Today, Explained - Made in China

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Chinese President Xi Jinping is a product of Mao Zedong’s revolution. On Sunday, he'll become the most powerful Chinese leader since the Communist Party’s founder — and maybe the most powerful person in the world. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Additional production and fact checking by Siona Peterous, Avishay Artsy, Hady Mawajdeh, and Jillian Weinberger Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What are your plans this weekend? Xi Jinping plans on becoming the most powerful person on planet Earth. This weekend in China, we'll have arguably the biggest political event in a decade, if not for longer. All the bigwigs in the Chinese Communist Party are coming together in Beijing for the Party Congress. It's where they pick new leadership. But this year is especially important because this year Xi Jinping will be confirmed as ruler for at least another five years, if not for the rest of his life. And that hasn't happened since Mao Zedong. Xi Jinping is now one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful man on earth.

When it comes to control over his own country, well, Xi Jinping has a head start on basically any other leader out there. That's what's coming on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today, I explain Sean Ramos from here with the Washington Post's China correspondent, Christian Shepard, who is currently based in Taipei, and is going to tell us Xi Jinping's origin story just in time for Xi to become maybe like, I don't know, Thanos.

Well, Xi Jinping's entry into politics basically began at birth. So he is the son of two really important revolutionary figures in China. His father, Xi Zhongshan, and his mother, Qi Xin, these are both people who were at the party from very early days. They got married in a cave near Yan'an, which is the kind of revolutionary base where Mao Zedong was launching his counterattack on the ruling party at the time. And he grew up in Beijing, you know, very close to the halls of power in one of these compounds for the children of the party elites. So he really was kind of born into this red heritage. But that wasn't always easy for him because being the son of a revolutionary in Mao's China could mean that you fall out of favor. And that's exactly what happened to his father, Xi Zhongxun.

Xi Zhongxun had a fallout with Mao Zedong to an extent, largely because he rose up to become the head of the propaganda department and allowed a publication of a book which was seen to be critical of Mao's version of history. So in the early 60s, Xi Zhongshun gets sent away. He gets basically put into exile. And that leaves Xi to fend for himself. He doesn't get kicked out of school. So he's still in Beijing. He's still attending what is a school for the children of leaders. But he is no one who can really look after him anymore. He's bullied. He has less access to resources than he would have otherwise had. You have accounts of him going hungry. So it's a really tough time. And after that goes on for a few years, he has this kind of option to get out. And the way he does that is he kind of

signs up for this program, which probably would have been forced on him anyway, of going down to a small village in the northwest of the country to work as what was called a sent-down youth. At 16, they're sent out to work and learn humility for five long years in the countryside. For even the brightest children, the long stretch of manual labor is the only route to university. The few who do make the return journey will have been chosen by their workmates. So these are educated people from the cities who Mao thought had kind of become too

removed from the circumstances of everyday China. So they went to learn from the local farmers to try and understand what the real China was like. It is considered useful for leaders and cadres especially to learn the class feeling of laborers and peasants in order to overcome bureaucracy and prevent revisionism. And he's there for seven years and it's pretty hard work. He has to dig wells. He has to read by candlelight. But he seems to have a go of it. After a tough period, he becomes quite friendly with the villagers, according to his own accounts. And he begins to see the value of what he's doing. And so he begins to turn it into a self-sacrificing narrative. And that continues all the way until his father is rehabilitated and he is able to then return to Beijing and go to university.

So in this trying time where Xi is basically living in poverty, his parents have been ostracized. Does his faith, even as a kid in the Chinese Communist Party, falter? Well, it's hard to know how much he wrestled with this idea of loyalty to the party, because most of what we rely on now are his own accounts of this time. He will talk about things like digging wells and, you know, doing manual labor at this time as being a kind of a cleansing experience. And, you know, since he's got into power, he sometimes refers back to this period as why he's spent so much time focusing on alleviating poverty, which has been one of his main policy campaigns. So there was a way in which, even though the party in some senses rejected him, he kind of turned back to the party and its overall mission as a way of trying to rehabilitate himself. So the job he actually

gets is as a very junior secretary to the Ministry of Defense. But then he kind of takes a left turn and he goes and gets a job in a small town, not too far from Beijing, but not particularly rich. And that kind of shift, it seems to be a bit of a bet that he's going to rise higher later on. Because if you stay in the military and he kind of stuck with his current path, he could never have become a top leader. He wouldn't have had that experience that you need, kind of governing different parts of the country, being a civilian leader. And so he kind of makes this shift where it seems like he already knows he wants to move up and do bigger things.

