School of War - Ep 42: Ian Easton on Xi Jinping and the CCP’s Grand Strategy

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Ian Easton, senior director at the Project 2049 Institute and author of The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, joins the show to talk about Xi Jinping, the ideology that shaped Jinping and by which he rules, and why his vision for the world should not be dismissed.  ▪️ Times  • 01:56 Introduction • 02:22 Interested In China • 05:01 Discovering Taiwan • 10:32 Perceptions Of The PRC  • 13:11 How The Chinese Government Works • 17:47 Who Is Xi Jinping? • 23:42 The Tactics Of Ideology And Control • 26:29 The “Scourge Of The Corrupt” • 29:36 Authentic Socialism • 31:25 Does China’s Communism Matter?     • 37:04 The Blending Of Communism And Nationalism • 43:04 Exporting Xi Jinping Thought     • 49:19 Absolute Control • 52:41 Does Xi Jinping Have Rivals?       • 56:04 Optimisim To Pessimism In Taiwan   • 01:04:00 It’s Not All Dark

Who is Xi Jinping, and what does T believe? Is the PRC simply another great power striving for respect and security in a way that any country in its position would? Or is it something more like the early Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, bent on world domination? If so, why does that distinction matter? And if so, are we going to make it out of this confrontation with our freedom intact? But first, a word from our sponsor. From the grocery store to the gas station, working things. families are getting hammered by rising prices. But instead of focusing on inflation,

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We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We will fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. We talk a lot about China. China on this podcast, and we do that for good reason. Last week, of course, we had a couple of

AEI scholars, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley on to talk about the prospects of war with China. And this week, I'm delighted to be joined by Ian Easton, who is senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, and most recently the author of The Final Struggle Inside China's Global Strategy to essentially continue that conversation. Ian, thanks for joining the show. Eric, hello, and thank you for having me on the show. So before, I want to talk about your most recent book, The Final Struggle, and I think you are, you're a real resource because you have immersed yourself in a study of China and what once upon a time with respect to a different country you might have called criminology. I'm not sure what the appropriate term is in the Chinese context. Maybe you can educate me. But you have kind of an interesting background. So I'm just curious, you know, tell me how it is, you know, where did you grow up and how did you get interested in China? How did you get dragged into this being? you know, essentially your life's work? Well, it was very much an accident.

So I grew up in a corner of fields of rural Illinois, about two hours outside of Chicago. And it was face-rakingly boring, wonderful place, wonderful people, but a very boring place to grow up. I was very restless. And I wanted to go see the world. And so I was very interested in foreign language. I didn't know which one to pick. So I tried a number of them, about half a dozen.

And I ended up sticking with Mandarin. And then one thing led to the next. Got it. And so you're in college, your grad school, and you're studying Mandarin. You ended up living in Taiwan, correct? Tell me about that. I did, yeah. So I went to China first.

I studied at Fudai University. And then at the end of the semester, I traveled across China from Beijing all the way out to Bhrumuchi and Xinjiang. And then down to Kashgar and all the way up in the mountains to the foothills. of K2 near the Sinal Pakistan border and then back. So I got to see a lot of China and I was very surprised by what I saw. It was not what I expected. It was not what my professors said it would be like. And I didn't want to stay there for too much longer after that.

I ended up going to Taiwan. What years were this just to give us a frame of reference? Oh, it's 2004. Okay. So I was there for six months in 2004. What semester? What was the difference between what you were expecting, what you're professors had told you what you saw.

Oh, that's a great question. So my professors described a place that was infused with Confucian values, and it was this wonderful rising superpower that the United States was going to cooperate with, that we were going to trade together, and China was going to reform, and we were going to have essentially a G2, and we're going to make the world a better place. And when I got there, that's not at all what I saw. What I saw was a deeply authoritarian one-party dictatorship with mass censorship, human rights abuse, pollution.

It was a police state, even back in 2004. And there was a lot of hostility towards the United States, certainly towards Taiwan, Japan. And so I was surprised by that. that. Okay. And so you move off to Taiwan and what did you discover in Taiwan? So they don't want to Taiwan. And I was surprised again. People that I had met previously described Taiwan as a backwater that really was not worth visiting. And, you know, I had professors tell me that Taiwan should go the way of Hong Kong. Hong Kong got a really sweet deal. Taiwan should take that deal. And then I got to talk Taiwan and I realized this is an entirely different

country that this idea of one china is a myth it's a narrative that that actually both the ccp and the kmpt government in taiwan created and that washington bought into for a variety of of reasons that made sense at the time and that this is actually a wonderfully liberal open democratic country and it's one that is very much understudied yeah i i remember when i was sort of first turning my own attention to East Asia and the Pacific on a Taiwan trip just a few days, you know, not like your extensive experience. And it's sort of struggling to wrap my head around that it was the sort of old conservative KMT that had the China sympathies, despite its historical legacy with respect to the Chinese Communist Party. It was the young progressives or progressive-oriented party who

tended to be more committed to independence and more hostile to China. Can you actually, you know, might be interesting. Give us, you know, 30, 60 seconds on, you know, how that dynamic actually work. Well, it's a work in progress, but what has happened is Taiwan has opened up, has become a liberal democracy. And it's really one of the world's greatest political miracles. Very few countries have been one-party dictatorships the way Taiwan was up until the 1980s and had a peaceful, successful transition to liberal democracy. Today, Taiwan is one of the most open, that's one of the freest countries in the planet. It was recently ranked among the top 10 leading democracies in the world.

And that happened peacefully. And it happened in a transition that did not sacrifice Taiwan's economy in the process as well. So it's a really remarkable story. And why is it that, you know, if you didn't know anything about Taiwan and, you know, you're using American politics as your early. at least the American politics the last few decades as your way of understanding the world. You might just guess that it's probably the conservative, traditionally anti-communist wing of Taiwanese politics that's really hostile to the PRC.

