August 7, 2025 • 44 mins
The Chinese Communist Party is probably one of the most difficult entities in the world to grasp due to its opacity of its inner workings. A new book from Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab and an associate professor at American University, sheds light on the entity by examining the life of Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping. The elder Xi was one of the earliest and important players in the revolution, and his life trajectory -- having spent 16 years out of power during the Cultural Revolution -- offers a lens into how the party operates. On this episode, we discuss Xi Zhongxun's life, the constant pressure to stay on the correct line, and what his struggles might tell us about how his son rules China today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm Joe Wasn't Thal, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Tracy.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Sometimes I read twentieth century Chinese history.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
And uh, sometimes just a little.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
No, there's here's something I don't understand. Like, you know,
I read about the ma out here, the done Cho
kang Era and.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
All the various Kadras.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
They are all like, oh, we're like guilty of like
have committed like a left deviationism or right deviationism or
all this stuff. And they're all really worried about whether
they're going to get expelled or something like that. And
I never like know what any of these words mean. Like,
I actually feel like I have no intuitive understanding of
how like elite level of Chinese communist party politics works.
(01:00):
And I think I probably should, given the sort of
like growing steaks and the growing awareness with which we
as Americas all have to be aware about how China works.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Wait, if you're reading lots of China history books, you
must know what self criticism is, right.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I know criticism, okay, but.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I don't know why they're like, oh, you engaged in revisionism, right,
you engage engaged in ultra leftism, or you engage in
ultra rightism. And I don't know what any of these
terms mean.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Right, Well, my experience of China is that sometimes the
rules are a little sketchy on purpose, right, so that
there isn't a clear definition, so that you can kind
of go after whoever you want. You know what I
do to learn about Chinese history? Tell me Chinese historical dramas.
I kind of love them.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Do you mean like plays or books?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
No? No, I mean TV shows, TV probably the equivalent of
soap operas in the States.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Do you have a favorite?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Oh, I have one I'm watching right now. I'll tell
you afterwards. Okay, it's so good. But the reason I
bring it up is because relatively recently, there was a
historical that was all about Seshin Ping's father.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I saw some screenshots from that. I think someone like
uploaded it all to you.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Have you watched it?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I haven't. I've been looking for it and I haven't
been able to find it. So if you find it
on YouTube, let me know. But the reason I bring
it up is because we're going to be speaking about
his life today to the author of one of his biographies,
the first English speaking biography, and the series itself got
panned when it came out. It was really funny, and
(02:30):
there are some quotes that said, oh, I think Chinese
youth today would rather watch stranger Things than learn about
the history of the CCP. So we're going to try
to make CCP history as interesting as stranger Things on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
And we're also, I guess, going to make the case
maybe to American listeners and maybe some Chinese youth if
they're listening, that it's worth learning about it, right, like whether.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
It's interesting or not.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's like, Okay, it's the year twenty twenty five, do
we need to like revisit the history and Yanan or
the Northwest Provinces whatever all this stuff? Is this really important?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
We obviously have the perfect guest we're going to be
speaking with, Joseph Triggan. He is a research fellow at
Stanford's Hoover Institution and an associate professor at American University,
and he is the author of a new book, The
Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Shi Jong Shun,
father of Hi Jinping. Joseph, thank you so much for
coming on od laws.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Why are we interested? Or I guess you, why were you?
Why is anyone interested in worth spending time to learn
about the life of Hi juong Shun.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
You know, I was listening to your conversation. I was
thinking about how one of the things that Shijinping is
trying to achieve is make the regime ammortal by having
people study party history. He believes that one of the
ways to keep the party vigilant and dedicated and at
one with the people is to learn from the legacy
(03:56):
of the revolutionary So what that history is teaching? That
history is moral education is at the very heart of
Xi Jinping's project. So that begs the question what was
that history? And I tried to tell it through the
prism of his own father with my book.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
So one question I always wanted to ask a sort
of CCP expert, is why would anyone want to join
the party in the sort of nineteen forties, nineteen fifties,
nineteen seventies. I understand that hindsight is twenty twenty, but
looking back, first of all, no one knew how this
was all going to turn out. And secondly, it seems
(04:35):
like your life as a sort of minor party official
could be very, very tricky and very dangerous in some ways.
To Joe's point about things like self criticism and getting
in trouble for leftist deviations or rightist deviations or whatever,
it doesn't seem like a fun time.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So I think that breaking down your question a little
bit would be meaningful. What decade you joined the party
can tell you a lot about that person, and also
why you stay in the party can be very different
from why you joined in the first place, because often
you don't know what kind of organization it is, and
you don't know what's going to becoming. But I think
(05:14):
that at the heart of what you're getting at is
why would you join an organization that is so dangerous
to be a member of, either because you're fighting a
revolution against a vastly superior force or because there are
so many power struggles within that party. One of the
answers is that for these people, communism wasn't just a
way of understanding economics. It wasn't just about Marxist dialectics.
(05:37):
It was really a source of meaning and purpose in
their lives. It was joining an organization that for them
was a manifestation of a world historical inevitability, and it
was exciting. It gave them agency, it gave them a
sense that their lives mattered, and of course they were
often joining the party at moments when they felt that
the entire nation was at risk of falling apart because
(05:58):
of warlords and bands and Western and Japanese encroachments.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I forget what decade it is, but there's another reason
that even people today get excited about radical politics, and
that is sex and dating, and they think it'll make
them attractive to members of the opposite sex. You mentioned
that in your book that that was one of the
appeals for the very early communists.
Speaker 5 (06:20):
So it's interesting how politics and the personal mix often
for members of the Chinese Communist Party. So there was
a political background, there was a social background. He was
born two years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty.
He saw of these battles between nationalists and bandits, nationalists
and communists, and it would have been even just visibly
(06:46):
striking for him to grow up in this area. Because
he grew up near Chian, which many of your listeners
must know as where the terra Cotta soldiers are from.
And that's because the first unified Chinese state was forged
near where he was born, and so he would have
seen just how far his country had fallen from these
amazing heights during the Tong dynasty. And so for him,
(07:09):
he didn't really understand the intricacies of the ideology. He
wasn't really attracted to Marxism from an intellectual perspective, but
as he and other people had written about or talked
about later, it was just kind of cool to be
more radical and more leftists because there was a sense
that the country really needed something drastic to be able
(07:30):
to find its feet.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Can you talk a little bit about how he rose
up through the party ranks in the sort of early days,
because this is always a question. So, first of all,
the goal of the Communist Party, as you mentioned, is
sort of always changing in one way or another, or
certainly the way they execute on it seems to be
quite flexible, and so I'm very curious how a sort
(07:53):
of junior level politician or party member gathers influence within
the party. Basically what qualifies as a good job to
get them ahead.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the lemmas
that my book tries to explore is what does it
mean to be a deputy in a system that puts
so much focus on a strong leader and discipline. So
people might wonder, why would I read a book about
someone who wasn't the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
(08:25):
Isn't this just an organization where people do what they're told?
But actually it's so much more complicated than that, and
it's complicated for lots of interesting reasons. One is that
the top leader often will give a general sense of
what they want to achieve, but they won't say what
matters more and how to achieve it, and then so
the deputy has to figure it out. They have to
(08:46):
be loyal to what the top leader wants, but also
not screw everything up entirely. There's other competitors that might
not like you. You also have to be aware of the
fact that often the top leader will change their minds.
So all of these things are what members of the
party have to manage. And Shi Junction stands out for
(09:06):
his ability to keep winning over famous senior men within
the party. So he was not one of the oldest
of the founding generation, but he really impresses you with
his ability to find these big brothers over and over again,
who saw something in him that they admired.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
One thing I really got from reading your book, and
you mentioned Shi Jinping himself as part of his own
goal is to have the younger generations learn more about
party history, hence the drama that Tracy mentioned. One thing
I really sort of deeply internalized reading your book is
how young the country is, how young the party is.
And I mean there is a sense in which Mao
(09:49):
is like Shijinping's uncle. I mean you say the word
big brother in terms of like Shi Jong Shun's ability
to find these sort of brother figures. It's still a
very close it's a very close family. These people were
like right there at the very beginning that Shujinping knew
and was growing up with.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
Yeah. So one of the things in the book that
I think is really quite significant is how long these
people knew each other. Right, So the book begins in
the nineteen twenties, and she junctions a major figure through
the early nineteen nineties, and these names keep coming back
(10:26):
over and over and over again, and they knew each
other for so long, and the intricacies of these relationships
are really something. So in the West, We've often seen
this habit of dividing the party between good guys and
bad guys, reformers and conservatives, leftists and rightists. And one
of the things that emerges from my research is that
(10:48):
they were so subtle the way they interacted with each other.
