Odd Lots - Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

The Chinese Communist Party is probably one of the most difficult entities in the world to grasp due to its opacity of its inner workings. A new book from Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab and an associate professor at American University, sheds light on the entity by examining the life of Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping. The elder Xi was one of the earliest and important players in the revolution, and his life trajectory -- having spent 16 years out of power during the Cultural Revolution -- offers a lens into how the party operates. On this episode, we discuss Xi Zhongxun's life, the constant pressure to stay on the correct line, and what his struggles might tell us about how his son rules China today. Read more:China Draws Red Lines on US Chip Tracking With Nvidia MeetingThe AI Showdown: How the US and China Stack Up Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But on Vanguard, at Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a big line. It's a very big. It's a few. commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com

slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing Corporation distributor. Thinking about buying the right home, but not sure when. What if you had the right design, the right lot and finishes at the right price? Not someday, but right now. Register at Democrat Homes.com and get everything you want right now. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, sometimes I read 20th century, Chinese history, and, uh, sometimes. Just a little.

No, there's, here's something I don't understand. Like, you know, I read about the Mao era, the Deng Xiaoping era. And all the various cadres, they're all like, oh, we're like guilty of, like, committed, like, a left deviationism or right deviationism or all this stuff. And they're all really worried about whether they're going to get expelled or something like that. And I never, like, know what any of these words mean. Like, I actually feel like I have no. intuitive understanding of how like elite level Chinese Communist Party politics works. And I think I probably should given this sort of like growing stakes and the growing awareness with which we as

Americans all have to be aware about how China works. Wait, if you're reading lots of China history books, you must know what self-criticism is, right? I know what self-criticism. Okay. But I don't know why. They're like, oh, you engaged in revisionism or you engaged in ultra-leftism or you engage in ultra-rightism. And I don't know what any of these terms mean. Right. Well, my experience of China is that sometimes the rules are a little sketchy on purpose, right? So that there isn't a clear definition so that you can kind of go after whoever you want. You know what I do to learn about Chinese history?

Tell me. Chinese historical dramas. I kind of love them. Do you mean like plays or books? No, no, I mean TV shows. Oh, TV shows. Probably the equivalent of soap operas in the States. Do you have a favorite?

Oh, I have one I'm watching right now. I'll tell you afterwards. It's so good. But the reason I bring it up is because relatively recently there was a historical drama that was all about Shishanping's father. Oh, I saw some screenshots from that. I think someone like uploaded it all to you. Have you watched it? I haven't. I've been looking for it and I haven't been able to find it. So if you find it on YouTube, let me know. But the reason I bring it up is because we're going to be speaking about his life today to the author of one of his. his biography is the first English-speaking biography. And the series itself got panned when it came out. It was really funny. And there are some quotes that said, oh, I think Chinese youth today would rather watch Stranger Things than learn about the history of the CCP. So we're going to try to make CCP history as interesting as Stranger Things on this podcast. And we're also, I guess, going to make the case maybe to American listeners and maybe some Chinese youth if they're listening, that it's worth learning about.

Absolutely. Right? Like whether it's interesting or not, it's like, okay, it's the year 2025. Do we need to like revisit the history in Yannan or the Northwest Provinces or whatever, all this stuff? Is this really important? Anyway, we obviously have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Joseph Tarigian. He is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and an associate professor at American University. And he is the author of a new book, The Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Xi Zhongshun, Father of Xi Jinping. Joseph, thank you so much. much for coming on Al-Bavs. Thanks so much for having me. Why are we interested? Or I guess you, why were you? Why is anyone interested and worth spending time to learn about the life of Xi Zhongshan? You know, I was listening to your conversation. I was thinking about how one of the things that Xi Jinping is trying to achieve is make the regime immortal by having people study party history. He believes that one of the ways to keep the party vigilant and dedicated and at one with the people is to learn from the legacy of the revolutionary. So what that history is, teaching that history is moral education is at the very heart of Xi Jinping's project. So that begs the question, what was that history?

