times it's stripping you away of I mean we talk about the siling of information and targeting of ads and targeting of news and um so two things come to mind to to mention one is um Christina Larson very bright journalist uh friend of mine who's now working on other things but was working in China and she wrote wrote about this in MIT Technology Review. She said, "You need to think about China as having the best as well as the worst internet experience in the world." And you know, you think about it with you think of the worst is easy. You know, the great firewall, you try to search for what happened. You search for the tank man, you won't get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him. Search for things about Shinjang and it makes seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than massive. um extraleal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by um by by things you have no control over. But she said like on other ways when it comes to like consumer playing to your your pleasures and things it was it was really advanced. A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember after I around the time that I had read that I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about like going out to eat. Like I said, oh, we've got such and such. And I said, "Oh, that's like Yelp." He said, "Well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We've got one that can tell you who's which which part of the restaurant you want to sit in because there's a waiter that's in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this or, you know, what the best dish there is in the last week. forget about these sort of slow and you had a lot of things you know that that were like okay you smart city and controlled you can learn things about ease of movement and Singapore had some of these things tested too you had way before you move you go into an underground um parking lot now in the US and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on um on a on a floor that was something that was years before in Singapore for and you don't use you used money less often there because you had a kind of transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things and it it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best and worst internet I always like is William Gibson who wrote one of the other important dystopian novels of the present neurommancer he wrote a rare non for him non-fiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And you know there are times when I shouldn't laugh there but it is it's a powerful he's not welcomed in Singapore let's just say but he he talked about how when he wanted to try to he went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you sort of got a sense of what the future might hold. So the the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we're seeing we see in Shinjang in places and there again it may seem like I'm just obsessed with um science fiction and there there it really is minority report. It's this kind of like you do certain kinds of behaviors and we're seeing this other places too. um you know we're seeing versions of it in the US as well where it's like oh we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X and so in Shinjang they were when they were starting to round people up there's this great book by a weager poet he talks about how people were just starting to disappear off the streets and they were being accused of being uh radicalized and being um potential terrorists and the cues could be something like somebody giving up smoking or not drinking alcohol because that was seen as something that sometimes went along becoming with becoming more um more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something a particular version of it. So he talked about how a group of the poets when they would get writers would they get together they would whether or not any of them drank they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table because it was simply a way of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side of um Shinjang is is this example in Tibet also with incredible um tight control and there's more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well. Um, but I think the question of whether we give up too much and who can abuse what we do give up is something that is being asked in the United States now about big tech companies as well as it's asked about governments, but it's also act asked about about big tech and what you have as a trade-off. And I hadn't thought about it till this conversation, which I can tell is why people find it uh stimulating to have these extended conversations because you have set lines, but then you kind of the conversation goes and you think in a different way. So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power and they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet block was dis was falling apart. They knew that one reason why people and this is like the simple way of one way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that but also people knew that people East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and having getting better stuff. And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it and it was true. And I think this is a human as human as the desire for more freedom. So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don't have things like tanment again? Well, what if we tried to make a deal with people? We'll give them more choices in their daily life. We'll give them better stuff. We'll give them more choices at the store. We'll give them more choices about what to read to cuz you know, we'll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals, consumer goods they want or to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading. So, we'll give them more choices. we won't open the floodgates completely, but we'll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new kind of new social compact. Allow us to keep ruling and we'll make sure that you're living better than the last generation in terms of choices and in terms of um material goods. Now, one of the things that's happening now is the Chinese Communist Party, the economy isn't booming the way it was before. The sort of sense of clearly we're living better materially than our the generation before. It's it's it's not as easy an argument to make when you have slower growth rates and things like that. But the Communist Party makes different kinds of arguments now about the rest of the world is in chaos and we're more stable. But but the thing that I I hadn't that I now I'm going to think about differently is the argument was we'll give you more choices and you'll have more sort of more of a private life more of this. But now in the period we are globally now there's a new kind of suspicion about the degree of any kind of private choices. I mean there was an idea that the post tiana men generation was promised to have a little bit more space away from the prying eyes of the state and now globally we worry about the prying eyes of whether it's the state or whether it's tech companies. It's it's a different moment. What does it mean to say you have more choices? It's almost like you have two knobs. One is 1984 and one is Brave New World. At first they turned up the Brave New World, more choices, and now they're uh turning up the 1984, keeping the choices, but turning up the 1984 with more surveillance. So