So they were kind of frenemies in a way, right,
So they all had loyalty to the party, but the
way that the antagonism shifted, the way that the loyalty shifted,
was something that was very protean over these years.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Talk a little bit more about that, because I think
when people, certainly in the West, hear about the Chinese
Communist Party, they often think of factionalism and all these
cadres that are sort of in secret rooms forming different
groups with different goals. Did that actually happen?
Speaker 5 (11:20):
So I'm a skeptic about how useful the idea of
factions can be for understanding the Chinese Communist Party. Now,
I don't want to go too far. It definitely matters
who you worked with, whether you work in the same organization,
that kind of thing. But the reason Leninist parties are
known as organizational weapons is because they are so leader
(11:42):
friendly and because there is such a taboo about any
concerted political action by certain groups. Now sometimes they approach
that level of coordination, but they have to be so
careful because as soon as the top leader identifies that,
then they're going to be in big trouble. But also,
people are people, so you can have more liberal views
(12:03):
on some issues, more conservative views on other issues. Just
because you worked with someone doesn't mean that you're going
to like them. So often the people who are as
I mentioned, these relationships are shaped by what happened decades previously.
They have long memories, and if you worked with someone
you didn't get along, that can be meaningful many many
many years into the future too.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mentioned this at the beginning, but I remember when
I read the recent biography from a few years ago
of Dounk Shopang, and then also a recent Joe and
Live biography. They're always like trying to read maus my
own right like they're on their like, oh, and are
we guilty of leftism or rightism or whatever? And I
can never really figure out do we take the correct line,
we dig the people's life whatever, what does leftism mean?
(12:58):
They're always getting accused of leftism. I thought they're all
leftists they're communists, But what is actual What did they
mean it when they said that someone was taking like
the leftist line and the CCP and that that was
bad in some way.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
Good question. So when you look at Chinese texts when
they talk about leftism and rightism, leftism is always in
quotation marks right. So what is leftism in theory? Leftism
basically means that you're too ambitious, you're moving forward too quickly,
you don't recognize the objective conditions, and therefore you're making
a hash of things because you're trying to achieve what
(13:30):
is not possible at that particular time. Now, at the
same time, leftism is part of the part of what
makes the Chinese Communist Party because of this phenomenon known
as campaigns. Right, So what's a campaign? A campaign means
you get people to go too far, deliberately because you
need to get them to go too far, because the
whole point is to gin people up, to get them excited,
(13:52):
to inspire zeal. So you expect that things are going
to go too far. Now for these people who are
the deputy. Typically when they go too far and then
there's a rectification, they're not punished for it because there
was an always expectation that there was going to be
some mistakes, that you're going to break a few eggs. Right. Nevertheless,
because this was a system that took ideology so seriously,
(14:17):
when there were differences of opinion, often they weren't understood
as such. They were seen as manifestations of a deeper
political problem. And as you were alluding to in your introduction,
one of the reasons Mao and Dung were so powerful
is because they got to decide what was leftist. They
got to decide what was a line error. And so
often the reason we think that there are factions is
(14:40):
because the top leader decides after the fact to label
a bunch of people as a group and say that
they represented some kind of political view. But almost always
what really happened is that these people just simply weren't
in line with the chairman and they weren't guessing correctly
what he wanted, and they were punished for it, and
then they were given this label.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Why didn't Mauth just issue clearer instructions?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
Yeah, good question. Part of it was about the succession, right,
So Chinese top leaders always are thinking about what's going
to happen after they die, and they don't want their
model to disappear with them, and so they're testing their deputies.
They're trying to figure out whether their deputies can do
the right thing on their own, and so they don't
(15:27):
always want to be clear because they want to see
what you do. But also the top leaders change their
mind all the time. They're mercurial. They can watch a
situation and decide that things aren't going to well that
they wanted, and then they don't say that immediately to
see why other people are going to realize that on
their own. But also I think that by leaving some ambiguity,
(15:50):
they can see whether or not you are going to
use that space to do everything you can to remain
loyal to the top leader, or whether you're going to
show some of your own inclinations which you may or
may not like as the senior leader.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Let's talk about the trajectory of Shijong Chun's life a
little bit more. A big part of your book is
these fights over over history, and they're obsessed about like
getting the exact history of riot of Chinese and the
Northwest territories, and who is where when, et cetera, and
who is influential et cetera. Why was this so important,
these sort of fights over specific details of history, and
(16:25):
then how did that culminate ultimately in sixteen years in
which he was sort of extremely punished and banished and
basically cast out of the party and humiliated and all
the horrible things that happened during the revelation.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Two reasons, primarily, one is for a top leader, your
legitimation narrative is to say I was always on the
right side of the debate. And so when you make
the case for why everyone should listen to you, whether
or not your version of history is affirm has a
lot to do with whether or not you are seen
as someone who deserves to be the chairman. And the
(17:01):
second reason is that the party is a totalizing organization, right,
so your entire sense of self worth, your prestige, your status,
your sense of meaning is how the party characterizes your
contributions to the revolution and to the regime after it's established.
So history in that sense is absolutely existential for them.
(17:23):
And I think that also when it comes to, as
I said, this preoccupation with whether the regime will survive,
you need to win the hearts and minds of young
people by talking about the party as an organization that
went from one victory to another because it was the
only way of organizing society that can guarantee China's return
(17:47):
to its rightful place on the world stage. Right. So,
for all of these reasons, history is so important. And
so when you're purged from the leadership and you're doing
self criticisms, what are these self criticisms about. Well, it's
a reflection of your own personal history. So when Chi
Juncshin spent sixteen years in the political wilderness after he
was purged, what he was writing about was his past
(18:08):
over and over and over again and negotiating with the
top leadership just exactly how what he had done previously
was going to be officially evaluated.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
You know, you mentioned the word frenemy earlier, and as
a former teenage girl, frenemies is something that is a
perennial interest to me. And when I think about famous
frenemies in the past, do you like the segue.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Too, Yeah, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
When I think about famous set frenemies in the past,
I kind of think about the Soviet Union and China
in the fifties and sixties. And one of the interesting
things about the elder she is that he was for
a while in charge of basically managing China's relationship with
Soviet experts at the time. What was that experience like
(18:56):
for him, How tricky was that to actually do, and
was it you us fault to him in later years
having had that experience.
Speaker 5 (19:04):
So in nineteen fifty three, the most prominent slogan in
the People's Republic of China was the Soviet Union of
today is China's tomorrow. And in fact that also was
the year that Shijinping was born and his father, Hi
Juncshin was Minister of Propaganda. In subsequent years, when Hijungshin
(19:25):
was working for Joe and Lai at the State Council,
as you said, one of his tasks was to manage
the Soviet expert program, and for a period of time
the number one priority was to learn wholesale from the
Soviet Union. And it was rooted in this idea that
there was only one way of doing communism. But Maltadong
(19:46):
increasingly came to the view that something had gone deeply
wrong with the October Revolution, that the Soviet leaders were
engaging in revisionism. And I know you were chuckling about
this word earlier. You're always getting a cued what is
this communist jargon and revision isn't basically means you're not
really a true communist anymore, that you are not as
(20:10):
actually leftist as you need to be right, you're not
pushing forward, you're too scared to try to win new
victories for the revolutionary agenda. And so Shei Junction would
have witnessed this story. He would have witnessed how Malzudun
gradually came to the conclusion that the Chinese project was
going to be different. And he also would have seen
(20:30):
something else, which was how dangerous it was to talk
to people outside the Chinese Communist Party, especially foreigners, because
one of the accusations against him in nineteen sixty two,
other than as you said, that he was trying to
revise history, was that he was a spy for the
Soviet Union. So it would have been very frightening for
she Junction to manage relations with the Soviets. Right, So,
(20:53):
the first great purge of the People's Republic of China
was a man named Gaogong, and he was another northwesterner.