And I tried to tell it through the prism of his own father with my book. So one question I always wanted to ask a sort of CCP expert. is why would anyone want to join the party in the sort of 1940s, 1950s, 1970s? I understand that hindsight is 2020, but looking back, first of all, no one knew how this was all going to turn out. And secondly, it seems like your life as a sort of minor party official could be very, very tricky and very dangerous in some ways to Joe's point about things like self-criticism and getting in trouble for leftist deviations or rightist.

deviations or whatever, it doesn't seem like a fun time. So I think that breaking down your question a little bit would be meaningful. What decade you join the party can tell you a lot about that person. And also why you stay in the party can be very different from why you joined in the first place because often you don't know what kind of organization it is and you don't know what's going to be coming. But I think that at the heart of what you're getting at is why would you join an organization that is so dangerous to be a member of, either because you're fighting a revolution

against a vastly superior force or because there are so many power struggles within that party. One of the answers is that for these people, communism wasn't just a way of understanding economics. It wasn't just about Marxist dialectics. It was really a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. It was joining an organization that for them was a manifestation of a world historical inevitability. And it was exciting. It gave them agency.

It gave them a sense that their lives mattered. And of course, they were often joining the party at moments when they felt that the entire nation was at risk of falling apart because of warlords and bandits and Western and Japanese encroachments. I forget what decade it is. But there's another reason that even people today get excited about radical politics and that is sex and dating. And they think it'll make them attractive to members of the opposite sex. You mentioned that in your book, that that was one of the appeals for the very early communists. So it's interesting how politics and the personal mix often for members of the Chinese Communist Party. So there was a political background. There was a social background. He was born two years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty.

He saw all of these battles between nationalists and bandits, nationalists and communists. And it would have been even just visibly striking for him to grow up in this area because he grew up near Xi'an, which many of your listeners must know as where the terracotta soldiers are from. And that's because the first unified Chinese state was forged near where he was born. And so he would have seen just how far his country had fallen from these amazing heights during the Tang Dynasty. And so for him, he didn't really understand the intricacy. of the ideology. He wasn't really attracted to Marxism from an intellectual perspective. But as he and other people had written about or talked about later, it was just kind of cool to be more radical and more leftist because there was a sense that the country really needed something drastic to be able to

find its feet. Can you talk a little bit about how he rose up through the party ranks in the sort of early days? Because this is always a question. So first of all, the goal of the Communist Party, as you mentioned, is sort of always changing in one way or another, or certainly the way they execute on it seems to be quite flexible. And so I'm very curious how a sort of junior level politician or party member gathers influence within the party and basically what qualifies as a good job to get them ahead. Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the dilemmas that my book tries to explore is what does it mean to be a deputy in a system that puts so much focus on a strong leader and discipline. So people might wonder, why would I read a book about

someone who wasn't the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party? Isn't this just an organization where people do what they're told? But actually, it's so much more complicated than that. And it's complicated for lots of interesting reasons. One is that the top leader often will give a general sense of what they want to achieve, but they won't say what matters more and how to achieve it. And then so the deputy has to figure it out. They have to be loyal to what the top leader wants, but also not screw everything up entirely. There's other competitors that might not like you. You also have to be aware of the fact that often the top leader will change their mind. So all of these things are what members of the party have to manage. And Xi Zhongshun stands out for his

ability to keep winning over famous senior men within the party. So he was not one of the oldest of the founding generation, but he really impresses you with his ability to find these big brothers over and over again who saw something in him that they admired. One thing I really got from reading your book, and you mentioned Xi Jinping himself as part of his own goal is to have the younger generations learn more about party history, hence the drama that Tracy mentioned. One thing I really sort of deeply internalized reading your book is how young the country is, how young the party is. And I mean, there is a sense in which Mao is like Xi Jinping's uncle.