When do we start to see hints of his authoritarian tendencies? Well, it's hard to say when they began or if they were always there, but in the kind of written record, I think some of the first signs we have comes from when he moved to Fujian in southern China, the province across from Taiwan. And there he is a leader of a small town at the time when you have the Tiananmen Square protests. Students everywhere are excited about the idea of China changing. Protesters stressed that they're not denouncing the Communist Party, but insisted they'll keep marching until officials agree in ongoing negotiations to more open local elections and to fair coverage of the protests in local media. And so at this time, Xi Jinping is dealing with the local offshoots of these protests.

It is a time that the whole country feel the hope and then the promises by the government. There are some students who want to come in from a neighboring province to sort of protest at the larger city nearby, and he prevents them from doing that. You know, a lot of people are arrested. It's hard to say how many Xi Jinping was directly involved in, but certainly he would have, to some extent, managed the crackdown locally. He says that censorship is actually something that every country does. And to an extent, it's a good thing.

And so you really get this sense that even then, even when he was a lowly official and he didn't really have any stake in it, that he was out to defend the party center. And is this how he goes from being a lowly official to a not so lowly official? Right, exactly. So he proves himself a number of times. He seems to be pretty tough on corruption. He also is someone who does a reasonably good job of pushing China's market reforms, involved in free trade zones being set up in Fujian. You know, he's

someone who manages to start to meld the economic reform with quite a stern approach to any dissent. And so that model, which we now see kind of continuing to today, it sort of runs throughout his career. And is there any sense when he enters office in 2012, that he could potentially be China's first ever president for life? One of the strange things about what has happened over the last decade is that when Xi came into power, a lot of outside observers thought he was probably going to be a reformer. And one of the reasons they thought this is they looked at his father, who seemed to be, you know, by standards of the time, a relative reformer. He had pushed economic reforms in southern China and Deng Xiaoping. And they looked at Xi's own record. He had, you know,

launched free trade zones and had encouraged private business. And they thought, okay, China's pretty open now. They just hosted the Summer Olympics. We just had this power transition that went pretty smoothly. Maybe this is a time when things will change. But pretty soon afterwards, Xi Jinping showed everyone to be wrong. More with Christian in a minute on Today Explained. with family and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, today explained, still here with Christian Shepard from the Washington Post talking about who could be the most powerful person in the world. Xi Jinping, he's brought in in 2012. People think he's going to be some sort of liberal reformer. And Christian, he proves them wrong.

That's right. Almost immediately, he launches this huge anti-corruption campaign. And he goes after not just kind of low-level corruption, but some of the top people in the party. In fact, one of the most senior person who has ever been taken down falls within Xi's first couple of years in office, the former head of public security, Zhou Yongkang. At a secret trial in northeast China, Zhou convicted for bribery, abuse of power,

and leaking national secrets. And then, in pretty short order, he cracks down on civil society. He begins this series of political reforms, forcing people to start memorizing more kind of party jargon and slogans, these study sessions. And in 2016, he's designated the core leader of the party, which is a title that hasn't existed for about two decades. Is it that kind of consolidation of power that allows him to clamp down on the Uyghur population in China? It's part of it. But for Xi Jinping, really, stability and unity are just absolutely key. In Xinjiang, there have been a series of violent incidents. First, it was a deadly explosion at this train station. Then assailants slashed at arriving passengers with knives.

There have been calls for kind of greater autonomy. And he's kind of worried that this is going to start fracturing, start spiraling. Soon after, China's official broadcaster quoting the president blamed the country's separatists. We must recognize the long-term, complex and acute nature of the struggle between separatism and anti-separatism in Xinjiang. It could be something that could spread to other regions. Inner Mongolia, Tibet, obviously, has always been a deep concern for the party. So he kind of comes in and says, you know, enough with this. We cannot accept this dissent

and brands it as extremism and launches a re-education campaign in Xinjiang. Yeah. When exactly is it that the world comes to know Xi as not just a very powerful dude, but a human rights violator? It starts probably around 2015 when there's a mass crackdown on human rights lawyers. Hundreds of people overnight are detained, arrested. Many of them later end up with lengthy prison sentences. China put its state police on display as the show trial of its best-known human rights lawyer

got underway inside Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court. And then after that, you just start to see that this isn't a one-off, this is a trend. We have the crackdown in Xinjiang. After that, you just start to see that this isn't a one-off, this is a trend. We have the crackdown in Xinjiang. Any Uyghur family you can ask, have someone in the camp right now, maybe whole family. The crackdown in Hong Kong. This morning thousands of protesters on Hong Kong streets clashing with riot police.

