Inside the CCP: how Xi Jinping's father illuminates party loyalty, corruption as a weapon, and succession risk

of Cinping's father, Ciong. Welcome to the show, Joseph. Good to have you. Thank you for Thanks so much for coming. It's great to have you. I would love to get a little bit of your background how you landed on this topic. It's incredibly difficult to uh to to research.

I was uh digging just just into the life of uh Cinping and uh there were no English biographies for a long time.

One of the most uh deepest dives on Cinping was from the economist actually in the form of this this podcast and and this reporting about the prince uh and and I was interested how you got into this what your background is and then we could go through some of the story.

So, I had just finished a book about elite power struggles in the Soviet Union and China after the deaths of Stalin and Mao. And someone asked me to write about party history and Xiinping. And I thought I would do a short article about Xiinping, a little bit about his father.

But what I did find out was the more research I did, the more I could learn and that I could tell a really interesting story through Xi Jun that wasn't just about Xiinping but could be a sort of microcosm of Chinese Communist Party history in the 20th century. Got it.

Um, one of the themes that I've been kind of wrestling with and my takeaway from studying Cinping was that uh there is this constant narrative of being both a a a victim and a perpetrator of party aggression essentially.

And I was wondering if that narrative feels right to you, where that comes from, why there's so why why these these leaders are so reluctant to reject the system that's sending them to jail or putting their family in hardship. Like it feels unique and it doesn't feel like something that happens in America.

Or maybe I'm just brainwashed by American politics or something and it is happening over here and I'm just not picking up on it. But is that a theme that you picked up on and and and you think is like worth digging into? Is it is it what's unique about the story? It sounds like you read my book quite closely.

That is certainly one of the themes. There's a puzzle there which is Xi Jangun, the father of Xiinping, was persecuted by his own party on several occasions and the party asked him to do things that he thought were wrong. Nevertheless, he remained devoted.

And I think to appreciate that we need to look at this bolevik communist political culture. And it's because these people see the party as a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. So in that sense to reject the party would have meant rejecting themselves.

So perhaps counterintuitively when the party hurt them the motivation was to redouble their efforts to win back the party's trust in them. Do you think that there's I'm I'm I'm I'm still struggling to understand the dynamic of like how dominant the single party is in China.

And I'm wondering if if we compare it with American politics, we it feels like we're always in this 50-50 stalemate where every four years it's like it's neck andneck and then and then yeah, maybe one party wins by some sort of margin, but I'm I've always wondered if that's a if you talk to somebody who's like a socialist, they're always really upset because they're basically like, well, they're both capitalists who are running.

uh and so they see it as as a false choice, but the vast majority of the American electorate is incredibly animated by the by the differences even though they might be somewhat minor if you zoom out a little bit. Um and I'm wondering like the the the more single party system versus the dual party system.

How does that emerge? Can you give me some some history of the party and and why is it so stable? So Lenin said that what we are doing is building a party of a new type and he thought that western political parties as you said were essentially representative of dominant class interests.

What Lenin wanted to do was create an organizational weapon and the reason for that was he was running a conspiracy and he wanted to take over the country and then use violence to transform it into something that was completely different.

And to do that, you need to create an institution that can force people to do things that they might not want to do. It's by design constructed so that the top leader can make a choice and then everyone has to follow along with that choice.

And sometimes that choice is wrong uh and has devastating impact for the party and the nation. But you can see that if you have such an ambitious agenda, what you want to do is create a system where the top leader is sort of firewalled from any kind of political consideration. Mhm.

Can you I mean there's so many there's so many anecdotes that could kind of tell the story. Would you mind telling me which story from Xi Jean Chung's life really stuck out to you as as emblematic or or maybe uh even just give me the high level because we kind of just jumped into it.

give me like the highlevel story arc that you decided to uh to weave the entire narrative through. Yeah. So he was born in 1913. That was only two years after the collapse of theQing dynasty. He was born into a rather dramatic place.

It he was born near where the Turkata soldiers are, which probably many of your viewers know about. That was where Chin Shaang forged the first unified Chinese state thousands of years before. And it was the city where emperors had ruled for for for millennia.