I mean, you say the word big brother in terms of like Xi Zhang Shun's ability to find these sort of brother figures. It's still a very close, it's a very close family. These people were like right there at the very beginning that Xi Jinping knew and was growing up with. Yeah, so one of the things in the book that I think is really quite significant is how long these people knew each other. So the book begins in the 1920s and Xi Zhongshunds, a major figure through the early 1990s, and these names keep coming back over and over and over again. And they knew each other for so long. the intricacies of these relationships are really something. So in the West, we've often seen

this habit of dividing the party between good guys and bad guys, reformers and conservatives, leftists and rightists. And one of the things that emerges from my research is that they were so subtle the way they interacted with each other. So they were kind of frenemies in a way, right? So they all had loyalty to the party. But the way that the antagonism shifted, the way that the loyalty shifted, it was something that was very pro-dian over these years. Talk a little bit more about that, because I think when people certainly in the West hear about the Chinese Communist Party, they often think of factionalism and all these cadres that are sort of in secret rooms forming different groups with different goals. Did that actually

happen? So I'm a skeptic about how useful the idea of factions can be for understanding the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I don't want to go too far. It definitely matters, who you worked with, whether you work in the same organization, that kind of thing. But the reason Leninist parties are known as organizational weapons is because they are so leader-friendly and because there is such a taboo about any concerted political action by certain groups. Now, sometimes they approach that level of coordination, but they have to be so careful because as soon as the top leader identifies that, then they're going to be in big trouble.

but also people are people. So you can have more liberal views on some issues, more conservative views on other issues. Just because you worked with someone doesn't mean that you're going to like them. So often the people who are, as I mentioned, these relationships are shaped by what happened decades previously. They have long memories. And if you worked with someone, you didn't get along, that can be meaningful many, many, many years into the future, too. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute.

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television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. I mentioned this at the beginning, but I remember when I read the recent biography from a few years ago of Deng Xiaoping and then also a recent Joe and Live biography, they're always like trying to read Mao's mind, right? Like they're on there, like, oh, and are we guilty of leftism or rightism or whatever? And I can never really figure out, do we take the correct line? We take the people's line, whatever. What is leftism mean, they're always getting accused of leftism. I thought they're all leftist. They're communist. But what is actual, what did they mean it when they said that someone was taking like the leftist line and the CCP and that that was bad in some way? Good question. So when you look at Chinese

texts, when they talk about leftism and rightism, leftism is always in quotation marks, right? So what is leftism? In theory, leftism basically means that you're too ambitious. You're moving forward too quickly. You don't recognize the objective conditions and therefore you're making a of things because you're trying to achieve what is not possible at that particular time. Now, at the same time, leftism is part of the part of what makes the Chinese Communist Party because of this phenomenon known as campaigns, right? So what's a campaign? A campaign means you get people to go too far deliberately because you need to get them to go

too far because the whole point is to gin people up, to get them excited, to inspire zeal. So you expect that things are going to go too far. Now, for these people who are the deputies, typically when they go too far and then there's a rectification, they're not punished for it because there was an always expectation that there was going to be some mistakes, that you're going to break a few eggs, right? Nevertheless, because this was a system that took ideology so seriously, when there were differences of opinion, often they weren't understood as such. They were seen as manifestations of a deeper

political problem. And as you were alluding to in your introduction, one of the reasons Mao and Deng were so powerful is because they got to decide what was leftist. They got to decide what was a line error. And so often the reason we think that there are factions is because the top leader decides after the fact to label a bunch of people as a group and say that they represented some kind of political view. But almost always what really happened is that these people, just simply weren't in line with the chairman and they weren't guessing correctly what he wanted and they were punished for it and then they were given this label. Why didn't Mao just issue clearer instructions?

Yeah, good question. Part of it was about the succession, right? So Chinese top leaders always are thinking about what's going to happen after they die and they don't want their model to disappear with them. And so they're testing their deputies. They're trying to figure out whether their deputies can do the right thing on their own. And so they don't always want to be clear because they want to see what you do. But also, the top leaders change their mind all the time. They're mercurial. They can watch a situation and decide that things aren't going the well that they wanted. And then they don't say that immediately to see whether or not other people are going to realize that on their own. But also, I think that by leaving some ambiguity,

they can see whether or not you are going to use that space to do everything you can to remain loyal to the top leader or whether you're going to show some of your own inclinations, which you may or may not like as the senior leader. Let's talk about the trajectory of Xi Zhong's life a little bit more. A big part of your book is these fights over history. And they're obsessed about like getting the exact history of riot of Chinese and the Northwest territories and who is where when, et cetera, and who is influential, et cetera. Why was this so important these sort of fights over specific details of history?