And the more progressive sort of youth-infused wing of Taiwanese politics that's more sympathetic to the mainland. But in reality, something close to the opposite is the case. Like, why is that? Well, this is actually an interesting case of identity politics. So the KMT government maintains this perspective that Taiwan is essentially Chinese. It's a Chinese democracy, culturally, ethnically, historically. And many people in the KMT, this is Chiang Kai Shek's old party, still have this romanticized view of mainland China.

They call it mainland China. the People's Republic of China, and they still hold out hope that one day the two sides of the Taiwan straight could be reunited in the way that people in South Korea and North Korea on both sides still hold out hope that one day the Korean Peninsula can be unified. But the majority of people in Taiwan don't hold that view. The vast majority, I would say 70 to 80 percent of people in Taiwan view Taiwan as a separate country that is Taiwanese. It is a unique Taiwanese identity, a unique Taiwanese culture, and it's not Chinese. That is inherited a lot of Chinese culture. People speak Mandarin,

but this is not Chinese, and the two sides of the Taiwan strait should never be one country. They should never unify, and Taiwan should certainly never be annexed by the People's Republic of China. And Taiwan should be a free country. It is a free country. And it should be recognized by the international community as such. Well, I want to come back to Taiwan and I'll bring us back here towards the end of our conversation because I'm also, I learned a lot from your last book about defense issues pertaining to Taiwan, the Chinese invasion threat. Do you have the title right?

Correct me if I'm off by a word or something. No, absolutely. That's right. Chinese invasion threat. And I learned a lot about the defense of Taiwan, which, you know, as well as anyone to be an extremely live issue in coming months, years, what have you. So we'll come back to that. But let's zoom out and talk big picture about the PRC for a bit. And maybe we should start with Western or American study of the PRC. You know, you are a China

specialist. You read other China specialists. I think it's fair to say that in the last few years attitudes towards the PRC and the CCP and she personally have grown sort of, if not universally, largely more skeptical. People are more comfortable with the notion that China is not a friend and a partner of the United States in which we are going to cooperate in a, you know, a condominium, a G2 and run the world together. Not that that, you know, vision to me would have made sense even on the assumption that China was a benign power, but that's a debate for another day. But this was a long time coming, right? So if you go back to when you're getting your start, you know, the mid-aughts, what was the attitude of China studies then? And, you know,

are there still sort of echoes of the old view around today? Well, I think there certainly are echoes of the old view. I mean, large institutions or organizations are very slow to change, even in the face of contrary in facts, the facts that show that their assumptions about the way things would go have been falsified by events. And that's also true of individuals. And it's especially true of individuals that have dedicated their entire lives to a certain viewpoint. And the viewpoint for many China scholars for a very long time, and this is the viewpoint that I was brought up with, the received wisdom was that we were going to bring down the PRC in the way that we brought down the Soviet Union, that we were going to use the power of our soft power, you know,

our narrative power, and we were going to use trade in economics and goodwill, because a lot of it was just policies that demonstrated goodwill. We're going to do that and we were going to shape the People's Republic of China. We were going to help them reform economically and then ultimately politically. And one day, China would become a free and open liberal democracy. That was the assumption that folks made. And I think there was a lot of hubris. In retrospect, we can look back and we can say,

everybody was just high after the fall of the Soviet Union that nobody expected that the Cold War would end in the fashion that it did and it just blew us away intellectually across the board everybody was blown away by actually how easy it was or how easy it seemed to take down another superpower and to transform the world there was the sense that America would never have another great power rival and that we could use all of the various tools of statecraft to do to China what we did to the Soviet Union and to have this peaceful transition into a much better world. So, you know, our main subject today and the subject of your book is the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party. Like their their objectives in ways and means.

let's talk about how that strategy is formulated. Who are the people? I mean, everyone knows the one important name, and we should talk about him at some length, I think. But who are the people and what are the structures that run China and formulate its strategy? Give us a bit of an introduction. Well, their system is remarkably opaque.

And so we really don't know how produced strategy, the way that we know the U.S. does it or Japan or other countries. We know that it's driven by the Politburo Standing Committee, it's driven by Xi Jinping primarily, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the chairman of the PRC state and those around him, his key advisors, where they set broad guidelines, broad aims,

and then the bureaucracy, both the party apparatus, the Chinese Communist Party organizations, and then state apparatus, the Chinese government, implement that. And they have a very centralized structure whereby once the guidance goes out, each organization on the rung below then has more specific plans that they develop to execute the guidance. And then that goes down level by level, by level, all the way down until you now have,

with varying degrees of detail, plans to implement policy. It's a remarkable system. Well, let's start at the top. And actually, let's not start with Xi, though. We'll come back to him in a second. What is the Politburo? People are probably familiar with the phrase, the word, from the Soviet example and, you know, Tom Clancy movies and stuff.

But what is this committee? How does it function? Does it function differently under Xi than it used to function? It definitely functions differently. So China has a one-party dictatorship. It's a Marxist-Leninist system ideologically and also organizationally. So they're built on the old Soviet model. Unlike the Soviet Union, which after the death of Stalin started to mellow out, China never has.

That Mao rejected Khrushchev rejected the idea of a mellowing now. And it wasn't really until Duncan Sheldin came along in the late 1970s that at least rhetorically and in many cases, practically, China did start to open up to the rest of the world. And so what their system allows for is for a very, very small group of men and their own men to decide all of the affairs of state and to oversee the entire population. They have both Communist Party apparatus. And I think this is very strange. The Chinese Communist Party is unlike any other political party on the planet today in the sense that it's extremely large. They have about 95 million party members. It polices itself in a very totalitarian fashion.