He had known Xi Jungshun for years, and Mao had
come to believe that exactly, and Mao came to believe
that Gay was a spy for the Soviet Union. In
nineteen fifty nine at the famous for Chinese historians Lushan Plenham,
(21:16):
when the Defense Minister Pung d' Huai made critical remarks
of the Great Leap Forward, he also, in Mao's mind,
only did that because of a special relationship with the
Soviet Union, and he saw some machinations there. And pungd'
huai was the commander on the Northwest Battlefield, and Hi
Jung Sshun was his right hand man. So U si
(21:38):
Jung Shin was basically a forrest gump for the two
first Great Purchase of the People's Republic of China, and
they both were seen by Mao as having had illicit
relations with the Soviet Union. And then he is purged
in nineteen sixty two as well. I'll say one other
thing about this which is quite remarkable. So the first
split that was really something that the Chinese and Soviets
(22:03):
had trouble managing, happened while she Junction was visiting the
Soviet Union. And what had happened was there was an
altercation on the border between China and India the first
one and several Indian soldiers were killed, and while Si
Juncshin was traveling, the Soviets put out a statement that
(22:24):
essentially took a neutral position even though the Soviet Union
and China were in a formal alliance, and the Chinese
were absolutely furious, and Shi Juncshun left Moscow early and
when Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet leader, visited China just a
few weeks later, Mao said to him, your statement made
the imperialists happy. And Mao's conclusion was, why aren't the Soviets,
(22:49):
Why don't they have our back, Why aren't they more supportive?
And his answer was that it wasn't that the Soviets
were pursuing their interests. We have our interests. It was
that they're not really communist anymore. They've gone revisionist. And actually,
to tie it again back to Si Junction, it contributed
to Miles's preoccupation with this idea of class struggle, and
(23:10):
he wanted to figure out a way to make sure
class struggle never went away, and his crackdown on Chi
Junction in nineteen sixty two was related to his marinating
in this obsession with the importance of class struggle that
was partly inspired by what he saw as the degradation
of the revolutionary project in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So Shei Junction was purged and subject to sixteen years
of absolute torment. It's funny you characterize him. It's sort
of like the forest Gump of twentieth century China, because,
of course, later on in his career he was heavily
involved in Gwandal and the opening of Shenzhen and these
special opportunity zones or special economic zones which people know
(24:05):
a lot about there, but he spent much of the
rest of his life essentially fearing the possibility. It seems
that my reading of your book that the ever present
risk of sliding back into cultural revolution type periods and
the Cultural Revolution per your book, there were many patterns
of it prior to it. It's sort of these purges
(24:26):
and campaigns that existed afterwards. I'm just curious in your view,
can the Party even today ever be inured against the
potential of reverting back into such a self destructive environment
such as that, or is that always going to be
endemic to the structure of the party that it could
trip into these sort of intense inward battles that are
(24:48):
so damaging.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
Yeah, that's a very insightful question. One piece of evidence
to get at what you're driving at is to look
what she's in paying himself experience during the Cultural Revolution
and how he's talked about it. Xi Jinping said that
when the Cultural Revolution began, everyone believed in it, which
was true. So when it became clear that it was
(25:11):
a disaster, it was profoundly disillusioning. And Xi Jinping admitted
that he too went through a period of doubt, but
that precisely because he went through this time of thinking
about why such a terrible thing could happen, but nevertheless
returned to the party's cause, meant that his dedication is
(25:32):
more unshakeable than anyone's, anyone else's, And the nineteen eighties.
In these interviews that I found that he gave, he
talks about how he saw the nineteen eighties as a
time when people should be even more loyal to the
party because now they could do something. Now the leftism
and the radicalism had gone away, so you could finally
(25:54):
work to bring China in the right direction. And in fact,
he said that the reason that that he didn't want
to make up for lost time and have fun and
make money. Was because he wanted to make sure that
another cultural revolution never happened. But it raises a question, right,
which is how do you stop that from happening? And
so some people who went through the same thing that
Sijin Ping did, they believe that China needed the rule
(26:18):
of law, it needed to prevent another strong man leader
from appearing. And Xi Jinping's answer was, you need to
have a party that's unconstrained. You need to have a
party that's so powerful that it can stop people who,
when are given the freedom to do so, take advantage
of it and use it to hurt people. And so
for Shijinping, a lot of people think that he's a
(26:40):
Maoist figure, that a lot of what he's doing has
elements that are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. And that's
certainly true, but as you said, a lot of what
we associate with the Cultural revolution has been part of
the party since the very beginning. And the question then
is so Sheijinping he wants to use struggle, goal, he
(27:00):
wants to use campaigns, but he also doesn't want another
cultural revolution. Well what does that mean? Well, he and
people around him have said that, well, we're not going
to do the tragedy of the cultural evolution. We're going
to avoid that kind of radicalism. We're also going to
recognize that we lost a sense of vigilance after Mau's death,
and we're going to find this happy medium. But what
(27:20):
is a happy medium in this sense? Right, Like, struggle
is not a legal concept. It's not a clear idea really,
so you can see how in theory that you would
get it just the right amount, but that in practice
it's very hard. And I think that's one of the
reasons why we're seeing China struggle to balance the economy
and security is because it's hard to do two things
(27:43):
at once.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, I always thought it was interesting that in modern
China there are a lot of portrayals domestically of the
Cultural Revolution, so things like historical dramas or in the
Three Body Problem. There's a very very long section on that,
and it kind of it's exactly what you're describing, which is,
to some extent, she Shinping wants people to know what
(28:05):
happened and to understand the danger of sliding back into
something like the cultural revolution. Just on that note, to
what extent do you think she Shin Ping actually draws
from his father's experience in terms of his own policy,
or are we sort of falling into the trap where
we think that all of Chinese politics has to be
(28:27):
dynastic and it's all about family members succeeding family members.
To what extent is that true?
Speaker 5 (28:33):
So Shichhung Shin has a reputation as the best kind
of person that the party could produce, almost uniquely humane
liberal pro reform. And so when Xijinping came to power,
a lot of individuals who knew the family or knew
something about party history believed that he was going to
(28:54):
be like what their understanding of his father was. And
when he moved into direction that to disappointed them, and
in fact was quite a surprise for them. They were
so so disappointed, And one of the things that they
did was they negatively contrasted him with his father. One
dissident exiled intellectual in the United States said that Xi
(29:18):
Jinping is not the son of Hi Juncshun. He's the
grandson of mal Jitdong. So this politicized use of shi
junction against Chijenping, and I'm sure that Shei jen Ping
hates it, but then the question becomes, well, is Chijenping
inspired by father as a positive example or as a
negative example. Some people have said that well, Xi Jinping
(29:39):
saw that his father's liberal policies failed, and that's why
he's doing something completely different. You know, we can't say
for sure, but I can say a couple things. One
is that it's interesting. It's interesting that Sheijenping's very first
article published in People's Daily was about the relationship between
older generations in the party and younger generations, and he
said essentially that we need to respect them. We can
(30:01):
learn so much from them, but we would not respect
them if we did exactly what they did, and we
never innovate, right, We need to move along with the times.
And also I think that at heart, what he wants
to do is make sure that the regime survives, and
everything he's doing is for that purpose, which means that
he is essentially inheriting the big picture of what his
(30:24):
father wanted, which was to ensure that the party and
the party's interests could persist from one generation to another.
So is he doing certain things different from what his
father did? Yes? Is it a conscious rejection of his father?
I'm not so sure. I think maybe he would say
that the heart of what I'm doing is the same
as what my father did, but also we need to
(30:45):
change with the times, and it's a story of the
party constantly learning new things and needing to address new
objective conditions as they appear. And one last point on this,
Chijinpin says that the reason the Chinese Communist Party survived
when other communist parties did not is because it had
this capacity for change. That it was because the party
could cynicize Marxism and adapt it to national conditions, therefore
(31:09):
find a Chinese style of modernization. That they could find
this way of a non Western style of development. So
it's interesting how he plays with this dialectic between tradition
and innovation. But in that sense, they think his thinking
here is.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
A little subtle tracy.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Have I mentioned I can't remember if I brought this up?
Have I mentioned too that I've recently read the book
Moby Dick?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Oh my god, Oh my god?
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Have I mentioned that?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Listeners? Let me just tell you, whenever Joe reads a book,
he talks incessantly about it. So, yes, you have brought
up Moby Dick several times.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
It's hard not to read the book about your book,
Joseph without thinking of the character Starbuck, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
You said that yourself on Twitter, and I use this
as an excuse to torment Tracy with bringing up Moby Dick.
But you yourself made that connection. Huh.