And then how did that culminate ultimately in 16 years in which he was sort of extremely punished and banished and basically cast out of the party and humiliated and all the horrible things that happened during the revolution? Two reasons primarily. One is for a top leader, your legitimation narrative is to say I was always on the right side of the debate. And so when you make the case for why everyone should listen to you, whether or not your version of history is affirmed has a lot to do with whether or not you are seen as someone who deserves to be the chairman. And the second reason is that the party is a totalizing organization, right? So your entire sense of self-worth, your prestige, your status, your sense of meaning is how the party characterizes your contributions to the revolution and to the regime after it's established. So history in that sense is absolutely existential for them. And I think that also when it comes to, as I said, this preoccupation with whether the regime will survive,

you need to win the hearts and minds of young people by talking about the party as an organization that went from one victory to another, because it was the only way of organizing society that can guarantee China's return to its, rightful place on the world stage, right? So for all of these reasons, history is so important. And so when you're purged from the leadership and you're doing self-criticisms, what are these self-criticisms about? Well, it's a reflection of your own personal history. So when Chi Zhong spent 16 years in the political wilderness after he was purged, what he was writing about was his past over and over and over again and negotiating with the top leadership just exactly how what he had done previously was going to be officially evaluated. You know, you mentioned the word frenemy earlier.

And as a former teenage girl, frenemies is something that is of perennial interest to me. And when I think about famous frenemies in the past, do you like the segue? Yeah, I do. All right. When I think about famous frenemies in the past, I kind of think about the Soviet Union and China in the 50s and 60s. And one of the interesting things about the elder Xi, is that he was for a while in charge of basically managing China's relationship with Soviet experts at the time. What was that experience like for him? How tricky was that to actually do? And was it useful to him in later years having had that experience? So in 1953, the most prominent slogan in the People's Republic of China was the Soviet Union of today is China's tomorrow. And in fact, that also was the year that Xi Jinping was born,

and his father, Xi Zhongshun, was Minister of Propaganda. In subsequent years, when Xi Zhong was working for Zhou Wanai at the state council, as you said, one of his tasks was to manage the Soviet expert program. And for a period of time, the number one priority was to learn wholesale from the Soviet Union. And it was rooted in this idea that there was only one way of doing communism. But Malta Deng increasingly came to the view that something had gone deeply wrong with the October Revolution, that the Soviet leaders were engaging in revisionism. And I know you were chuckling about this word earlier. Because they're always getting accused of revisionism.

And revisionism basically means you're not really a true communist anymore, that you are not as actually leftist as you need to be, right? You're not pushing forward. forward, you're too scared to try to win new victories for the revolutionary agenda. And so Xi Zhongshin would have witnessed this story. He would have witnessed how Mao Zedong gradually came to the conclusion that the Chinese project was going to be different. And he also would have seen something else, which was how dangerous it was to talk to people outside the Chinese Communist Party, especially foreigners, because one of the accusations against him in 1962, other than, as you said, that he was trying to revise history

was that he was a spy for the Soviet Union. So it would have been very frightening for Xi Zhongshun to manage relations with the Soviets, right? So the first great purge of the People's Republic of China was a man named Gao Gong. And he was another northwesterner. He had known Xi Zhongshun for years. Oh, this is that Gao. And Mao had come to believe that. Exactly.

And Mao came to believe that Gao was a spy for the Soviet Union. And in 1959, at the famous for Chinese historians, Lushan Plenum, when the defense minister, Pung de Hwai, made critical remarks of the Great Leap Forward, he also, in Mao's mind, only did that because of a special relationship with the Soviet Union. And he saw some machinations there. And Pung de Huai was the commander on the Northwest battlefield, and Xi Zhongshun was his right-hand man. So Xi Zhongshin was basically a forest gump for the two first great purges of the People's Republic of China. And they both were seen by Mao as having had illicit relations with the Soviet Union. And then he is purged in 1962 as well. I'll say one other thing about this, which is quite remarkable.