If you're a party member, first of all, it's hard to become a party member. If you are a party member, you're monitored every detail of your personal life and, of course, your public life and your professional life is monitored. Everybody reports on everybody else that it really is a police state. And you were expected to be loyal to this ideology and the ideology at the end of the day is whatever the chairman says it is. And this is what has really changed under Xi Jinping, is previously it was believed that the Politburo engaged in consensus decision making.

And that would protect China from engaging in really radical, self-destructive behavior, the likes of which we saw under Mao Zedong. And this is something that Deng Xiaoping instituted. So he was still, he was. still the paramount leader, but he also gave the other members of the Politburo, and this is a group of seven leaders that sit around. It's like a boardroom table, and they each have very large portfolios. They each have very large portions of power that are allotted to them. That is all changed under Xi Jinping, that there's no longer any consensus. There's not consensus. There's not

consensus decision making. He's not the first among equals. There are no checks on his authority that he has created cult of personality around himself. And everybody around him has to show on a very regular basis that they're loyal to him personally. And that's very different. It's quite remarkable because such a situation has not existed since Mao. And maybe you would tell us that in some respects, maybe this is even more consolidated than under Mao. Tell us about Xi, who he is and how he achieved this. Well, he's a mystery. There have been no really detailed biographies of Xi Jinping's life that draw

from authoritative Chinese language sources. And so I tried to do a thumbnail sketch in this book. It's just four or five page sketch of his life. This is a guy who was raised by revolutionaries, radical revolutionaries. Xi Jinping's dad went to jail when he was still in high school. Not Xi Jinping, but when his dad was still in high school, he went to jail for attempted murder. He tried to kill his teacher. So he was a radical from a very young age.

He was fired at a rough time in high school, but never quite that far. Yeah, can you imagine? And then he ended up joining this movement to overthrow the Republic of China government. He became an insurgent, what today we would think of as a terrorist or an insurgent. And then he fought in a 27-year-long civil war to overthrow the regime. And ultimately, he was one of the few survivors. This is Xi Jinping's dad, Xi Zhongshun, and so he emerged as one of Mao Zedong's top lieutenants in what they call New China, or the People's Republic of China, which was experimental.

It was viewed as this massive experiment, this large social engineering project. And so this is the environment that Xi Jinping grew up in. And as a result of the fact that both of his parents were violent, they both fought in the war, they both engaged in purges against enemies within the party and, of course, outside the party. And Xi Jinping grew up in the Cultural Revolution, which was a period of mass chaos and purging in China. It was a period of, it was very doggy dog. It was jungle rules. And as a result, Xi Jinping was almost killed on several occasions.

His eldest sister, actually his half-sister, but the oldest sibling in his family that he grew up with was murdered. And it's not clear if she had to kill herself to escape from a worser fate or whether she was actually killed at the hands of radical militants that were ransacking her house and attacking their family. because Xi Jinping's dad by this point had himself been purged, Xi Jinping ended up living in a cave for seven years in rural Yanan County, which is a very rough area in western central China.

And then he's had a very topsy-turvy political career. He's had an incredible career. Not to be flippin, but there is a kind of strong comic book energy, comic book villain energy to the sort of background story you've just presented. Yeah, I mean, it really is remarkable. When you look at where the man came from and how he survived and then what he's done since he has been able to marshal power into his own hands, it's really remarkable. Here's a guy who has purged over 100 general officers in the People's Liberation Army.

he has purged vice ministers of the CMC, the Central Military Commission. That would be like, you know, if we imagine a U.S. politician rising up, becoming the president of the United States, and then purging a deputy secretary of state, a deputy or a former chief of the joint chiefs of staff, and then multiple others, 100 generals and admirals, in addition to the former director of CIA, because Xi Jinping has also purged the former intelligence. are. And then thousands upon thousands of other high to mid-ranking officials and then over a million

other rank and file party members, it is just incredible what he's done over the past 10 years. He's created a cult of personality around himself. So when you travel around China, every billboard on every large building, you see his picture. If you stay in a hotel in China, you know, here in the United States, you stay in a hotel and you'll see the Gideon's Bible, often, in one of the drawers near the bedside. In China, it's books on Xi Jinping thought with his portrait on the cover of the book. He's instituted a policy whereby all students in China, all the way from starting in elementary school now, all the way up, have to read his books and have to read textbooks on Xi Jinping thought. And of course, there's a very simple version of Xi Jinping thought that elementary. school kids learn about and that it goes all the way up to PhD study level that advanced party

members are expected to memorize. If you look at what his top advisors and ministers write, and this is something that I did for when I was researching this book, it took about three years to write this book. I read a lot of party documents, a lot of speeches. And it just blew me away that all of his top ministers were constantly paying homage to Xi Jinping. That they could do nothing right. Xi Jinping did everything right. Everything good that was going on in China

was Xi Jinping's fault. He deserved all the credit for everything. And everyone now, in any position of power in China, whatever they write, anything, whenever they give a speech, they'd have to spend most of their time talking about Xi Jinping. and quoting Xi Jinping as showing their public loyalty to Xi Jinping.