Speaker 5 (32:02):
So it's not a perfect analogy, right, because Starbuck is
the first mate and she Junction was sort of the
first mate to the first mate, right, so he's a
wrong further down than Starbuck. And also the book seems
to suggest that while Ahab is motivated by vengeance and
Starbuck is somebody who just wanted to make wants to
(32:24):
make money. Well, she Junction he was on board with
the revolutionary project, right, like he shared many of Mao's
views and Dung's views, so that we shouldn't essentialize the
difference between between She and Mao. And also that the quad, right,
the ship crashed, but the party has survived, right, the
party is still there. So those are the difference. But
(32:45):
at the same time, it is I think meaningful to
think about the similarities. Right. So Starbuck was the deputy,
the first mate to Ahab, and he knew better, but
he still allowed himself to be a victim, and by
doing that he doomed himself, he doomed the crew. And
even though he was someone who recognized that Ahab was
(33:07):
the kind of person who would strike the sun if
the sun insulted him, which really is a very Maoist
thing to say, right, Like Mao really kind of fetishized
this idea of struggle and fighting back and having a
strong personality, he still didn't really do anything about it.
And also, like She Junction, Starbuck isn't clearly a hero
are a villain, right he raises questions about the morality
(33:30):
of what he was doing as part of this particular system.
Starbucks also didn't really have legal recourse to removing a
have right. So there's this one moment where he thinks
about killing him, but he recognizes that that's a violation
of the law of the ship. And also, Starbuck is
similar to Sea Junction in the sense that when he
thinks that something is not going the way he thinks
(33:53):
is right, he remonstrates, but very carefully in a way
that he's almost not even really remonstrating because of just
how cautious he is. So and I'll say one final
thing about this right. So what's interesting about Moby Dick
is the whole crew kind of gets on board with
this crazy idea of hunting this whale, right, And it
kind of reminds me of this quote by Dunk shell
(34:14):
Ping about the Great Lea Forward, which is that we
all had the fever right, And it raises his questions like,
why would people be so loyal to this person who's
so strange and so eccentric. And I think it's because
this idea of the adventure and the thrill and mission
was something that spoke to something at the heart of
(34:35):
their lives. So maybe they're all just a few thoughts. Well,
you know, it's when you write a biography, you need
to talk about psychology and the fact that she Junction
and Xi Jinping went through these traumas can't be ignored
and you need to talk about it and it needs
to be addressed. But psychology and history, psychology and politics
(34:57):
are different disciplines for a reason, which is that you
can't essentialize their behavior down to what they experienced his children, right,
So a lot of people thought that everything Stalin did
could be explained by the fact that he was beaten
up when he was a young person right by his.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Oh yeah, this Stalin biography so much more than Knkin.
He has this great line He's like, oh, people say
that his father was abusive and drunk, and he's like,
who wasn't abusive and drunk in the early night and
late eighteen hundreds of that area. So anyway, sorry, keep going,
but yes, that's a good point.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
You'll say. One other thing about this.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
D H.
Speaker 5 (35:29):
Lawrence wrote chapter in a book about Moby Dick, and
he talked about all this practicality in search of a
mad mad Chase. And that also really gets to something
at the heart of the Party that we've talked about,
which is during the Revolution, during the Great Leak forward,
during the Cultural Revolution, you see these goals that are
just utopian. And at the same time that doesn't mean
(35:51):
that the party, at sometimes even the same moment, sometimes
more than others, doesn't also have this very practical side,
very flexible side. And these two elements have coexisted from
the very beginning in ways that I think are meaningful
to dwell onto.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
So one thing I'm always curious when it comes to
books like these very large historic projects is how you
actually go about gathering your research and what sources you're
looking at, and whether you're finding new things that potentially
people were unaware of before. And then just on that note,
what would you say is the biggest misconception that academics
(36:30):
or maybe people in the West in general tend to
have when it comes to understanding how the CCP actually works.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
Yeah, so when you do research on the Chinese Communist Party,
you can't just go to a couple of archives, collect
the material and write it up. You need to have
a different sense of sensibilities. You have to be sensitive
to the possibilities, not the limitations, and recognize that you're
going to have to collect a lot of different types
(36:59):
of evidence and making mosaic and you'll be able to
understand certain things better than others, but that in the
future people will find new things, and that it's an
ongoing project. There's never going to be a definitive version.
But nevertheless, there's enough that you can do to say
in the intgiram at least something meaningful, something to start
a conversation. And so, for example, a lot of internal documents,
(37:24):
a lot of archives have made their way to American
libraries and institutions in Hong Kong and Taiwan. People from
the mainland were able to publish histories outside of censorship,
but also document collections and memoirs. But you also need
to use the stuff that comes out of mainland China.
(37:45):
So there was a period where party history journals were
really pushing the envelope. But even the official stuff like
the chronologies and the official biographies, you can mind those
things for biographical details, but also you can put it
in the context of other material collected, and then suddenly
that evidence is meaningful to you in a way that
maybe even the compilers of it did not expect. And
(38:07):
also I just made a list of every time that
she jumption met with a foreigner and then tried to
either speak to that person or go to their archives.
I spoke to the Dalai Lama. I went to the
French Communist Party archives because she jumptioned went to France.
I went to the archives in Serbia because you went
to a big important congress in Yugoslavia when it still existed.
(38:27):
That kind of thing, and so you know, what are
the main misunderstandings. Well, one thing to say is that
this isn't always just a case of Westerners who don't
understand China getting it wrong for cultural reasons or whatever.
But people at the very heart of this system also
constantly got it wrong right And so, as I mentioned earlier,
(38:48):
these people who knew that she family were totally dumbfounded
by Xijinping when it became clear what kind of a
leader he was going to be. Right, and these were
not stupid people. These were people who had been around
the block over and over and over again. And the
reason these purges happened, the reason why someone like Hijo Mashin,
who was actually quite cautious and quite clever, why he
(39:11):
crashed on the shoals of power struggles is because he
also didn't fully understand the repercussions of what he was doing.
So in that sense, we should keep in mind just
how hard it is to get the system right, not
just for people on the outside, but even for people
on the inside too.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
That's a great ending, Joseph to regain fantastic book. Really
appreciate you coming on odd lots and chatting.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
On, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
While we were recording that episode, Joseph mentioned the various
campaigns that they had the CCP, so I went to
the Wikipedia page, and like, I love some of the
names of their campaign because like some of them are
like sort of straightforward, like cleansing the class ranks campaign,
kind of obvious. But then like counter attack, the right
deviate counter attack, the right Deviationist reversal of verdicts trend campaign,
(40:14):
the criticized Lynn, criticized Confucius classic obviously campaign, there's something.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Always very poetic about it. Well, the four Pests campaign.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Oh yeah, where that one was very sad and kind
of blew up in their face. But I think you're
getting to an important point, which is a campaign. What
was the second one you mentioned.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
The counter attack the right Deviationist reversal of verdicts trend campaign. Sorry,
that was the Gang of Four attacking Chupain, who is
involved in reversing verdicts of people who had been improperly
punished during the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Right, But this is actually important because it's like, what
does that mean exactly? And I think this has kind
of been both the strength and the weakness of the
CCP over time, which is that a lot of these
concepts are fuzzy and ever changing, and often they are
fuzzy on purpose, so that the leader can exert control
and declare what actually is anti right or anti visionism
(41:14):
or whatever.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
No, totally it is clear.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I mean, obviously there is like the however many year period,
the formal the nineteen sixty six nineteen seventy six cultural Revolution,
which she the elder she and the younger she well
like truly like unbelievable leverage, levels of personal humiliation and suffering.
But it really extended both before that and afterwards. And
I really, you know, it's clear, like it is not
(41:39):
easy in a political system such as that to ever
fully guard against the return of that style of full
blown politics.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
I have one question for you. How many Moby Dick
references am I going to hear on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Well, maybe the only the next time we do an
energy one.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Okay, all right, I can Okay, I'd be really impressed
if you like work it into every episode, So I definitely.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I just thought it was very funny in this case
that the author happened to have a lot of an
unusually high level of drawn out thoughts between one character
and Moby Dick and the author of his book.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
So I had to bring that up. I thought that
was very good.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
I'm un good at being weird. Here, here we go.
I'm going to read Moby Dick as a lens for
understanding the CCP.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
You should It's great?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
All right? Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 4 (42:27):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
This has been another episode of the Audloughts Podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Joseph Triggian. He's at Joseph Triggian, and
check out his new book, The Party's Interests Come First,
The Life of Shi Jong Shun, father of Shi Jinping.