Uh but by the time Xi Jang was born, it had fallen into years of banditry and war and famine. And he was attracted to radicalism, trying to figure out a way to uh help China escape from these uh imperialist encroachments and uh political infighting at home.

And his first uh political act was an attempt to assassinate an academic administrator. and it failed. He got a bunch of teachers sick uh and was thrown into prison and joined the party there. Was he again? He wasn't he like 15 when he was sent out. That's right. He was very young.

And what's interesting too is he didn't really have an intellectual attraction to communism. Yeah. And when he was released from incarceration, he read this novel uh that's a terrible novel.

uh it's basically just a protagonist who goes from one disaster to another, but it fetishizes this idea of resistance and and struggle.

And so it speaks to the fact that uh you know for a lot of these people their intuition was that something needed to be changed, but they weren't exactly sure what and the party was a source of meaning for them.

H um I I I know you mentioned that he had a lot of interaction with the party around uh relationships with other religions and I was wondering if you could if you could kind of like when I grew up I remember like the free Tibet movement and it's kind of like fallen by the wayside.

Tibet's not really in the in the in the news much anymore. Could you take me through the story of his interaction with some of these uh kind of tangential groups in China and uh and how how the history of those relationships played out? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that.

So, within the Chinese Communist Party, you would have people that were experts in the military on economics. Xi Jun was the leading United Front figure. So, what's the United Front? Well, Mazudon called it one of the CCP's magic weapons, and it's basically a political influence campaigns.

And so, what you do is you figure out who's on your side, who's in the middle, who's against you, and you empower the ones uh that like you, you win over the ones that aren't sure, and then you hurt the ones that are that are deadenders.

And this was something that Xi Jang continuously applied to uh China's ethnic minorities.

And so he was in the last years of the civil war and the early years of the people's republic the leader of the so-called northwest bureau which included a huge expanse of China including Shing Jang but there were also lots of Tibetans in Shing Hai and Gansu which were other uh massive provinces uh in China and so he was trying to figure out how to incorporate them and it was definitely bloody but he also wasn't blind to the advantages of finding local power brokers and winning them over.

Um but over the 1950s the party decided that that approach was dated because people weren't coming to socialism on their own. And so essentially um uh the party declared war on them with tanks and planes and um during the cultural revolution any sign of an ethnic difference was seen as class struggle.

And then in the 1980s the party understood that they had really screwed up and that they needed to have a new approach. And Xiang ran uh ethnic politics for the secretariat which is sort of the party's brain.

and he tried to use economic development, bringing religion out into the open so it could be better controlled, uh, allying with local power brokers, but by the end of that decade, uh, many people within the party concluded that when you do that and you give people space, they just use it to hurt you.

Uh and so the party decided that growing protests weren't a sign of uh uh reaching a new equilibrium but uh you know hitting some road bumps on the way but that uh that fundamental approach had been a mistake. Yeah.

Yeah, there's this there's this narrative that keeps popping up whenever you hear about turmoil in the party uh around purges, which is a term that I don't I'm not really I can't really map to as an American um because we don't really have those, I guess.

Um and and a lot of this is always tied to uh there's uh there's corruption and we're going after corruption and every every kind of major defenestration feels like it's tied to corruption and I'm always wondering how we are evaluating those claims because at the same time in a growing developing country there probably is a lot of corruption and there's probably a lot of people that are uh banditry for example that you mentioned.

um there are people that are taking advantage of different parts of the government. So the so the corruption might be real, but then also corruption is used as a weapon to to amass power or or remove certain people from power. And so can you walk me through um how corruption is used as a tool?

How real do you think the various corruption narratives have been? Maybe if there's any examples of of corruption being wielded as a tool for uh for party power.

So as soon as the party was able to take over the country, they immediately faced a question which was how they were going to ensure that they didn't take such pride and arrogance in their victory that they allowed bourgeoa uh liberalization meaning individualism to seep in and that they would be divorced from the masses and that they would care about uh their own materialist needs.

And so from the very beginning the party struggled to figure out a way to eliminate this problem. And so especially during the Mao era you had constant constant rolling campaigns that inevitably went too far.