It's really remarkable. I try to generate the same policy at my office, but for some reason it doesn't seem to take. So what were his tactics to achieve this position? I mean, it's no easy task, of course, to just become a senior CCP official, let alone, you know, the first of my—it wasn't easy to become Hujin Tower, James, in. So to get to that position and then, you know, achieve something like absolute power, you know, how did he actually do it? I think he used a combination of ideology, so psych, which is, you know, in their case, it's psychological warfare. It's controlling the narrative, controlling the

way people think, and making sure that everybody agrees that your version of the truth, and this is, of course, not the truth based on science or based on actual objective facts or, you know, empirical evidence, but it's it's a created narrative, right? That you control that. So he was the president of the Central Party School, the CCP Central Party school. So the Chinese Communist Party, in many ways it's like an atheist church. It's the best way to describe it. It's state-driven religion that it does reject God. It rejects any kind of universal values. But it does believe in the idea that you can create perfect government and you can have heaven on earth essentially that it can be manmade. And so you have the central party school, which is the

it's the elite of the elite in their training system. And then you have lesser schools at the provincial level and the municipal level. You have 3,000 training centers where Chinese Communist Party members train. And this is a political party of 95 plus million members. He was the president. He was the of their highest training institution for about five years before he rose to Paramount leader and used that in combination with his other political savvy to gain control of ideology, essentially. It would be like if you were a scholar of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and you had a proven track record of dominating.

the discussion on what it means to be an American, right? Essentially, you know, at a fundamental level, and you can get everybody to agree that your version of America is the best version. That's essentially what he's done. And then since he's taken power, he's been able to use violence and terror tactics to create this climate of fear, this remarkable environment of fear. I have it on good authority from a variety of Chinese publications that it's simply a scourge of the corrupt. He's an anti-corruption figure. How does that play into all of this? Yeah. So he is, he's done all of this under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign. Now, corruption is endemic in the People's Republic of China. And the irony, the great irony of the

narrative that he's created around himself being a fighter of corruption is what he's done is actually increased corruption in China. This was a problem that existed before and it was it was really, really bad. He's actually made it worse because we all know that if you want to fight corruption, the three greatest weapons against corruption is free media. So investigative journalism, in other words, transparency, right? That's the best way to fight corruption. But you also need an independent judiciary. You can't have your lawyers and judges and courts be controlled by those who are corrupt, right, by the leaders. And of course, you also need checks and balances in the form of a Congress or a parliament or a diet, another political party or multiple

political parties that will hold your feet to the fire when you make mistakes. He's made sure that none of that happens in China, that when you have a one-party dictatorship with no free media, no free judiciary, no alternative political parties, or even strong alternative political factions within the CCP, it makes corruption so much worse. Yeah. The question about ideology, which is a sort of perennially hot topic amongst those of us who are interested in China and policy towards China here in the United States. So you mentioned she's, you know, sort of academic position, if you will, over the course of his career, you know, formulating what it is that the party is actually about and for.

In the last administration, I thought that the Pompeo State Department, my personal view is they did a good job. I'm curious to know your view. Their policy planning team produced this report on, you know, Chinese strategy objectives, the nature of the regime in which they took the strong view that there are two fundamental, you know, sources. of Chinese conduct. One is essentially nationalism. And the other is, you know, socialism. Marxist, Londonism, call it what you like. Good old fashion socialism. And this, you know, I think earlier in my own career, when I wasn't, like a lot of people my age, I was mostly focused on the Middle East, served in the Middle East. I was not particularly focused on China until recent years when sort of everyone has become focused on China. I would have sort of casually told you, you know,

if you'd ask me 10 or 15 years ago, oh yeah, you know, the PRC says it's communist, but let's honest, they're all capitalists now. It's a bit of an oligarchy. And the Pompeo State Department took a very different view with it. No, actually, there is some authentic socialism that is important to Xi's worldview and the CCP's view. What's your take on that? Absolutely. That's absolutely true. That if we want to understand the foreign policy of China, if we want to understand their strategy, their strategic objectives, the plans for the future, we have to read what they write. And by they, of course, I mean the Chinese Communist Party rulers, the elite. And in this case, Xi Jinping, because it is a one-man dictatorship, have to read what they write, have to listen to what they say, especially in important speeches. And then we have to watch what they do, how they spend their money, how they behave in the international community, how they behave at home, how they treat their own people. And if you do that and you think about the implications of that for the, the future and the future of US PRC strategic competition, I think is what we're most concerned

about. The implications in this case are stark. They are stark. The conclusion that, and Eric, I would have completely agreed with you 10 or 15 years ago, maybe even five years ago, absolutely. But having spent three years with, you know, my head and Chi Chi Jinping thought, I believe, and I think I've shown in this book that China's government has a plan for world domination. And that plan appears to be working and it's driven by their ideology.

So in a world where in 1949, the mainland of China did not fall to the Chinese Communist Party, but instead, let's say the KMT were the rulers of China, you know, maybe we would have issues with China today. But I mean, this is in a way a kind of impossible question, but I'm just curious to know your review. you know, would they be of the same nature? Do we think China would have become, you know, sort of more Western in the way that Japan and Korea and Taiwan have become Western? You know, to what extent does the communism matter, I guess, is what I'm trying to drive at. There are tens of millions of people who died in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, who would not have died. So you would probably have, by the way, many of those people were the elite. They were the best

and the brightest of China, the intellectuals, the professors, the writers, the philosophers, the thinkers, the great musicians, the great poets, the great artists, the great political thinkers. These were the types that the Chinese Communist Party destroyed. Because again, this is a totalitarian system, and it destroys any potential opposition. We will imagine. And so you want to go after elites, essentially. So if the Chinese Communist Party would have lost the Chinese Civil War, and you look at Chiang Kai Shack and his regime, which was deeply corrupt, it was deeply authoritarian, it was also a

dictatorship, but it was much more liberal and much closer to the United States. And we can't prove this. You can never prove it counterfactual. We don't know how things were played out. But I think today we'd be looking at a much more liberal, much more open, and much more successful China. So in terms of your sources, you talk about this pivotal, I guess, 2018 speech that she delivers at the party Congress. What, what, you know, from she's own words, whether it's that, whether it's the compilations of his thought, you know, what is his view of the world and what

at the highest level is the plan here? So at the highest level, Xi Jinping wants to re-engineer human society as we know it. And he wants to create what. they referred to as a new world order. Xi Jinping talks about world socialism and international communism. I had no idea what that was. I had never been educated in communist philosophy. I didn't know what Marx had written. All I knew three years ago is that in these speeches,