Barriers torn down, rubber bullets and tear gas fired into the chaos. It's very clear that Xi is determined as much as possible not to let any of these grassroots movements, whether it's right activism or distinct ethnic identity, from challenging his grip on power. And this essentially works, right? Nothing really stops him because in 2018, despite human rights abuses and consolidating power, China ends term limits setting Xi up to do what he's doing right now, to become president for life,

to extend his terms more than anyone has before him. Xi Jinping has done a pretty good job of building up a base of legitimacy. So his anti-corruption campaign, which helped him to gather power, that dealt with a lot of the kind of petty corruption that was really impacting people's lives on an everyday basis. He also had a huge push to deal with extreme poverty, which was declared successful. He's kind of made China look strong on a global stage. He's not shied away from conflicts with the US or other countries. I mean, nationalism is a great way of building your support in any country. We can't continue to allow China to rape our country,

and that's what they're doing. You know, he's a real populist leader. And so, yes, I think people are concerned, but they don't necessarily think that he's doing a bad job. Until the global pandemic, COVID-19. At the start of 2020, it looked like it was a big, big issue. Xi kind of disappeared for a while. And then he reappears and imposes the strictest lockdown that, at the time, you have to remember, this wasn't something that had happened globally, that had ever been done before.

This was a huge, huge thing. People also started to ask questions about whether or not Xi's mode of governance, where so much decision-making power was in his own hands, had slowed down the response. The local officials weren't acting fast enough. So it really seemed like it was going to undermine his power, or at least be a black mark. But pretty quickly, China turns things around. And that's one of the kind of amazing things about what Xi's been able to do as a leader, is he was able to build this narrative of, look, we have a model that works. Yes, people made sacrifices, but ultimately those sacrifices allowed us to achieve zero COVID. So for many, many months, China was having basically no cases

on a day-to-day basis. And at the same time, the rest of the world, as we all know, was struggling with huge outbreaks. So Xi was able to flip the narrative and to say, look, we have a system that works. And yes, maybe it stumbles occasionally, but we get it back on track. As Xi enters his third term, as he becomes maybe the most powerful leader in the world, and certainly the most powerful leader in China since Mao Zedong, in earnest, how much does his version of, you know, consolidated power look like the last time China saw it in Mao Zedong? There are some similarities and I think bigger differences.

So Mao Zedong was really a revolutionary leader. He came to power through political infighting and then a civil war. He then tried to keep power with these really kind of drastic steps, including launching the Cultural Revolution, which kind of handed power over to the people in a way that Xi Jinping would just never do. So Xi is much more cautious. His power has been built by centralizing the institutions of control that the party has had for a long time and making sure that he has firm hold of the levers of power. So he is kind of working within the system, building it around himself, whereas Mao would go around it on a fairly regular basis. But in some ways they are similar because

I think in the collective memory of the party, in the way that it talks about itself, Xi Jinping is trying to kind of continue where Mao left off. So Mao founded the nation, and now Xi Jinping is trying to make it great again. And so he has this phrase where China has stood up, which was what Mao said, and then it got rich, which is what Deng Xiaoping made happen with reform. And now it's getting strong. And that's the kind of new era that Xi Jinping is trying to take charge of so that he can have a legacy which is on par with Mao's.

You know, this idea that he might be now the most powerful person in the world goes hand in hand with wanting to change the world. What do you think Xi wants to do internationally with all of his power? Well, I think the key thing he wants to do is return China to a position of being one of, if not the strongest nations on earth, and being kind of entirely safe from any form of disruption to its hold on that position. At the same time, the Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Anyone who dares to try to do that will have their heads bashed bloodied against the Great Wall of Steel, forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people. You know, they talk a lot in China in the history books

about a century of humiliation when China was invaded and you had the opium wars and you had this great downfall. But then the Communist Party came and put the nation back on track. And now we are bringing about this great rejuvenation. The unmistakable hallmarks of Communist Party rule were front and centre of its celebrations. The total control. The omnipotent leader. The unquestioning loyalty.

And so, to make that happen, Xi Jinping needs a world where the model, the political model he's creating is not just accepted, but kind of believed in globally by a number of partners. You know, you see the partnership with Russia. You see them building various relationships across the global South. So I think it's really trying to create a version of the global order where it's okay to be an authoritarian leader like Xi Jinping. Christian Shepard, you can read him at the Washington Post.

Our show today was produced by Halima Shah. It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey. Laura Bullard fact-checked and we had help from Siona Petros, Abishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, and Jillian Weinberger. It's Today Explained. Thank you.