the choices you make have to be more public. Do you have a that the thing we've been talking about, the increase in censorship, does that predate Xi Jinping? Is Xiinping a part of that increase in censorship? Like what is that dynamic? What role does Xi Jinping play in uh what China has gone through over the past uh let's say a decade and a half? That's a really great question. I was I was actually just writing a review of two books. One is called the Xiinping effect which was just a bunch of scholars an academic volume sort of looking at take this topic and that topic how much is Xiinping as a person really affected it and it they come up with all kinds of answers but there's a book I I really like um Emily Fang of NPR has a new book out called um let only red flowers bloom and what she talks about the changes in China as she was covering it from the mid2010s on was and I think this really is Xiinping's one of his impromachers on the country is there's a narrowing of spaces available for variations of ways of being Chinese within the country and this goes against the grain of a pattern in the sort of post Tiana men period of allowing more space for sort of civil society but also allowing sort of way Muslims felt that they didn't have to choose between being you know their Muslim identity and their Chinese identity that there's more and more of a kind of um we see this in Xiinping being becoming impatient with Hong Kong where there was a way of which okay this is a city that's part of the PRC but it really operates very differently he seems to be uncomfortable with difference I guess is and he's not alone in strongman this way of sort of wanting to impose a kind of singular vision of what Chinese identity means, what loyalty to the status quo means. And so there's been a kind of tightening of controls over all the borders and even things one thing she reported on was Mongolia in Mong Inner Mongolia. it it's been seen as an unproatic kind of frontier area and who cares if there was some revival of Mongolian language but under shei there's been a there's been a less patience with with those kinds of difference he's been uh it's been a there's been more of a resurgence of patriarchy all kinds of things have happened under him but how much is it just him or how much is it also a kind of mood or group within the party. Some of these trends I think began before he took power in late 2012. I think really my own feeling going to China fairly often from the mid 1990s till about 2018 was that until 2008 the year of the Olympics year each trip it would feel like oh there's just more space there's more breathing room for uh you know it's not becoming a liberal democracy but I would notice things that felt like I'm surprised that that that happens that there just felt people felt less worried about what they were saying and what they were doing. Um that kind of trend line up until about 2008. But from the Olympics um and then the financial crisis after that the Chinese Communist Party felt I guess more it's still insecure but it felt cockier in some ways. and you had like okay maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that's been stronger under Xiinping's time in power and he was already the designated successor by 2008. He was in charge of um he was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment possibly of more opening up because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right-wing um dictatorship and move toward democracy and some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way and it went quite the opposite. You mentioned that you we don't know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping or the party apparatus and that question going back to Confucious of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one party state uh work? What can we say? What do we know about the structure of this communist party apparatus? Uh how much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system? So James Palmer who worked in Beijing as a journalist and now is an editor foreign policy wrote an important piece few years ago about just we should really be straight about what a black box the Chinese elite elite politics are and really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense of these kind of ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy and things like that. And they were also basic partly based on personalities and personal ties. But we did have a sense you could sort of map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xiinping. It's very hard to know other than the sort of small group around him how it works. We don't have a major defector who says yeah this is how this is how Xiinping we we have Xiinping's self-presentation and a lot of things that are then um said about him. There were some false expectations about him that some people thought oh he's going to be a reformer because his father was a liberalizing figure and you know that doesn't work that way. He does seem to care about orderliness. he does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China's deep past. Um we know he's a strong nationalist and a kind of cultural nationalist as well as um political nationalist, but beyond that we don't have that much of a sense of what makes him what makes him tick. we get little hints. Um, you know, there was a secret speech where he talked about that leaked out that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed because people didn't the leadership didn't pay enough attention to ideology. And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So he I imagine if he and he and Putin ever have a kind of heart-to-heart conversation, they'd one thing they'd find to agree on is this sort of distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was that was the wrong way to do things. Not manly enough. Yeah. And two not strong enough about you know really keeping control. And you know for Putin it would be that it led to the Soviet Union to the loss of an empire. But for Xiinping, it's there is a bit of being haunted by what happened to the Soviet Union. And we're not I'm not going to be the leader who sees the diminishment of this land mass that was in a sense rebuilt over time for Mao and then Den Xiaoing. You know, you have the the story a very powerful story about the Chinese past that the Chinese Communist Party makes a lot out of. But that Shanghai the nationalist party who was Ma's great rival also made a lot out of and it has a partial basis in fact was that from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century China which had been this strong force in the world got bullied and nibbled away at by foreign powers and it's important to realize there are elements of that story that are very true and the answer they had is that under my watch that's not going to happen and the reason why my party deserves to rule is because it can reassert China's place in the world. And both the nationalist party and the communist party predicated themselves on this kind of nationalistic story of being in a position to prevent that from happening again. This is a a bit of a tricky question, but is it safe for journalists, for folks who write excellent books about the topic to uh travel to China? I think there are all kinds of different things about safety or not. I think until recently at least the people who were most vulnerable were um people of Chinese descent uh people originally from