Uh and now under Xiinping you see that he believes that corruption for him is is about whether the party can survive because for Xiinping ideals and conviction and a sense of motivation are necessary for the party to exist.

And the biggest danger to that is corruption because it's uh it basically means putting yourself first but also corruption is a problem because it's a vector for western influence because there's this idea that the west is materialistic and uh oriented towards consumption and once that gets into China then uh the west can use it as a weapon and in fact many people in China thinks that what happened to the Soviet Union uh that essentially uh the leaders of the regime became oriented towards the West and um the uh the west won what they call a war without gunpowder.

Mean meaning you don't use a you don't use violence to destroy the regimes you don't like. You do it by winning over certain people uh within it. And the one other thing uh to say too here is that you're right like corruption is partly about regime security, but it's also about getting rid of people that you don't like.

And so what's interesting here is, you know, why do people keep uh doing things that make them vulnerable to accusations of corruption? And here I think speaks to something else with um about the system which is nobody's quite quite sure where the red lines are.

Uh and so sometimes you just get it wrong and sometimes the top leader changes where the red lines are and you can see that um in a system where the top leader is the one who gets to make those decisions, it's a very powerful weapon. Yeah.

What is what is the current sentiment uh from the party about the state of the world? Right. I I feel like here in America right now, you have a frustration. China's become the factory of the world. We're we're deeply reliant on them.

Uh the at the same time, the world feels very uncertain consumerrist because they're certainly buying Xiaomi phones and and uh you know. Yeah. So, so I'd be curious like any type of insight around the party's sentiment around what's happening in China culturally and then sort of geopolitically on a on a world stage.

do they feel like they're making progress? You know, we we study, you know, their goals around individual industries like semiconductors, AI, defense, etc. Um, but I'm curious what what you know sentiment in in and out of the country.

So, it's interesting to see how ambitious Xiinping is in terms of how he characterizes his goals in a holistic sense. He says that for millennia you would have one dynasty collapse after another and that the Chinese Communist Party needs to break that. And his solution is this idea of self-revolution.

And basically what he wants to do is figure out a way of how you win over the third and fourth generation uh of young Chinese uh to the revolutionary cause. And your questions speak to a dilemma there, right?

like you can see how a message of sacrifice and rejuvenation is meaningful maybe for many people but that he also recognizes that economic development uh is essential as well.

So, you know, how you balance those two things at the same time is not clear and it's something that I think uh the party is has constantly wrestled with from the very beginning. How you balance ideals and conviction and motivation with being practical and thinking about economics and that kind of thing.

You know, in terms of how China thinks about uh the world, uh they see real inherent strengths in their system. And even though they're communists and therefore should be m uh people who only think about the world in terms of um uh concrete uh objective conditions, they talk about spiritual civilization all the time.

And in fact, they think that China has one, but the west does not because in capitalist societies, all they do is care about money and consumption.

So in Xiinping's mind, he sees those problems only getting worse and worse in the west as opposed to China where in his mind they can tell a good story, a motivating story, but also the party can organize interests in a way that doesn't allow one class or one group to dominate. How does that actually play out?

Because I feel like we there's incredible amount of wealth still in China like like there's still a wealth inequality. Um there are many tech billionaires and massively successful folks over there.

Of course, when they get really really big, they tend to disappear for a little bit and it doesn't seem like a great place to be a Jeff Bezos type. But at the same time, it doesn't feel like oh yes, like they are truly communist. Everyone has the exact same standard of living. And so is that even the goal?

Are they okay with some level of wealth inequality? And or or do they see it as a failure?

and and and even that digging a level deeper if if she and and party leaders can speak to the sort of civilization, you know, the spirit of the the Chinese civilization and and how great it is and how the the system of the west is failing.

What do three, you know, five levels below that in in in the Chinese system in terms of, you know, how much do you try to dig in and, you know, what is the average factory worker? Do they feel that same sense of of pride in in the in the spirit of China or is there kind of a disconnect?

Yeah, that's a really those are some really good questions. So I think for Xiinping he can do course corrections to a certain extent, right? So this is someone who a few years ago was really doing a very severe crackdown uh in the tech sector and people who made a lot of money were suddenly very worried.