Follow our producer Carman Rodriguez at Kerman Ermann Dash, Ob
Bennett at Dashbot, and kil Brooks at Keil Brooks. And
for more Odlov's content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash
(42:55):
odd lots, we're the daily newsletter and all of our episodes,
and you can chat up all of these topics, including
China twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot
gg slash hot lots.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
And if you enjoy all lots, if you want some
recommendations for Chinese historical dramas, then please leave us a
positive review on your favorite podcast platform, and remember, if
you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all
of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to
do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and
follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm Joe Wasn't Thal, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Tracy.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Sometimes I read twentieth century Chinese history.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
And uh, sometimes just a little.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
No, there's here's something I don't understand. Like, you know,
I read about the ma out here, the done Cho
kang Era and.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
All the various Kadras.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
They are all like, oh, we're like guilty of like
have committed like a left deviationism or right deviationism or
all this stuff. And they're all really worried about whether
they're going to get expelled or something like that. And
I never like know what any of these words mean. Like,
I actually feel like I have no intuitive understanding of
how like elite level of Chinese communist party politics works.
(01:00):
And I think I probably should, given the sort of
like growing steaks and the growing awareness with which we
as Americas all have to be aware about how China works.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Wait, if you're reading lots of China history books, you
must know what self criticism is, right.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
I know criticism, okay, but.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I don't know why they're like, oh, you engaged in revisionism, right,
you engage engaged in ultra leftism, or you engage in
ultra rightism. And I don't know what any of these
terms mean.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Right, Well, my experience of China is that sometimes the
rules are a little sketchy on purpose, right, so that
there isn't a clear definition, so that you can kind
of go after whoever you want. You know what I
do to learn about Chinese history? Tell me Chinese historical dramas.
I kind of love them.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Do you mean like plays or books?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
No? No, I mean TV shows, TV probably the equivalent of
soap operas in the States.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Do you have a favorite?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Oh, I have one I'm watching right now. I'll tell
you afterwards. Okay, it's so good. But the reason I
bring it up is because relatively recently, there was a
historical that was all about Seshin Ping's father.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
I saw some screenshots from that. I think someone like
uploaded it all to you.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Have you watched it?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I haven't. I've been looking for it and I haven't
been able to find it. So if you find it
on YouTube, let me know. But the reason I bring
it up is because we're going to be speaking about
his life today to the author of one of his biographies,
the first English speaking biography, and the series itself got
panned when it came out. It was really funny, and
(02:30):
there are some quotes that said, oh, I think Chinese
youth today would rather watch stranger Things than learn about
the history of the CCP. So we're going to try
to make CCP history as interesting as stranger Things on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
And we're also, I guess, going to make the case
maybe to American listeners and maybe some Chinese youth if
they're listening, that it's worth learning about it, right, like whether.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
It's interesting or not.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's like, Okay, it's the year twenty twenty five, do
we need to like revisit the history and Yanan or
the Northwest Provinces whatever all this stuff? Is this really important?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (03:02):
We obviously have the perfect guest we're going to be
speaking with, Joseph Triggan. He is a research fellow at
Stanford's Hoover Institution and an associate professor at American University,
and he is the author of a new book, The
Party's Interests Come First, The Life of Shi Jong Shun,
father of Hi Jinping. Joseph, thank you so much for
coming on od laws.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Why are we interested? Or I guess you, why were you?
Why is anyone interested in worth spending time to learn
about the life of Hi juong Shun.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
You know, I was listening to your conversation. I was
thinking about how one of the things that Shijinping is
trying to achieve is make the regime ammortal by having
people study party history. He believes that one of the
ways to keep the party vigilant and dedicated and at
one with the people is to learn from the legacy
(03:56):
of the revolutionary So what that history is teaching? That
history is moral education is at the very heart of
Xi Jinping's project. So that begs the question what was
that history? And I tried to tell it through the
prism of his own father with my book.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
So one question I always wanted to ask a sort
of CCP expert, is why would anyone want to join
the party in the sort of nineteen forties, nineteen fifties,
nineteen seventies. I understand that hindsight is twenty twenty, but
looking back, first of all, no one knew how this
was all going to turn out. And secondly, it seems
(04:35):
like your life as a sort of minor party official
could be very, very tricky and very dangerous in some ways.
To Joe's point about things like self criticism and getting
in trouble for leftist deviations or rightist deviations or whatever,
it doesn't seem like a fun time.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So I think that breaking down your question a little
bit would be meaningful. What decade you joined the party
can tell you a lot about that person, and also
why you stay in the party can be very different
from why you joined in the first place, because often
you don't know what kind of organization it is, and
you don't know what's going to becoming. But I think
(05:14):
that at the heart of what you're getting at is
why would you join an organization that is so dangerous
to be a member of, either because you're fighting a
revolution against a vastly superior force or because there are
so many power struggles within that party. One of the
answers is that for these people, communism wasn't just a
way of understanding economics. It wasn't just about Marxist dialectics.
(05:37):
It was really a source of meaning and purpose in
their lives. It was joining an organization that for them
was a manifestation of a world historical inevitability, and it
was exciting. It gave them agency, it gave them a
sense that their lives mattered, and of course they were
often joining the party at moments when they felt that
the entire nation was at risk of falling apart because
(05:58):
of warlords and bands and Western and Japanese encroachments.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I forget what decade it is, but there's another reason
that even people today get excited about radical politics, and
that is sex and dating, and they think it'll make
them attractive to members of the opposite sex. You mentioned
that in your book that that was one of the
appeals for the very early communists.
Speaker 5 (06:20):
So it's interesting how politics and the personal mix often
for members of the Chinese Communist Party. So there was
a political background, there was a social background. He was
born two years after the collapse of the Qing dynasty.
He saw of these battles between nationalists and bandits, nationalists
and communists, and it would have been even just visibly
(06:46):
striking for him to grow up in this area. Because
he grew up near Chian, which many of your listeners
must know as where the terra Cotta soldiers are from.
And that's because the first unified Chinese state was forged
near where he was born, and so he would have
seen just how far his country had fallen from these
amazing heights during the Tong dynasty. And so for him,
(07:09):
he didn't really understand the intricacies of the ideology. He
wasn't really attracted to Marxism from an intellectual perspective, but
as he and other people had written about or talked
about later, it was just kind of cool to be
more radical and more leftists because there was a sense
that the country really needed something drastic to be able
(07:30):
to find its feet.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Can you talk a little bit about how he rose
up through the party ranks in the sort of early days,
because this is always a question. So, first of all,
the goal of the Communist Party, as you mentioned, is
sort of always changing in one way or another, or
certainly the way they execute on it seems to be
quite flexible, and so I'm very curious how a sort
(07:53):
of junior level politician or party member gathers influence within
the party. Basically what qualifies as a good job to
get them ahead.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the lemmas
that my book tries to explore is what does it
mean to be a deputy in a system that puts
so much focus on a strong leader and discipline. So
people might wonder, why would I read a book about
someone who wasn't the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
(08:25):
Isn't this just an organization where people do what they're told?
But actually it's so much more complicated than that, and
it's complicated for lots of interesting reasons. One is that
the top leader often will give a general sense of
what they want to achieve, but they won't say what
matters more and how to achieve it, and then so
the deputy has to figure it out. They have to
(08:46):
be loyal to what the top leader wants, but also
not screw everything up entirely. There's other competitors that might
not like you. You also have to be aware of the
fact that often the top leader will change their minds.
So all of these things are what members of the
party have to manage. And Shi Junction stands out for
(09:06):
his ability to keep winning over famous senior men within
the party. So he was not one of the oldest
of the founding generation, but he really impresses you with
his ability to find these big brothers over and over again,
who saw something in him that they admired.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
One thing I really got from reading your book, and
you mentioned Shi Jinping himself as part of his own
goal is to have the younger generations learn more about
party history, hence the drama that Tracy mentioned. One thing
I really sort of deeply internalized reading your book is
how young the country is, how young the party is.
And I mean there is a sense in which Mao
(09:49):
is like Shijinping's uncle. I mean you say the word
big brother in terms of like Shi Jong Shun's ability
to find these sort of brother figures. It's still a
very close it's a very close family. These people were
like right there at the very beginning that Shujinping knew
and was growing up with.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
Yeah. So one of the things in the book that
I think is really quite significant is how long these
people knew each other. Right, So the book begins in
the nineteen twenties, and she junctions a major figure through
the early nineteen nineties, and these names keep coming back
(10:26):
over and over and over again, and they knew each
other for so long, and the intricacies of these relationships
are really something. So in the West, We've often seen
this habit of dividing the party between good guys and
bad guys, reformers and conservatives, leftists and rightists. And one
of the things that emerges from my research is that
(10:48):
they were so subtle the way they interacted with each other.