Xi Jinping kept talking about Marx and what a hero Marx was and how Marx was the greatest thinker in the history of the world, that in the entire history of humankind, Karl Marx was the greatest thinker. And the Communist Manifesto was the greatest document that had ever been written. And so I had to go back and I read the Communist Manifesto and then I read speeches that Xi Jinping was given. And then I read textbooks, both the elementary school level and all the way up to the grad school level at the Central Party School on what is Xi Jinping thought? Xi Jinping thought is Marxism. It's 21st century Marxism.

Xi Jinping believes he has the purest interpretation of Marx, and it's better even than what Mao had or what Lenin had. So if you think of this as an atheist religion, and if you say Marx was the greatest thinker in human history, the logical conclusion of that is, it's like a religiously, saying that God is talking to him and only he knows the truth. That's essentially what Xi Jinping is saying. That's what he's telling everybody in China. That is incredible. Talk about megalomania, right? But that's essentially what he's saying.

And so what's the plans to the future? World socialism is this theoretical, philosophical idea that you can create a one-party dictatorship, the way the Soviet Union did, and then they exported that abroad to countries all around the world, including, of course, China, and that you can then continue to export that until all countries everywhere, through a process of subversion and revolution and civil war will become one-party dictatorships along your model. And this is what George Orwell writes about in his famous novel 1984, that all countries end up becoming these socialist one-party dictatorships,

and that is world socialism. And it's a centralized system. So in Xi Jinping's idea, in his telling of the story, one day, perhaps one day soon, all countries in the world will be dominated by China. They'll follow China's governance model, which is superior to all others, and especially superior to the American model, according to Xi Jinping's telling, and we'll have world socialism. And then somehow by some magical force, and this is never described in any detail,

there's this quasi-religious faith that borders between nations will fall away, and governments will even fall away. And we will have peace on earth, perfect justice, perfect equality, essentially will have heaven on earth. And that is the idea of international communism, that you'll have a one-world government and it will be perfect. We're going to move towards perfection. It is radical.

It's actually radical and it's not humanistic at all, but that's what his writing say. What is the evidence kind of an impossible question in a way, but I think an important one, why should we be so confident that this is sincerely held belief rather than, as it were, cynical appropriation of Marx as part of a political project that actually is grounded in more realistic visions of human nature and of politics. That might be, for example, more influenced by Chinese nationalism than communism, et cetera. Well, ironically, nationalism is a big part of this. So Xi Jinping is very deeply nationalistic. And his idea is that China has a special model. And of course, his version of China and Chinese civilization is the version that

the Chinese Communist Party has created. They've created this narrative, this myth of Chinese civilization, which they claim to represent. According to him, Chinese people in their DNA are superior. It's pretty wild. It echoes a little bit of Nazi thought, that there's a racial superiority piece to it. There's a cultural superiority piece to it. And that others have to follow the Chinese. these models. So nationalism is part of this project as well. So even though Karl Marx was very

internationalistic in outlook, he was globalistic in outlook. Xi Jinping is taking that piece on board, but he's also infusing it with this deep, deep nationalism. Ultra nationalism is really what it is. It's very extremist. And so your question was, it's a wonderful question, is, How do we know that this is not just a cynical power play? Because it certainly could be, right? What's evidence that suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is actually trying to put this wild extremist ideology into practice? So here we have to look at how they spend their money. That's critical.

And if you look at how they spend their money and the things that they're doing in the economic sphere to, create spheres of influence around the world through one belt, one road, what is now referred to as the Belt Road Initiative, BRI. They are spreading their models through basic infrastructure, but also digital infrastructure. They've created the world's largest telecommunications provider. China Grid, which is the state of enterprise, is now the world's largest provider of electricity around the world. by far, nobody else comes close. And they're exporting that and they're rewiring the internet. So everybody's data flows through Chinese Communist Party controlled server farms in Beijing

and elsewhere in the PRC. They're relating the rules of the road at the United Nations. They are using an industrial policy, the likes of which the world has never seen before, to control all strategic domains, everything from, again. telecommunications, chips, electronics, consumer electronics, drones, all the way to pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals. They have systematically identified all the technologies and all the pieces of the market that will drive the future of the world economy that everybody will depend on for the

livelihoods. And they plan to absolutely dominate it to create monopolies or where monopolies are not possible to create cartels of CCP-controlled, mega-corporation. And they're willing to lose a tremendous amount of money in the process. So there's this narrative that the CCP is driven by economic considerations. But of course, now we know that's not true. We've seen what has happened to a number of Chinese companies, very large companies, a number of Chinese billionaires.