So the first split that was really something that the Chinese and Soviets had trouble managing happened while Xi Zhongshun was visiting. the Soviet Union. And what had happened was there was an altercation on the border between China and India, the first one and several Indian soldiers were killed. And while Xi Zhongshun was traveling, the Soviets put out a statement that essentially took a neutral position, even though the Soviet Union and China were in a formal alliance. And the Chinese were absolutely furious. And Xi Zhongshun left Moscow early. And, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you And when Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited China just a few weeks later, Mao said to him, your statement made the imperialists happy.

And Mao's conclusion was, why aren't the Soviets, why don't they have our back? Why aren't they more supportive? And his answer was that it wasn't that the Soviets were pursuing their interests, we have our interests, it was that they're not really communist anymore. They've gone revisionist. And actually, to tie it again back to Xi Zhongshun, it contributed. to Mao's preoccupation with this idea of class struggle. And he wanted to figure out a way to make sure class struggle never went away. And his crackdown on Xi Zhong Shun in 1962 was related to his marinating in this obsession with the importance of class struggle that was partly inspired by what he saw as the degradation of the revolutionary project in the Soviet Union. They say abs are made in the kitchen. Cool, but who has time for three hours of meal prep and a fridge full of Tupperware?

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the right lot and finishes at the right price. Not someday, but right now. Register at democrat homes.com and get everything you want right now. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment, but I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader.

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but also really acknowledge where you've done. own and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to leading by example, executives making an impact on the IHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Xi Zhongshun was purged and subject to 16 years of absolute torment. It's funny you characterize him as sort of like the forced gump of 20th century China because of course later on in his career, he was heavily involved in Guangdong and the opening of Shenzhen and these special opportunities.

or special economic zones, which people know a lot about there. But he spent much of the rest of his life essentially fearing the possibility, it seems, or there's my reading of your book, that the ever-present risk of sliding back into cultural revolution-type periods. And the cultural revolution per your book, there were many patterns of it prior to it. It's sort of these purges and campaigns they existed afterwards. I'm just curious, in your view, can the party even today ever ever? be inured against the potential of reverting back into such a self-destructive environment such

as that? Or is that always going to be endemic to the structure of the party that it could trip into these sort of intense inward battles that are so damaging? Yeah, that's a very insightful question. One piece of evidence to get at what you're driving at is to look what Xi Jinping himself experienced during the Cultural Revolution and how he's talked about it. Xi Jinping said that when the cultural revolution began, everyone believed in it, which was true. So when it became clear that it was a disaster, it was profoundly disillusioning. And Xi Jinping admitted that he, too, went through a period of doubt, but that precisely because he went through this time of thinking about why such a terrible thing could happen, but nevertheless, return to the party's cause meant that his dedication is more unshakable. than anyone else's.

And the 1980s in these interviews that I found that he gave, he talks about how he saw the 1980s as a time when people should be even more loyal to the party because now they could do something. Now the leftism and the radicalism had gone away so you could finally work to bring China in the right direction. And in fact, he said that the reason that he didn't want to make up for lost time and have fun and make money was because he wanted to make sure that another cultural revolution never happened. But it raises a question, right, which is how do you stop that from happening? And so some people who went through the same thing that Xi Jinping did, they believed that

China needed the rule of law. It needed to prevent another strong man leader from appearing. And Xi Jinping's answer was, you need to have a party that's unconstrained. You need to have a party that's so powerful that it can stop people who, when are given the freedom to do so, take advantage of it and use it to hurt people. And so for Xi Jinping, a lot of people think that he's a Maoist figure, that a lot of what he's doing has elements that are reminiscent of the cultural revolution. And that's certainly true. But as you said, a lot of what we associate with the cultural revolution has been part of the party since the very beginning. And the question then is, so Xi Jinping, he wants to use struggle,

He wants to use campaigns, but he also doesn't want another cultural revolution. Well, what does that mean? Well, he and people around him have said that, well, we're not going to do the tragedy of the cultural revolution. We're going to avoid that kind of radicalism. We're also going to recognize that we lost a sense of vigilance after Mao's death, and we're going to find this happy medium. But what is a happy medium in this sense, right? Like, struggle is not a legal concept.