So they were kind of frenemies in a way, right,
So they all had loyalty to the party, but the
way that the antagonism shifted, the way that the loyalty shifted,
was something that was very protean over these years.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Talk a little bit more about that, because I think
when people, certainly in the West, hear about the Chinese
Communist Party, they often think of factionalism and all these
cadres that are sort of in secret rooms forming different
groups with different goals. Did that actually happen?
Speaker 5 (11:20):
So I'm a skeptic about how useful the idea of
factions can be for understanding the Chinese Communist Party. Now,
I don't want to go too far. It definitely matters
who you worked with, whether you work in the same organization,
that kind of thing. But the reason Leninist parties are
known as organizational weapons is because they are so leader
(11:42):
friendly and because there is such a taboo about any
concerted political action by certain groups. Now sometimes they approach
that level of coordination, but they have to be so
careful because as soon as the top leader identifies that,
then they're going to be in big trouble. But also,
people are people, so you can have more liberal views
(12:03):
on some issues, more conservative views on other issues. Just
because you worked with someone doesn't mean that you're going
to like them. So often the people who are as
I mentioned, these relationships are shaped by what happened decades previously.
They have long memories, and if you worked with someone
you didn't get along, that can be meaningful many many
many years into the future too.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mentioned this at the beginning, but I remember when
I read the recent biography from a few years ago
of Dounk Shopang, and then also a recent Joe and
Live biography. They're always like trying to read maus my
own right like they're on their like, oh, and are
we guilty of leftism or rightism or whatever? And I
can never really figure out do we take the correct line,
we dig the people's life whatever, what does leftism mean?
(12:58):
They're always getting accused of leftism. I thought they're all
leftists they're communists, But what is actual What did they
mean it when they said that someone was taking like
the leftist line and the CCP and that that was
bad in some way.
Speaker 5 (13:09):
Good question. So when you look at Chinese texts when
they talk about leftism and rightism, leftism is always in
quotation marks right. So what is leftism in theory? Leftism
basically means that you're too ambitious, you're moving forward too quickly,
you don't recognize the objective conditions, and therefore you're making
a hash of things because you're trying to achieve what
(13:30):
is not possible at that particular time. Now, at the
same time, leftism is part of the part of what
makes the Chinese Communist Party because of this phenomenon known
as campaigns. Right, So what's a campaign? A campaign means
you get people to go too far, deliberately because you
need to get them to go too far, because the
whole point is to gin people up, to get them excited,
(13:52):
to inspire zeal. So you expect that things are going
to go too far. Now for these people who are
the deputy. Typically when they go too far and then
there's a rectification, they're not punished for it because there
was an always expectation that there was going to be
some mistakes, that you're going to break a few eggs. Right. Nevertheless,
because this was a system that took ideology so seriously,
(14:17):
when there were differences of opinion, often they weren't understood
as such. They were seen as manifestations of a deeper
political problem. And as you were alluding to in your introduction,
one of the reasons Mao and Dung were so powerful
is because they got to decide what was leftist. They
got to decide what was a line error. And so
often the reason we think that there are factions is
(14:40):
because the top leader decides after the fact to label
a bunch of people as a group and say that
they represented some kind of political view. But almost always
what really happened is that these people just simply weren't
in line with the chairman and they weren't guessing correctly
what he wanted, and they were punished for it, and
then they were given this label.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Why didn't Mauth just issue clearer instructions?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
Yeah, good question. Part of it was about the succession, right,
So Chinese top leaders always are thinking about what's going
to happen after they die, and they don't want their
model to disappear with them, and so they're testing their deputies.
They're trying to figure out whether their deputies can do
the right thing on their own, and so they don't
(15:27):
always want to be clear because they want to see
what you do. But also the top leaders change their
mind all the time. They're mercurial. They can watch a
situation and decide that things aren't going to well that
they wanted, and then they don't say that immediately to
see why other people are going to realize that on
their own. But also I think that by leaving some ambiguity,
(15:50):
they can see whether or not you are going to
use that space to do everything you can to remain
loyal to the top leader, or whether you're going to
show some of your own inclinations which you may or
may not like as the senior leader.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Let's talk about the trajectory of Shijong Chun's life a
little bit more. A big part of your book is
these fights over over history, and they're obsessed about like
getting the exact history of riot of Chinese and the
Northwest territories, and who is where when, et cetera, and
who is influential et cetera. Why was this so important,
these sort of fights over specific details of history, and
(16:25):
then how did that culminate ultimately in sixteen years in
which he was sort of extremely punished and banished and
basically cast out of the party and humiliated and all
the horrible things that happened during the revelation.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Two reasons, primarily, one is for a top leader, your
legitimation narrative is to say I was always on the
right side of the debate. And so when you make
the case for why everyone should listen to you, whether
or not your version of history is affirm has a
lot to do with whether or not you are seen
as someone who deserves to be the chairman. And the
(17:01):
second reason is that the party is a totalizing organization, right,
so your entire sense of self worth, your prestige, your status,
your sense of meaning is how the party characterizes your
contributions to the revolution and to the regime after it's established.
So history in that sense is absolutely existential for them.
(17:23):
And I think that also when it comes to, as
I said, this preoccupation with whether the regime will survive,
you need to win the hearts and minds of young
people by talking about the party as an organization that
went from one victory to another because it was the
only way of organizing society that can guarantee China's return
(17:47):
to its rightful place on the world stage. Right. So,
for all of these reasons, history is so important. And
so when you're purged from the leadership and you're doing
self criticisms, what are these self criticisms about. Well, it's
a reflection of your own personal history. So when Chi
Juncshin spent sixteen years in the political wilderness after he
was purged, what he was writing about was his past
(18:08):
over and over and over again and negotiating with the
top leadership just exactly how what he had done previously
was going to be officially evaluated.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
You know, you mentioned the word frenemy earlier, and as
a former teenage girl, frenemies is something that is a
perennial interest to me. And when I think about famous
frenemies in the past, do you like the segue.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
Too, Yeah, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
When I think about famous set frenemies in the past,
I kind of think about the Soviet Union and China
in the fifties and sixties. And one of the interesting
things about the elder she is that he was for
a while in charge of basically managing China's relationship with
Soviet experts at the time. What was that experience like
(18:56):
for him, How tricky was that to actually do, and
was it you us fault to him in later years
having had that experience.
Speaker 5 (19:04):
So in nineteen fifty three, the most prominent slogan in
the People's Republic of China was the Soviet Union of
today is China's tomorrow. And in fact that also was
the year that Shijinping was born and his father, Hi
Juncshin was Minister of Propaganda. In subsequent years, when Hijungshin
(19:25):
was working for Joe and Lai at the State Council,
as you said, one of his tasks was to manage
the Soviet expert program, and for a period of time
the number one priority was to learn wholesale from the
Soviet Union. And it was rooted in this idea that
there was only one way of doing communism. But Maltadong
(19:46):
increasingly came to the view that something had gone deeply
wrong with the October Revolution, that the Soviet leaders were
engaging in revisionism. And I know you were chuckling about
this word earlier. You're always getting a cued what is
this communist jargon and revision isn't basically means you're not
really a true communist anymore, that you are not as
(20:10):
actually leftist as you need to be right, you're not
pushing forward, you're too scared to try to win new
victories for the revolutionary agenda. And so Shei Junction would
have witnessed this story. He would have witnessed how Malzudun
gradually came to the conclusion that the Chinese project was
going to be different. And he also would have seen
(20:30):
something else, which was how dangerous it was to talk
to people outside the Chinese Communist Party, especially foreigners, because
one of the accusations against him in nineteen sixty two,
other than as you said, that he was trying to
revise history, was that he was a spy for the
Soviet Union. So it would have been very frightening for
she Junction to manage relations with the Soviets. Right, So,
(20:53):
the first great purge of the People's Republic of China
was a man named Gaogong, and he was another northwesterner.