We've seen what's happened. We've seen Xi Jinping and the party go against basic fundamental economic principles. They're willing to handle. hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in the process to achieve their strategic objectives. They're also building military bases around the world. They're using their state-owned enterprise and all the infrastructure they're building to create military bases. All of this is indicative of a regime and of a leader who's driven not by rational calculations, economic calculations, political calculations, or otherwise the way we would see it as rational. But he's driven.

by ideology. And this is a party that is driven by ideology. So just a quick note on the racial dimension to all of this, because I think it's important. And then I want to keep pressing you on this point because I think it's in a way it is the heart of the matter. But it's actually as surprising as it may seem that you would have a party devoted on the one hand to, you know, a post-national socialist future that, you know, encompasses the whole of humanity. And on the other hand, a deeply racist vision about Han superiority. So that's not even that creative of an unholy compromise. I mean, this is Heidegger and Nietzsche, that the party would be for China, the vessel of humanity's unfolding, but then that the Han people would be for Earth, the vessel of humanity's

progress. That kind of structure of an idea has long provenance amongst European philosophers, though typically with respect to the German people. So some of what you described, though, in terms of the structures of, you know, imperialism that the CCP is building, whether they are, whether we're talking about infrastructure, whether we're talking about military bases, et cetera. Okay, fine. I'm going to sort of play devil's advocate here. You've demonstrated, Ian, that there is a bid for certainly regional hegemony at play here. We might go further and say something like Eurasian and Pacific hegemony is the goal.

but can you demonstrate with the pattern of facts available to you, the kinds of things you were just citing, that the vision is truly a, is truly the exportation of a form of government as well? Because that question is critical in terms of how we plan to deal with it and how we predict the Chinese may or may not, you know, draw lines for themselves at given points. I mean, if another way I've asked the question is if the Chinese goal is something like the return of the middle kingdom with, you know, associated. sat rapes and tribute states, but they can continue to sort of be themselves so long as they genuflect to China. Well, that's one kind of vision of the end of all this. And you could plan to deal with the bid for that in one way. And a vision where everyone essentially has to be a communist similar to the Soviet Union's vision in its early days. Well, that's quite different, sort of global revolution. So how do you, and it seems to me you're more in the latter camp.

How do you get there? Well, I read Xi Jinping. I mean, and this is why I spent so much time in the book quoting Xi Jinping and quoting authoritative textbooks on Xi Jinping's awe. I myself didn't believe it when I started this project. I did not have a central thesis that was driving the research. I had a number of research questions that were driving the research. And one of my questions was, does China have a grand strategy?

and if so, what is it? And how might we know? What is the objective? What's the big aim? What's the big story here? And if you read Xi Jinping's thought, you know, read what Xi Jinping has written and listen to what he says. This is what he talks about all the time. Talks about it all the time.

And then you look at the way they spend their money, the way they've done restructuring in very difficult to do ways, politically very difficult, not expedient at all. It becomes clear that they're actually trying to put this into practice. It's Bolshevism. It really is. They're trying to re-engineer Chinese society, which is why they've created this massive Orwellian surveillance and control complex, and they're exporting that complex around the world. So that freedom of speech and universal values, as we know them are dying out. And so if you look, there are studies that have been done, I know Hal Brantz and Michael Beckley recently talked on this podcast about this. Research that has been done.

And I listened to that program and I loved it. Research has been done that's shown that countries that sign on to China's One Belt One Road project or is One Belt One Road or BRI strategy, those that are vulnerable democracies end up becoming authoritarian states. those that are authoritarian states already become more deeply authoritarian. They build what are referred to as smart cities. What's the smart cities? It's a Ruelian surveillance and command complex. That China is exporting these tools of control around the world. They're supporting Marxist groups around the world,

the Marxist regimes around the world, but they're also supporting other dictatorships around the world because there's this idea that they have that what happens to one authoritarian system affects them all. Just as many people in free and open liberal democracies would say, what happens to one of us affects all of us, which is why we don't want to see a country like Ukraine get invaded and occupied by Russia. We don't want to see South Korea get invaded.

We don't want to see Taiwan get invaded. What happens to what democracy affects them all. The Chinese Communist Party has a similar conviction that what happens to one dictatorship matters to them all. And so they're exporting tools of repression. And in fact, and this is one of the more troubling aspects of it, is this is at play here in the United States of America, that freedom of speech in our own country is now under assault.

I mean, you can look at a number of different case studies. There was one last year that really stuck out to me. There was an employee at Marriott International in Omaha, Nebraska, who was fired for a tweet. He tweeted or retweeted something that the Dalai Lama headset. And the Chinese government saw that. Somehow they were monitoring that. And they put so much pressure on Marriott International,

which is a massive corporation as over 100,000 employees worldwide. They had so much pressure applied to them that they had to fire this poor guy for a tweet. And of course, we've seen that happen in the NBA, right? where some of the NBA's finest players, if they speak out in, you know, it's supportive of freedom for home call or freedom for the weaker people, freedom for Taiwan, you know, they can get fired. This is what we now live in, even in the United States of America. And so I think the evidence is overwhelming that China is in the process of exporting its political ideology and its model of governance. So we have this important party convening coming up this fall, which maybe you can tell us a little bit about.

And I want to ask you a question about she's supremacy. There's a contrarian strain of thought out there at Lovac, great contrarian, that we should not take it for granted that she's sort of continuing elevation into near mythic status is going to continue a pace at this party Congress. that between the collapse in the Chinese real estate market, which is extremely severe, much more severe. I mean, it looks severe, and we obviously only have highly incomplete access to the actual numbers we would need to see to see how bad it is. So you have that, you have the ongoing sort of insane COVID shutdown strategy there,

which given the nature of the virus today is obviously irrational, but for some reason they continue to stick to it. You know, if she's rise tracked with increasing, international prestige and power and economic growth, how he can continue to rise when, you know, at a minimum, Chinese economic growth seems to be grinding to a halt, or at least coming in for very, you know, very rough weather. Why should we, why should we be so sure? Why is, why should she be so sure that this fall is going to see a kind of continuation of his consolidation of power?