It's not a clear idea, really. So you can see how in theory that you would get it just the right amount, but that in practice it's very hard. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing China struggle to balance the economy and security is because it's hard to do two things at once. Yeah, I always thought it was interesting that in modern China, there are a lot of portrayals domestically of the cultural revolution. So things like historical dramas or in the three body problem, there's a very, very long section. on that. And it kind of indicates exactly what you're describing, which is, to some extent, Xi Jinping wants people to know what happened and to understand the danger of sliding back into something like the Cultural Revolution. Just on that note, to what extent do you think

Xi Jinping actually draws from his father's experience in terms of his own policy? Or are we sort of falling into the trap where we think that all of Chinese politics has to be dynastic, and it's all about family members, succeeding family members. To what extent is that true? So Xi Zhongshu has a reputation as the best kind of person that the party could produce, almost uniquely humane, liberal, pro-reform. And so when Xi Jinping came to power, a lot of individuals who knew the family or knew something about party history

believed that he was going to be like what their understanding of his father was. And when he moved in a direction that disappointed them, and in fact was quite a surprise for them, they were so, so disappointed. And one of the things that they did was they negatively contrasted him with his father. One dissident, exiled, intellectual in the United States said that Xi Jinping is not the son of Xi Zhongshun. He's the grandson of Mao Zedong Shih Teng. So this politicized use of Xi Zhongshun against Xi Jinping. that Xi Jinping hates it. But then the question becomes, well, is Xi Jinping inspired by father as a positive example or as a negative example? Some people have said that, well,

Xi Jinping saw that his father's liberal policies failed and that's why he's doing something completely different. You know, we can't say for sure, but I can't say a couple things. One is that it's interesting. It's interesting that Xi Jinping's very first article published in People's Daily was about the relationship between older generations in the party and younger generations. generations. And he said essentially that we need to respect them. We can learn so much from them, but we would not respect them if we did exactly what they did and we never innovate, right? We need to move along with the times. And also, I think that at heart, what he wants to do is make sure that the regime survives and everything he's doing is for that purpose, which means that he is

essentially inheriting the big picture of what his father wanted, which was to ensure that the party and the party's interests could persist from one generation to another. So is he doing certain things different from what his father did? Yes. Is it a conscious rejection of his father? I'm not so sure. I think maybe he would say that the heart of what I'm doing is the same as what my father did. But also we need to change with the times. And it's a story of the party constantly learning new things and needing to address new objective conditions as they appear. And one last point on this, Xi Jinping says that the reason the Chinese Communist Party survived when other communist parties did not is because it had this capacity for change, that it was because the party could

cynicize Marxism and adapt it to national conditions, therefore find a Chinese style of modernization that they could find this way of a non-Western style of development. So it's interesting how he plays with this dialectic between tradition and innovation, but, and that sense I think his thinking here is a little subtle. Tracy, have I mentioned, I can't remember if I've brought this up. Have I mentioned to you that I've recently read the book, Moby Dick? Oh my God. Oh my God. Have I mentioned that? Have I mentioned that? Listeners, let me just tell you, whenever Joe reads a book, he talks incessantly about it. So yes, you have brought up Moby Dick several times. It's hard not to read the book about your book,