Uh Xiinping was talking about common prosperity. uh but over the last few months uh they have been talking more about the economy and it seems that Xiinping has empowered his premier uh to focus on development and that doesn't mean that they've suddenly stopped caring about security or ideology.

It just means that they can move around a little bit uh without admitting that they were wrong. And I think the reason for that is that the party when they talk about ideology, they're more careful I think than people uh give them credit sometimes, right?

So for example, if you look at the latest uh party congress report, it begins with ideology and it talks about how we need to believe in this stuff and we still are, you know, socialist and communist. But then it says other things too.

It says the reason communism works in our country but failed in other others is that we cynicize it. We made it Chinese, which basically means we made it say whatever uh we want it to be, right?

And so then you also see other language about markets still being decisive and China still being in the stage of primary accumulation which means that development not restructuring um uh society is the top priority.

So you know they talk about common prosperity because they know that uh they need to tell a good story about getting rid of inequality because they subscribe to socialism. Then you have all these buts and ants, right?

So they say, you know, we're not going to become populist like Latin American countries by allowing people to have such a social safety net that they feel that they don't have to work hard.

And so for all of these reasons, I think that uh uh he he's trying to manage dilemmas because he he can't solve problems, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Have have you uh um Yeah.

I mean, we've been talking to people about how uh some of China's investments in the semiconductor industry are in some ways more capitalist than the way America subsidizes our our like the chips act compared to the the series of five-year plans that have been somewhat cutthroat over in China between a whole bunch of different companies competing for grants.

And yes, there's a lot of government money pump pumping into the sector and they've been able to stay at the lagging edge for years, but it's been uh designed to be kind of doggy dog and hasn't just been a situation where China's just picked one winner and said, "Here's, you know, $50 billion and go run with it.

" Um, I'm I'm interested to hear the story about uh the development of Hong Kong relative to some of the mainland uh uh cities. Uh, can you can you uh walk me through what that taught about China and Sei Jong Shun because I believe he saw kind of that happened.

I've seen the time lapses uh and I've I've been to Guanghou once very briefly uh and and and the balancing act there between those those various cities and what that kind of taught uh taught China. I'm really glad you've asked about Hong Kong.

I've done a handful of interviews and you're the first person to raise it and it's it's a quite an interesting story and it's revealing in many ways. So, Xi Jong Fin, he was persecuted for 16 years, right?

Uh and then he's released and the first job that he gets is the party boss of GuangDong, which of course is the province that borders Hong Kong. and he saw physically just how far behind China had become.

And his first task that he had to deal with were the thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese people who were fleeing to Hong Kong, often losing their lives in the process. So, it was such a striking physical manifestation of how far the socialist motherland uh had had had fallen behind.

And so for him uh that helps explains the special economic zones which uh he played a role in establishing and you know he has this idea that one of the problems is that is ideology.

We need to make people you know believe in the cause but he wasn't so foolish as to not recognize that you also had an economic angle here that you needed to figure out.

And then ensuing years uh in Beijing when he was running the United Front, he had to figure out how the people in Hong Kong were going to feel about returning to the mainland. So he kept meeting with these Hong Kong people uh during the handover negotiations and he would say things like, you know, we're all Chinese.

Uh go overseas and look around and you'll realize that actually uh Western countries aren't as great as you think. You put your money in a bank and the fees are greater than any interest that you would make.

you know, these kind of like sort of very conventional communist views of of of of boom and bust and that uh uh he uh but you know what's interesting is for them like in in Hong Kong uh one of them during these meetings a lawyer from Hong Kong said you know you in the mainland you feel like you're coming out of a tunnel because the cultural revolution is over and you're reforming but we in Hong Kong we feel like we're going into a tunnel um because we're uh we're looking at unification with you but we're not sure about what direction you're going and and were frightened.

And it was it was Xi Junction's job to win their trust and faith to this uh um to to the handover. Interesting. Um Xi is up for reelection in 2028. There's no term limits.

what what should be people be looking out for in terms of the leadup and and what he's is it the right um kind of outlook that that he should be you know really trying to prove like does this next few years really matter in terms of proving that he's the right leader for the next five years beyond that or or how do you how do you look at the election?