Well, I don't think we should be sure. And I'm sure that Xi Jinping is not sure, that this is a guy who suffers from a god complex but he's also deeply paranoid in the same way that stolen was deeply paranoid and Mao was deeply paranoid it's one of the great ironies of gaining total control absolute control is once you have it you still don't have a fundamental deep sense of personal security for yourself for your family for your ideas and so this is when you constantly have to continue ratcheting it up and finding new ways to stay in power and to grow your power. And it's a process that never ends, which is why these types of regimes are so dangerous. I think there is a happy, comforting story that we tell ourselves, at least in

Washington. And the story goes something like this. All of the problems that we see today, which China are Xi Jinping's fault, or at least are mostly Xi Jinping's fault. That because China now has a one-party dictatorship, and it really is about the man Xi Jinping, if he were to lose

power in some kind of struggle, you know, inter-party struggle, or say he was assassinated, or say he had an untimely death due to a health issue, he's 69 years old, so he could easily live for another 20 to 30 years, but say that didn't happen. happen, then somehow we would snap back to the China that we believed that we had prior to

Xi Jinping, or at least prior to Hu Jintao before 2008, before the Olympics in 2008. So in other words, a China that is authoritarian, but it's much more rational, it's much more mild-mannered. This is a China that we can live with, and we can compete against them and it's not, you know, the stakes are not the entire future of the world. world. That's a comforting story. I don't think that story is based in the facts because the problem is not just Xi Jinping and it's not just the Chinese Communist Party. It's both. It's the Chinese Communist Party produced Xi Jinping. And as long as the Chinese Communist Party

continues to exist, it will continue to produce various forms of Xi Jinping. That if you want to to power. You want to become the chairman in the PRC. You have to do these types of things. Xi Jinping is unique because he's so transparent, actually, about what he's trying to achieve. He's so open about it. But Hujintel, his predecessor, was also a dictator. He also did things that were terrible for China and for U.S.-China relations, especially in the wake of the 2000-Dade Olympics. His predecessor, John Simeet, also did things that were terrible. So did Deng Xiaoping.

We just tended to ignore these types of things because, again, we believed in this fairytale that we could change China just by trading with China and by showing goodwill. So when she looks around the table at his fellow Politburo members, who do you think he eyes with the most concern and suspicion and why? There's no way to know. We just don't have the insights, or at least I don't have the insights, into the personal dynamics between the most powerful elites in the Chinese Communist Party. There's a lot of rumors, but we can't say for sure. We can traffic in rumors here.

You know, feel free to feel free to do. Okay. Well, let me dish that. Look at what happened in March of 2020. I think that's a telling story. In 2020, there is this terrible outbreak of COVID-19. Wuhan was in lockdown, February, March 2020. Xi Jinping disappears.

He doesn't visit ground zero of the pandemic. He doesn't go to the hospital in Wuhan. He stays back in Zhongnan Heights. He stays in antiseptic, completely isolated splendor of the leadership complex. in Beijing. Earlier you asked what Kremlin ology would be when it comes to China. It would be a mouthful. It would be Zhongnanhaiology, right? Because Zhongnanhai is the Kremlin in Beijing. Yeah, that's a tough. So what does Xi Jinping do? He sends Li Kuchang. He says the premier down

as his personal representative to Wuhan. Why does he do that? Because if the pandemic spins out of control and if it really goes sideways for China, Xi Jinping can put all of the blame on Lee Kuchamp. It's all Lee Kuchang's fault. He takes the burden. It's not the paramount leader that was at fault. It was the Likuchamp. More recently with the, it was referred to as the COVID Olympics

of that, the pandemic Olympics, or the genocide Olympics in Beijing, the Winter Games, this happened to get where Xi Jinping appointed, one of the top Politburo members to take responsibility for the Winter Olympics in Beijing, and he did not take that responsibility. You can bet if there's a future attack on Taiwan, the same thing will happen. Where somebody on the Politburo standing committee will have to own that operation. And if it goes well, Xi Jinping will take all the credit. if it goes sideways, that person will be perched and all those around that person will be purged.

It'll be all the other fault. Well, actually, I'm glad you mentioned Taiwan because I know I want to be respectful of your time here, but let's finish on Taiwan. I learned a tremendous amount from your book, The Chinese Invasion Threat, at a very granular level. I mean, it's really fascinating research into the PLA order of battle, you know, what an assault would actually look like, what the challenges for the PLA actually were. And I came away from reading that book, actually, honestly, slightly more bullish on the defense of Taiwan than I had gone into the book with. I left feeling a little bit reassured at the complexities and difficulties of such an operation and the sort of natural advantages that Taiwanese would have.

Are you still as optimistic? That may be the wrong word. Do you still have the same balance of optimism and concern did when you wrote that book, What's your view of the situation today and the like PLA, CC, PLA, and et cetera? Success should they mount an attempt as, you know, how Brands and Michael Beckley think is possible, you know, 2025, 2026, et cetera. I'm much less optimistic than I was. So that book was published in October of 2017. So five years ago.

And at that time, I was very happy to learn everything that I learned in the course of research. That book took three, four years of research and over 10 years of inquiry. This is something that I had been fascinated by from my time living in Taiwan and then also when I came back to D.C. And I worked as an entry-level China analyst at the Navy and Raycourse think tank. I had always been interested in this. And the more research that I did, the more reassured I became.

Because when you read the training manuals and the technical studies that the PLA had produced over a long period of time on future Taiwan blockade and invasion operations, they were very reassuring because what they said essentially was this would be the most complex and dangerous campaign we could possibly undertake. this is our worst war plan by far it would be extremely hard and we're not ready and here are the 10 or the hundred reasons we're not ready and here's our vision for how we must get ready so five years ago or even longer all of this was aspirational they had a vision for what would be required to actually be ready to invade and occupy Taiwan while also defeating the u.s military in the western pacific

because they have to assume the u.s. will integrate and defend Taiwan, along with Japan and others. They have to be ready to fight multiple, multiple powers. And so I looked at that, and I looked at what the Taiwanese were writing. I looked at what they were doing. I also read the Taiwanese military technical rioting. And then I looked at what I thought was happening in terms of the defense reforms in Taiwan and reforms in U.S. Taiwan, defense and security relations.