Joseph, without thinking of the character Starbuck, isn't it? No, I'm just kidding. You see. You said that yourself on Twitter, and I used this as an excuse to torment Tracy with bringing up Moby Dick. But you yourself made that connection, huh? So it's not a perfect analogy, right? Because Starbuck is the first mate and Xi Zhongshun was sort of the first mate to the first mate, right? So he's the wrong further down than Starbuck. And also the book seems to suggest that while Ahab is motivated by vengeance, and Starbuck is somebody who just want to make, once, to make money. While Xi Zhongshun, he was on board with a revolutionary project, right? Like, he shared many of Mao's views and Deng's views. So we shouldn't essentialize the difference

between Xi and Mao. And also, the bequad, right, the ship crashed, but the party has survived, right? The party is still there. So those are different. But at the same time, it is, I think, meaningful to think about the similarities, right? So Starbucks was the deputy, the first made to Ahab. And he knew better, but he still allowed himself to be a victim. And by doing that, he doomed himself. He doomed the crew. And even though he was someone who recognized that Ahab was the kind of person who would strike the son if the son insulted him, which really is a very Maoist thing to say, right? Like Mao really kind of fetishized this idea of struggle and fighting back and having a strong personality. He still didn't really do anything about it. And Also, like Xi Zhongshun, Starbuck isn't clearly a hero or a villain, right? He raises questions about the morality of what he was doing as part of this particular system. Starbucks also didn't really have legal recourse to removing Ahab, right? So there's this one moment where he thinks about killing him, but he recognizes that that's a violation of the law of the ship.

And also, Starbucks is similar to Xi Zhongshun in the sense that when he thinks that something is not going the way he thinks is right, He remonstrates, but very carefully in a way that he's almost not even really remonstrating because of just how cautious he is. And I'll say one final thing about this, right? So what's interesting about Moby Dick is the whole crew kind of gets on board with this crazy idea of hunting this whale, right? And it kind of reminds me of this quote by Deng Xiaoping about the Great Leaf Forward, which is that we all had the fever, right? And it raises this question. It was like, why would people be so loyal to this person who's so strange and so eccentric? And I think it's because this idea of the adventure and the thrill and mission was something that spoke to something at the heart of their lives.

Maybe they're all just trauma bonded. A few thoughts. I forgot about trauma. Well, you know, it's when you write a biography, you need to talk about psychology. And the fact that Xi Zhongshun and Xi Jinping went through these. traumas can't be ignored and you need to talk about it and it needs to be addressed. But psychology and history, psychology and politics are different disciplines for a reason, which is that you can't essentialize their behavior down to what they experience as children,

right? So a lot of people thought that everything Stalin did could be explained by the fact that he was beaten up when he was a young person, right, by his father. Oh, yeah, the Stalin biographer also at Stanford. Kotkin, he has this great line. He's like, oh, people say that his father was abusive and drunk. And he's like, who wasn't abusive and drunk in the early late 1800s in that area? So anyway, sorry, keep going.

But yes, this is a good point. You know, I'll say one other thing about this. D.H. Lawrence wrote chapter in a book about Moby Dick. And he talked about all this practicality in search of a mad mad chase. And that also really gets to something at the heart of the party that we've talked about, which is during the revolution, during the Great League Forward, during the Cultural Revolution, you see these goals that are just utopian. And at the same time, that doesn't mean that the party at sometimes even the same moment, sometimes more than others, doesn't also have this very practical side, very flexible side.

And these two elements have coexisted from the very beginning in ways that I think are meaningful to dwell on too. So one thing I'm always curious when it comes to books like these very large historic projects is how you actually go about gathering your research and what sources you're looking at. and whether you're finding new things that potentially people were unaware of before. And then just on that note, what would you say is the biggest misconception that academics or maybe people in the West in general tend to have when it comes to understanding how the CCP actually works? Yeah. So when you do research on the Chinese Communist Party, you can't just go to a couple archives, collect the material, and write it up.

You need to have a different sense of sensibilities. You have to be sensitive to the possibilities, not the limitations, and recognize that you're going to have to collect a lot of different types of evidence and make a mosaic, and you'll be able to understand certain things better than others, but that in the future people will find new things and that it's an ongoing project. There's never going to be a definitive version. But nevertheless, there's enough that you can do to say, in the interim at least something meaningful, something to start a conversation.