China who had gone abroad and coming back or even people who were um you know Chinese Americans who went there there was a higher sort of expectation that they should be on board. So you had early cases. My friend Melissa Chan was an early person kicked out when she was working for Alazer and reporting on Shinjiang. So that's one kind of person who was vulnerable because of this expectation that they should be somehow more loyal. Another kind of person who was vulnerable or this case more likely to be blocked from China. They there's a the communist party is particularly concerned about people from outside of China who are amplifying the voices of people within China or exiles from China who the government would like to to silence. So the Dalai Lama you had scholars who worked on Tibet and had connections to Dalai Lama were early people to have trouble going to the PRC. Then scholars who worked on Shinjang and were connected to weaguers. But there also were people who were sort of personally connected to dissident or exiles who would amplify their voices would translate their work would would promote them that then it wasn't about necessarily danger if you got in China but you were more likely to be denied a visa if you were the kind of person who was doing that. So, I wrote critical op-eds about the Chinese Communist Party. I published them in some high-profile places. I've written a lot about Tiana, wrote about human rights issues, all that. And I kept getting visas to go to China. I testified to a congressional executive joint committee on China, about the Tiana protests on the 25th anniversary of it. And some people said, "Oh, that's the kind of thing that would lead to you not getting a visa." I got a visa right after that. Uh now I think it might be different. Now some of these expectations have been changed. There have been people who've been very surprisingly gotten in trouble. These two Canadians who were clearly it was a kind of tit fortat partly because of tech maven's relative being held in Canada. So it was kind of there. It was also not picking a fight with Americans. But there were certain kinds of things that you could map out what was the riskiest thing to do. And so I went in the 2010s having written you know forcefully about Tanamean and I didn't feel dangerous. I mean I felt there was an awareness in some cases of what if I was giving a public talk there was awareness of what it was. There was sometimes um you didn't want to get your host who had brought you to a university in trouble by saying something that would get them in trouble. I think it was often that the you were more vulnerable if you were within China or you were connected China in different ways. For me, it's been confusing these last few years. I wrote one piece about this about I'm I'm not going to any part of the PRC for the time being, but I always thought that Hong Kong was a place that I'd be free to go even if the things got difficult. I didn't get a visa for the mainland. You didn't need a visa for Hong Kong. But with Hong Kong, with the mainland, I had kept a kind of distance from the dissident that I was writing about. With Hong Kong, I felt that these rules kind of didn't apply and I was more connected to them, um, more friends with some of them. And then with this crackdown that's come on Hong Kong and they're exiles from Hong Kong who have bounties on their heads. And so now I feel that, you know, it's not necessarily that anything would happen to me if I went to Hong Kong, but I feel I would be very closely watched. And so I wouldn't want to meet with some of my my friends there who aren't this highprofile. So I don't want to go to a place where I would feel that I was toxic in some way, right? One, you're walking on eggshells, and two, you can get others in trouble. That kind of dynamic is complicated. So it's fascinating that Hong Kong is now part of that calculus. So, I've gotten a chance to speak to a bunch of world leaders. Do you think it's possible that I would be able to do an interview with Xi Jinping? If you do, I would I would be very pleased because I could watch that interview and get some insights about um she which have been very hard to get. I mean, it's been they're really difficult. There have been very few um very few discussion. He doesn't meet with he doesn't give press conferences. There's variety of things and this is this is different from some of his predecessors. Um Jang Zamin famously was interviewed by Barbara Walters and asked about Tanaman and he tried to make out that it wasn't a big deal. You know there the variety of things but he had relatively spontaneous conversations. I was going to say I he's the only Chinese leader I've met but I met him before he was a major major leader. he was the um party secretary or mayor of Shanghai. And it matters because the party secretary is the more important role. But anyway, he just met with a group of um foreign scholars who were going over to Shanghai in ' 88 for a conference on Shanghai history. And just to show you the limits of anybody who thinks they can predict what's going on in Chinese politics or I mean predictability is just very hard in general in the world. But I think the consensus among us and these were some of the most knowledgeable foreign scholars on China was this was somebody who really had probably topped out because he was meeting with us. You know, he must not be heading anywhere up and then after Taname he becomes uh the top leader in China. But he he had a kind of you could pick things out from being in a room. He he liked to kind of show off his kind of cosmopolitanism. Xiinping talks, gives these speeches about all the foreign authors he likes and has read, but it's all very kind of scripted, at least in his his own head, too. It's very carefully done to present a certain image of himself. And we really don't get many senses of what he's like in unguarded moments or has them. And um sometimes we get the illusion of them. like there was an image of him and um Obama in their shirt sleeves at uh the Sunnylands meetings and and the photo would show them walking and talking and but there's no translator in the image and so like how are they talking what are the what's what language are they using how is this or is it just a kind of I mean there are of course there are exchanges with top leaders and you know Trump will say they're friends or these kinds of things or there's a language Xiinping can talk about somebody or some country being friend but we don't have a sense of these kinds of the the what makes him tick as a person. So, so maybe you should ask him about Ernest Hemingway and see if he really gets excited about him because the in the kind of generic things he talks about all these you can feel him sort of ticking things off about oh yes I'm glad to be in England the country of Shakespeare and this and he goes off these set things but Hemingway there's some sense that you know he had some special feeling which fits in with some of the macho side that would be interesting he doesn't meion Orwell is one of his favorite British uh authors as much. He says he likes Victor Hugo a lot and that became a little tricky because Do you hear the people singing from lay miserable became one of the really um one of the protest songs in Hong Kong and how do you get in this position where you you know you and actually Victor Hugo is…

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