And I walked away feeling worried about the rising threat. And I talked about that in the book, but also reassured by this idea that, wow, the PLA is a long way to go. And they're probably not going to be able to make the kinds of reforms, structural reforms that they would need to make. And the CCP more broadly is probably not going to be able to militarize Chinese society in the way they would need to do. And Xi Jinping is probably not going to be able to centralize power in the kind of ways he would need to do. in order to actually get to a place where they could feel confident that they could actually pull this off. Well, over the past five years, they've started to check all the blocks one by one by one. And it is really disquieting how they've done that.

And so we're now looking at China engaged in the largest peacetime military buildup the world has seen in at least 100 years, maybe ever. It is absolutely massive. They are militarizing all of Chinese society. They are preparing for an invasion and occupation of Taiwan across every domain in ways that five years ago, I didn't even believe it was possible. And so I'm increasingly pessimistic because at a certain point, you have to think that their acquisition of capabilities is a signal of intent. So it's one thing for them to have this very aggressive and hostile rhetoric and talk about taking Taiwan, right? That's one thing. That's just rhetorical.

It's a very different thing when Xi Jinping is spending so much political capital actually preparing down to very, down to the very granular level. You know, building a brigade system or a battalion, you know, building battalias to do this, or before they had, you know, heavy divisions that were going to be clunky and we're not going to work. Doing things like military civil fusion. So you're militarizing Chinese society. Doing things like the massive purges that we spoke about so that you don't have any opposition when you do give the order. You know, all these types of things are very troubling that all the indications that we currently have available to us suggest that they're very, very seriously preparing. for an invasion of Taiwan, that they know what their challenges are,

they know what their shortcomings are, they know what they need to do, and they're actually spending the money to do it. Just to finish. That's worrisome. So I'm much more pessimistic. Just to finish on a sort of tactical operational note, okay, fine, I hear everything you say. And yet, you know, on D minus one,

a lot of Chinese troops are going to have to get onto ferries and conveyances is to get across what's a pretty wide straight, and they're going to be en route to only a handful of possible destinations, and they're going to be very vulnerable to anti-shipmish soils and any number of other mechanisms. How does the PLA and the PLA Navy intend to overcome the obvious challenges of an amphibious operation of that scale against a target that at least at a strategic level we'll see it coming?

Well, if there are doctorate calls for destroying the eyes and years of Taiwan and the United States. So the first thing that you would see is an information blackout. They would destroy all of Taiwan's early warning capabilities, their surveillance radar air surveillance, sea surveillance, undersea surveillance, knockout their listening posts, knock out their electric grid, just completely blind them. There would be a blinding campaign that would go on. There would be a campaign to assassinate key leaders in Taiwan from the president to all

the top ministers to generals, admirals, to activate units or sleeper cells that they almost certainly had in Taiwan to conduct sabotage missions. So this is how they think it could unfold. And of course, this is all theoretical. Nothing like this has ever happened before. We've never seen a war like this. So it would be the ultimate gamble. And it would be extremely difficult to pull off. would have to be a madman to try it. You really would. When you look at the death and instruction that would result from an attempt on Taiwan, especially in an amphibious assault, you would have to be a madman to order that. But the conclusion of my new book, the final struggle is, I think we are dealing with a manman in Beijing. I think if, you know,

If you look at Xi Jinping's personal ideology and his behavior, it suggests that he has much more in common with Hitler or Stalin or Mao than he does with any kind of more rational leader, the likes of which we're more comfortable with. And so if we mirror image, you know, if our policymakers mirror image and they project their own values and our worldview onto China, I think that's a mistake. Reading 2017, Ian, led me to sleep better at night than reading and talking to 2022, Ian. So there is a positive side of this story. It's not all dark, and I'm not entirely pessimistic. I'm also quite optimistic in a way because in many ways, the Chinese Communist Party's global strategy is working not because China's leaders play Go and our leaders play chess, not because of, you know, what ancient Greek history tells us, you know, the lucidities and the rise and the fall of great powers, not at all. The reason their strategy appears to be working,

and I say appears because we don't know. Future historians 20 years from now will know if it's actually worked or not, but it does appear to be working. And the reason it appears to be working is because the United States government and the United States of America, our society is actually helping it along. We're actually helping China achieve its strategic objectives. And so what that means? And so we talk about great ball of competition. We talk about strategic competition. But we're not actually acting like it.

Once we begin to act like it, and I think that's the trend, I think that's what we're going to see in the months and years ahead, once we become more competitive, and we stop supporting the CCP strategic goals, then we're going to completely change the state of play. That our country, our economy is still by far the most dynamic in the world. Our military is still the most powerful in the world. And we have a tremendous latent capability to be dynamic, to do things that are surprising, and to create a new and better future,

and to do it while avoiding war, to do it in a peaceful fashion. So I think once we get brilliant on the basics, that we'll be in a much better place. We're not there yet. I think there's still deliberations going on. We're still at a process of kind of waking up as a nation. We're still learning about things like the fundamentals of China's government and who they are, what they are, what they're trying to achieve. But we're going to get there.

And what we do, I think, we're going to do. things that are likely to be very positive. Ian, I've learned a lot, seriously, and I'm grateful to you for coming on the show. So this is Ian Easton, author of The Final Struggle Inside China's Global Strategy. Thanks for joining Ian. Aaron, thank you.

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