So he is in a situation where whatever he decides is what will go.

Nevertheless, he is facing really really powerful challenges when he looks at the succession because as his father's story shows if you read my book there's it's hard to think of anything more explosive than succession politics in an alenist regime and it gets back to what we were talking about earlier which is that these are very lead leader friendly systems.

The whole purpose is to have a really really powerful person at the center who can make choices and then everybody has to listen.

So Xiinping if he if he picks a successor uh it raises the question of well who's actually really boss and then this the name successor will have to figure out how much space he has and whether or not he's actually getting Xiinping right and he want he'll want to impress Xiinping but he also won't want Xiinping to think that he is getting too big for his bridges but if Xiinping doesn't pick a successor then uh he might be afraid about what will happen to the party after he dies uh and he will likely want to make sure that the person that he thinks is best is the person that uh becomes the next leader.

So, he's kind of stuck, right? Because neither of those uh options are very good, but um and he's probably also thinking in his own mind and changing his mind and testing certain people and uh seeing how well they read him and how well they handle situations.

So, it really is something to watch and a lot of it will be about personal chemistry. Yeah, I'd love to know how hereditary dynasties play into that dynamic and if you could ground it by explaining the concept and history of the princelings and then kind of the current status of the idea of a princling.

I don't know if that's kind of gone out of fashion or if that's still uh if if if uh uh if that matters today. Yeah.

So in the 1980s, the party as it was trying to figure out how to survive after the founding generation died, they looked at young people and they were a little afraid because during the cultural revolution, young people had beaten them up, brought them to struggle sessions, incarcerated them uh while they were still alive, which you know raised questions about what would happen after they died.

And a lot of them had been betrayed by their own secretaries. And so in the 1980s a lot of them were picking princlings uh to work in their offices uh because they thought that they would be more trustworthy.

The problem with princlings is that they were not wellliked more broadly within the population and in many circles of the party because they were seen as entitled. They were seen as arrogant. They were seen as benefiting from their parents' status.

And so they had this weird sense of both entitlement and vulnerability uh at the same time. And Xiinping was a witness to that. And that was one of the reasons I think why Xiinping decided to go work in the grassroots as opposed to pursue a career that was purely in Beijing so that he could avoid those kinds of charges.

So uh you know Xiinping's career was hurt in many ways because he was a princling although he also did benefit his father. So it's a little bit of a complicated story.

you know, now in um uh China today, I think that uh Xiinping probably doesn't have a great relationship with these princlings because he doesn't want them to think they have special purchase on him because of who their family is and Xiinping thinks everyone should put the party's interest first.

So, uh in that sense, I think that princlings matter because Xiinping is a princling and the fact that his background, you know, tells us something about that. But, uh I think many other princlings feel that they don't have much of a say in the direction China is going.

Well, that's the name of the book, The Party's Interests Come First. And thank you so much for stopping by. This is a fantastic conversation. Yeah, we'll have Thanks so much for having me back on when there's when there's Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, we'd love to have you back and and talk when there's uh anything that you haven't announced, but also uh anything in the news that you could comment on would be fantastic. Uh but congratulations on the book. Uh and I highly recommend everyone go pick it up. The party's interests come first.

Uh thanks so much for stopping by, Joseph. Great questions. Thank you. Bye. Next up, we have Paul from Browserbase coming into the studio. Uh, he's not here yet. And that and you know what that means. We get to do some ads, baby. Adio customer relationship magic.

Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Go to addio. com. Also, how did you sleep? Jordy, Coca-Cola, modal USV. I think I got you. Got rain. Think I beat you. How'd you sleep, John? 93. Only 7 hours and 19 minutes, but great on quality. Great. Back on my back. 97.

Oh, it's a disaster. A clean eight hours. Oh, brutal. Okay. Well, congratulations. You're you're back. You've been You had a rough rough week. It was bit about a 10day period that perfectly coincided with being You beat me 10 weeks in a row, but I beat you for one week and it felt like 20 weeks of victory for me. I