He had known Xi Jungshun for years, and Mao had
come to believe that exactly, and Mao came to believe
that Gay was a spy for the Soviet Union. In
nineteen fifty nine at the famous for Chinese historians Lushan Plenham,
(21:16):
when the Defense Minister Pung d' Huai made critical remarks
of the Great Leap Forward, he also, in Mao's mind,
only did that because of a special relationship with the
Soviet Union, and he saw some machinations there. And pungd'
huai was the commander on the Northwest Battlefield, and Hi
Jung Sshun was his right hand man. So U si
(21:38):
Jung Shin was basically a forrest gump for the two
first Great Purchase of the People's Republic of China, and
they both were seen by Mao as having had illicit
relations with the Soviet Union. And then he is purged
in nineteen sixty two as well. I'll say one other
thing about this which is quite remarkable. So the first
split that was really something that the Chinese and Soviets
(22:03):
had trouble managing, happened while she Junction was visiting the
Soviet Union. And what had happened was there was an
altercation on the border between China and India the first
one and several Indian soldiers were killed, and while Si
Juncshin was traveling, the Soviets put out a statement that
(22:24):
essentially took a neutral position even though the Soviet Union
and China were in a formal alliance, and the Chinese
were absolutely furious, and Shi Juncshun left Moscow early and
when Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet leader, visited China just a
few weeks later, Mao said to him, your statement made
the imperialists happy. And Mao's conclusion was, why aren't the Soviets,
(22:49):
Why don't they have our back, Why aren't they more supportive?
And his answer was that it wasn't that the Soviets
were pursuing their interests. We have our interests. It was
that they're not really communist anymore. They've gone revisionist. And actually,
to tie it again back to Si Junction, it contributed
to Miles's preoccupation with this idea of class struggle, and
(23:10):
he wanted to figure out a way to make sure
class struggle never went away, and his crackdown on Chi
Junction in nineteen sixty two was related to his marinating
in this obsession with the importance of class struggle that
was partly inspired by what he saw as the degradation
of the revolutionary project in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So Shei Junction was purged and subject to sixteen years
of absolute torment. It's funny you characterize him. It's sort
of like the forest Gump of twentieth century China, because,
of course, later on in his career he was heavily
involved in Gwandal and the opening of Shenzhen and these
special opportunity zones or special economic zones which people know
(24:05):
a lot about there, but he spent much of the
rest of his life essentially fearing the possibility. It seems
that my reading of your book that the ever present
risk of sliding back into cultural revolution type periods and
the Cultural Revolution per your book, there were many patterns
of it prior to it. It's sort of these purges
(24:26):
and campaigns that existed afterwards. I'm just curious in your view,
can the Party even today ever be inured against the
potential of reverting back into such a self destructive environment
such as that, or is that always going to be
endemic to the structure of the party that it could
trip into these sort of intense inward battles that are
(24:48):
so damaging.
Speaker 5 (24:50):
Yeah, that's a very insightful question. One piece of evidence
to get at what you're driving at is to look
what she's in paying himself experience during the Cultural Revolution
and how he's talked about it. Xi Jinping said that
when the Cultural Revolution began, everyone believed in it, which
was true. So when it became clear that it was
(25:11):
a disaster, it was profoundly disillusioning. And Xi Jinping admitted
that he too went through a period of doubt, but
that precisely because he went through this time of thinking
about why such a terrible thing could happen, but nevertheless
returned to the party's cause, meant that his dedication is
(25:32):
more unshakeable than anyone's, anyone else's, And the nineteen eighties.
In these interviews that I found that he gave, he
talks about how he saw the nineteen eighties as a
time when people should be even more loyal to the
party because now they could do something. Now the leftism
and the radicalism had gone away, so you could finally
(25:54):
work to bring China in the right direction. And in fact,
he said that the reason that that he didn't want
to make up for lost time and have fun and
make money. Was because he wanted to make sure that
another cultural revolution never happened. But it raises a question, right,
which is how do you stop that from happening? And
so some people who went through the same thing that
Sijin Ping did, they believe that China needed the rule
(26:18):
of law, it needed to prevent another strong man leader
from appearing. And Xi Jinping's answer was, you need to
have a party that's unconstrained. You need to have a
party that's so powerful that it can stop people who,
when are given the freedom to do so, take advantage
of it and use it to hurt people. And so
for Shijinping, a lot of people think that he's a
(26:40):
Maoist figure, that a lot of what he's doing has
elements that are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. And that's
certainly true, but as you said, a lot of what
we associate with the Cultural revolution has been part of
the party since the very beginning. And the question then
is so Sheijinping he wants to use struggle, goal, he
(27:00):
wants to use campaigns, but he also doesn't want another
cultural revolution. Well what does that mean? Well, he and
people around him have said that, well, we're not going
to do the tragedy of the cultural evolution. We're going
to avoid that kind of radicalism. We're also going to
recognize that we lost a sense of vigilance after Mau's death,
and we're going to find this happy medium. But what
(27:20):
is a happy medium in this sense? Right, Like, struggle
is not a legal concept. It's not a clear idea really,
so you can see how in theory that you would
get it just the right amount, but that in practice
it's very hard. And I think that's one of the
reasons why we're seeing China struggle to balance the economy
and security is because it's hard to do two things
(27:43):
at once.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
Yeah, I always thought it was interesting that in modern
China there are a lot of portrayals domestically of the
Cultural Revolution, so things like historical dramas or in the
Three Body Problem. There's a very very long section on that,
and it kind of it's exactly what you're describing, which is,
to some extent, she Shinping wants people to know what
(28:05):
happened and to understand the danger of sliding back into
something like the cultural revolution. Just on that note, to
what extent do you think she Shin Ping actually draws
from his father's experience in terms of his own policy,
or are we sort of falling into the trap where
we think that all of Chinese politics has to be
(28:27):
dynastic and it's all about family members succeeding family members.
To what extent is that true?
Speaker 5 (28:33):
So Shichhung Shin has a reputation as the best kind
of person that the party could produce, almost uniquely humane
liberal pro reform. And so when Xijinping came to power,
a lot of individuals who knew the family or knew
something about party history believed that he was going to
(28:54):
be like what their understanding of his father was. And
when he moved into direction that to disappointed them, and
in fact was quite a surprise for them. They were
so so disappointed, And one of the things that they
did was they negatively contrasted him with his father. One
dissident exiled intellectual in the United States said that Xi
(29:18):
Jinping is not the son of Hi Juncshun. He's the
grandson of mal Jitdong. So this politicized use of shi
junction against Chijenping, and I'm sure that Shei jen Ping
hates it, but then the question becomes, well, is Chijenping
inspired by father as a positive example or as a
negative example. Some people have said that well, Xi Jinping
(29:39):
saw that his father's liberal policies failed, and that's why
he's doing something completely different. You know, we can't say
for sure, but I can say a couple things. One
is that it's interesting. It's interesting that Sheijenping's very first
article published in People's Daily was about the relationship between
older generations in the party and younger generations, and he
said essentially that we need to respect them. We can
(30:01):
learn so much from them, but we would not respect
them if we did exactly what they did, and we
never innovate, right, We need to move along with the times.
And also I think that at heart, what he wants
to do is make sure that the regime survives, and
everything he's doing is for that purpose, which means that
he is essentially inheriting the big picture of what his
(30:24):
father wanted, which was to ensure that the party and
the party's interests could persist from one generation to another.
So is he doing certain things different from what his
father did? Yes? Is it a conscious rejection of his father?
I'm not so sure. I think maybe he would say
that the heart of what I'm doing is the same
as what my father did, but also we need to
(30:45):
change with the times, and it's a story of the
party constantly learning new things and needing to address new
objective conditions as they appear. And one last point on this,
Chijinpin says that the reason the Chinese Communist Party survived
when other communist parties did not is because it had
this capacity for change. That it was because the party
could cynicize Marxism and adapt it to national conditions, therefore
(31:09):
find a Chinese style of modernization. That they could find
this way of a non Western style of development. So
it's interesting how he plays with this dialectic between tradition
and innovation. But in that sense, they think his thinking
here is.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
A little subtle tracy.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Have I mentioned I can't remember if I brought this up?
Have I mentioned too that I've recently read the book
Moby Dick?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Oh my god, Oh my god?
Speaker 4 (31:37):
Have I mentioned that?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Listeners? Let me just tell you, whenever Joe reads a book,
he talks incessantly about it. So, yes, you have brought
up Moby Dick several times.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
It's hard not to read the book about your book,
Joseph without thinking of the character Starbuck, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
You said that yourself on Twitter, and I use this
as an excuse to torment Tracy with bringing up Moby Dick.
But you yourself made that connection. Huh.