And so, for example, a lot of internal documents, a lot of archives have made their way to American libraries and institutions. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, people from the mainland were able to publish histories outside of censorship, but also document collections and memoirs. But you also need to use the stuff that comes out of mainland China. So there was a period where party history journals were really pushing the envelope. But even the official stuff, like the chronologies and the official biographies, you can mine those things for biographical details, but also you can put it in the context of other material you've collected. And then suddenly that evidence is meaningful to you in a way that maybe even the compilers of it did not expect.

And also, I just made a list of every time that Xi Junction met with a foreigner and then tried to either speak to that person or go to their archives. They spoke to the Dalai Lai I went to the French Communist Party archives because she jumped into France. I went to the archives in Serbia because you went to a big important Congress in Yugoslavia when it still existed, that kind of thing. And so, you know, what are the main misunderstandings? Well, one thing to say is that this isn't always just a case of Westerners who don't understand China getting it wrong for cultural reasons or whatever.

But people at the very heart of this system also constantly got it. wrong, right? And so as I mentioned earlier, these people who knew the she family were totally dumbfounded by Xi Jinping when it became clear what kind of a leader he was going to be, right? And these were not stupid people. These were people who had been around the block over and over and over again. And the reason these purges happened, the reason why someone like Xi Zhongshun, who was actually quite cautious and quite clever, why he crashed on the shoals of power struggles, is because he also didn't fully understand the repercussions of what he was doing. So in that sense, we should keep in mind just how hard it is to get the system right, not just for people on the outside, but even for people

on the inside, too. That's a great ending. Joseph Turgian, fantastic book. Really appreciate you coming on Oblots and chatting with us. Really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for having me out. Tracy, while we were recording that episode, Joseph mentioned the various campaigns that they had, the CCP. So I went to the Wikipedia page and like I love some of the names of their campaigns. Because like some of them are like sort of straightforward like cleansing the class ranks campaign kind of obvious. But then like counterattack the right deviant. Counterattack the right deviationist reversal of verdicts trend campaign. The criticized Lynn criticized Confucius classic obviously campaign. There's something always very poetic about this. The four pests campaign.

Oh yeah. That one was. very sad and kind of blew up in their face. But I think you're getting to an important point, which is a campaign, what was the second one you mentioned? Wait a second. The counterattack the right deviationist reversal of verdicts trend to campaign. Sorry. That was the gang of four attacking Don Chalpang who was involved in reversing verdicts of people who had been improperly punished during the Cultural Revolution. Right. But this is actually important because it's like, what does that mean exactly? And I think this has kind of been both the strength and the weakness of the CCP over time, which is that a lot of these concepts are fuzzy

and ever-changing, and often they are fuzzy on purpose so that the leader can exert control and declare what actually is anti-right or anti-visionism or whatever. No, totally. It is clear. I mean, obviously there is like the however many-year period, the formal, the 1966, 1916, 1916, 1976 cultural revolution, which she, the elder she and the younger, she, well, like, truly, like, unbelievable levels of personal humiliation and suffering. But it really extended both before that and afterwards. And I really, you know, it's clear, like, it is not easy in a political system such as that to ever fully guard against the return of that style of full-blown politics. I have one question for you. How many Moby Dick references?

am I going to hear on this podcast? Well, maybe only the next time we do an energy one. Okay. All right. I can accept that. Okay. I'd be really impressed if you, like, or get into every episode. No, I definitely would.

I just thought it was very funny in this case that the author happened to have a lot of an unusually high level of drawn-out thoughts between one character and Moby Dick and the author of his book. So I had to bring that up. I thought that was very unexpected and weird. Here we go. I'm going to read Moby Dick as a lens for understanding the CCP. You should. It's great. All right. Shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest Joseph Tarigian. He's at Joseph Tarigian.

And check out his new book, The Party's Interest Come First. The Life of Xi Zhong Shen, father of Xi Jinping. Follow our producer, Carmen Rodriguez, at Kermin Armin, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kel Brooks at Kel Brooks. And for more Oddlods content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots with the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics, including China 247 in our Discord. Discord.

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