Speaker 5 (32:02):
So it's not a perfect analogy, right, because Starbuck is
the first mate and she Junction was sort of the
first mate to the first mate, right, so he's a
wrong further down than Starbuck. And also the book seems
to suggest that while Ahab is motivated by vengeance and
Starbuck is somebody who just wanted to make wants to
(32:24):
make money. Well, she Junction he was on board with
the revolutionary project, right, like he shared many of Mao's
views and Dung's views, so that we shouldn't essentialize the
difference between between She and Mao. And also that the quad, right,
the ship crashed, but the party has survived, right, the
party is still there. So those are the difference. But
(32:45):
at the same time, it is I think meaningful to
think about the similarities. Right. So Starbuck was the deputy,
the first mate to Ahab, and he knew better, but
he still allowed himself to be a victim, and by
doing that he doomed himself, he doomed the crew. And
even though he was someone who recognized that Ahab was
(33:07):
the kind of person who would strike the sun if
the sun insulted him, which really is a very Maoist
thing to say, right, Like Mao really kind of fetishized
this idea of struggle and fighting back and having a
strong personality, he still didn't really do anything about it.
And also, like She Junction, Starbuck isn't clearly a hero
are a villain, right he raises questions about the morality
(33:30):
of what he was doing as part of this particular system.
Starbucks also didn't really have legal recourse to removing a
have right. So there's this one moment where he thinks
about killing him, but he recognizes that that's a violation
of the law of the ship. And also, Starbuck is
similar to Sea Junction in the sense that when he
thinks that something is not going the way he thinks
(33:53):
is right, he remonstrates, but very carefully in a way
that he's almost not even really remonstrating because of just
how cautious he is. So and I'll say one final
thing about this right. So what's interesting about Moby Dick
is the whole crew kind of gets on board with
this crazy idea of hunting this whale, right, And it
kind of reminds me of this quote by Dunk shell
(34:14):
Ping about the Great Lea Forward, which is that we
all had the fever right, And it raises his questions like,
why would people be so loyal to this person who's
so strange and so eccentric. And I think it's because
this idea of the adventure and the thrill and mission
was something that spoke to something at the heart of
(34:35):
their lives. So maybe they're all just a few thoughts. Well,
you know, it's when you write a biography, you need
to talk about psychology and the fact that she Junction
and Xi Jinping went through these traumas can't be ignored
and you need to talk about it and it needs
to be addressed. But psychology and history, psychology and politics
(34:57):
are different disciplines for a reason, which is that you
can't essentialize their behavior down to what they experienced his children, right,
So a lot of people thought that everything Stalin did
could be explained by the fact that he was beaten
up when he was a young person right by his.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Oh yeah, this Stalin biography so much more than Knkin.
He has this great line He's like, oh, people say
that his father was abusive and drunk, and he's like,
who wasn't abusive and drunk in the early night and
late eighteen hundreds of that area. So anyway, sorry, keep going,
but yes, that's a good point.
Speaker 5 (35:26):
You'll say. One other thing about this.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
D H.
Speaker 5 (35:29):
Lawrence wrote chapter in a book about Moby Dick, and
he talked about all this practicality in search of a
mad mad Chase. And that also really gets to something
at the heart of the Party that we've talked about,
which is during the Revolution, during the Great Leak forward,
during the Cultural Revolution, you see these goals that are
just utopian. And at the same time that doesn't mean
(35:51):
that the party, at sometimes even the same moment, sometimes
more than others, doesn't also have this very practical side,
very flexible side. And these two elements have coexisted from
the very beginning in ways that I think are meaningful
to dwell onto.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
So one thing I'm always curious when it comes to
books like these very large historic projects is how you
actually go about gathering your research and what sources you're
looking at, and whether you're finding new things that potentially
people were unaware of before. And then just on that note,
what would you say is the biggest misconception that academics
(36:30):
or maybe people in the West in general tend to
have when it comes to understanding how the CCP actually works.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
Yeah, so when you do research on the Chinese Communist Party,
you can't just go to a couple of archives, collect
the material and write it up. You need to have
a different sense of sensibilities. You have to be sensitive
to the possibilities, not the limitations, and recognize that you're
going to have to collect a lot of different types
(36:59):
of evidence and making mosaic and you'll be able to
understand certain things better than others, but that in the
future people will find new things, and that it's an
ongoing project. There's never going to be a definitive version.
But nevertheless, there's enough that you can do to say
in the intgiram at least something meaningful, something to start
a conversation. And so, for example, a lot of internal documents,
(37:24):
a lot of archives have made their way to American
libraries and institutions in Hong Kong and Taiwan. People from
the mainland were able to publish histories outside of censorship,
but also document collections and memoirs. But you also need
to use the stuff that comes out of mainland China.
(37:45):
So there was a period where party history journals were
really pushing the envelope. But even the official stuff like
the chronologies and the official biographies, you can mind those
things for biographical details, but also you can put it
in the context of other material collected, and then suddenly
that evidence is meaningful to you in a way that
maybe even the compilers of it did not expect. And
(38:07):
also I just made a list of every time that
she jumption met with a foreigner and then tried to
either speak to that person or go to their archives.
I spoke to the Dalai Lama. I went to the
French Communist Party archives because she jumptioned went to France.
I went to the archives in Serbia because you went
to a big important congress in Yugoslavia when it still existed.
(38:27):
That kind of thing, and so you know, what are
the main misunderstandings. Well, one thing to say is that
this isn't always just a case of Westerners who don't
understand China getting it wrong for cultural reasons or whatever.
But people at the very heart of this system also
constantly got it wrong right And so, as I mentioned earlier,
(38:48):
these people who knew that she family were totally dumbfounded
by Xijinping when it became clear what kind of a
leader he was going to be. Right, and these were
not stupid people. These were people who had been around
the block over and over and over again. And the
reason these purges happened, the reason why someone like Hijo Mashin,
who was actually quite cautious and quite clever, why he
(39:11):
crashed on the shoals of power struggles is because he
also didn't fully understand the repercussions of what he was doing.
So in that sense, we should keep in mind just
how hard it is to get the system right, not
just for people on the outside, but even for people
on the inside too.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
That's a great ending, Joseph to regain fantastic book. Really
appreciate you coming on odd lots and chatting.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
On, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
While we were recording that episode, Joseph mentioned the various
campaigns that they had the CCP, so I went to
the Wikipedia page, and like, I love some of the
names of their campaign because like some of them are
like sort of straightforward, like cleansing the class ranks campaign,
kind of obvious. But then like counter attack, the right
deviate counter attack, the right Deviationist reversal of verdicts trend campaign,
(40:14):
the criticized Lynn, criticized Confucius classic obviously campaign, there's something.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Always very poetic about it. Well, the four Pests campaign.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
Oh yeah, where that one was very sad and kind
of blew up in their face. But I think you're
getting to an important point, which is a campaign. What
was the second one you mentioned.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
The counter attack the right Deviationist reversal of verdicts trend campaign. Sorry,
that was the Gang of Four attacking Chupain, who is
involved in reversing verdicts of people who had been improperly
punished during the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Right, But this is actually important because it's like, what
does that mean exactly? And I think this has kind
of been both the strength and the weakness of the
CCP over time, which is that a lot of these
concepts are fuzzy and ever changing, and often they are
fuzzy on purpose, so that the leader can exert control
and declare what actually is anti right or anti visionism
(41:14):
or whatever.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
No, totally it is clear.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I mean, obviously there is like the however many year period,
the formal the nineteen sixty six nineteen seventy six cultural Revolution,
which she the elder she and the younger she well
like truly like unbelievable leverage, levels of personal humiliation and suffering.
But it really extended both before that and afterwards. And
I really, you know, it's clear, like it is not
(41:39):
easy in a political system such as that to ever
fully guard against the return of that style of full
blown politics.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
I have one question for you. How many Moby Dick
references am I going to hear on this podcast?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Well, maybe the only the next time we do an
energy one.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Okay, all right, I can Okay, I'd be really impressed
if you like work it into every episode, So I definitely.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I just thought it was very funny in this case
that the author happened to have a lot of an
unusually high level of drawn out thoughts between one character
and Moby Dick and the author of his book.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
So I had to bring that up. I thought that
was very good.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
I'm un good at being weird. Here, here we go.
I'm going to read Moby Dick as a lens for
understanding the CCP.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
You should It's great?
Speaker 3 (42:25):
All right? Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 4 (42:27):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
This has been another episode of the Audloughts Podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Joseph Triggian. He's at Joseph Triggian, and
check out his new book, The Party's Interests Come First,
The Life of Shi Jong Shun, father of Shi Jinping.
Follow our producer Carman Rodriguez at Kerman Ermann Dash, Ob
Bennett at Dashbot, and kil Brooks at Keil Brooks. And
for more Odlov's content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash
(42:55):
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