Transcript | The View from Behind Xi Jinping's Desk, with Jonathan Czin

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo:

Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from the lovely little village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire, where my sister and her husband live.

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This week on Sinica, we’re going to take a step back and look, again, well, really, really, really look at how we understand China’s leadership under Xi Jinping. I’ve often been frustrated by the persistence of certain tropes in, especially American commentary, but, you know, more broadly, Western commentary, about XI and the senior leadership in Beijing that he’s either, you know, Mao reincarnate or some brittle autocrat presiding over imminent collapse. That’s why I found Jonathan Czin’s new piece in Foreign Affairs, titled “China Against China: Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success,” really refreshing. The piece should come out right around the time that you’re hearing this if you’re listening to it on the day that the show drops. If you are a subscriber to Foreign Affairs, you might think about hitting pause and giving it a read first — or not.

Jon is Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. He served as a director for China at the National Security Council during the Biden administration and spent many a year as an analyst at the CIA on working on China, of course. His essay and his work on China more generally, it really it does something that too few in Washington do these days. He actually takes Xi’s project seriously on its own terms. Yes, not just what XI Jinping has done, but why? And he suggests that many of the reforms that we lament as illiberal were actually, from Xi’s vantage point, efforts to fix problems that earlier, more liberal reformers were, well, had left unresolved. I really want to emphasize here that the strength of Jon’s piece, at least to me, is that he bothers to try to look at things from Xi’s vantage point.

What do we call that, boys and girls? We call that cognitive empathy. And it’s basically, you know, the North Star I strive for with Sinica, right? Anyway, Jon argues that Xi’s China isn’t the story of a failing autocracy or of a state losing control. It’s the story of the leadership trying to cure the pathologies that its own success created corruption, dependency, and fragility born of prosperity. It’s a very sober and, I’m sure for some, a deeply unsettling read because it challenges not just our assumptions about China, but about ourselves. So, my own essay, The Great Reckoning, just came out this week in the Ideas Letter from the Open Society Foundations. I’ve actually reprinted it now, just now at sinicapodcast.com. So, it explores how China’s rise forces Americans to confront certain uncomfortable truths about modernity, legitimacy, our own myths of exceptionalism.

I thought this would be a really good moment to bring Jon on for a conversation. Both of our pieces, for sure, in very different registers, are kind of about clarity, about seeing through the haze of ideology and wishful thinking. Jon’s essay, like I said, just calls on us to see Xi’s project not as the simple story of repression that so many in D.C. have settled on, but as a complex, adaptive response to the contradictions of China’s own successes. Mine, meanwhile, is about reckoning with what China’s achievements force us to confront about ourselves. Read the piece. It’s about our complacency, our narratives of exceptionalism, our tendency to explain away what doesn’t fit our mental models. So, in a sense, both essays, I think, are attempts at intellectual honesty, at looking directly at the thing itself without the reflexive yes, but.

So, with that, Jonathan Czin, congrats on this excellent, excellent piece, and welcome to Seneca. You are long overdue. Ryan Hass shouted you out back in March. I’ve been itching to get you on ever since, man. Welcome.

Jonathan Czin:

Thanks so much, Kaiser. Thanks for having me on. It’s a real pleasure, especially because I am a long-time listener. Your voice has been pumping into my ears on many a commute and many a long run for quite some time.

Kaiser:

Well, I’m really pleased to hear that. So, let’s dive right in. First, thanks to Jenna Lief and other folks at Foreign Affairs for vouchsafing with me your essay before it was published. So, I got a chance to read it and to talk to you and put the podcast out on the day that it drops. But let’s talk about this. You described Xi’s leadership as a kind of reformation. The word comes up a bunch of times. It’s a term, obviously, within historical resonance. And yeah, it’s kind of a pun, I guess, but it probably needs to be unpacked a bit. I mean, several years ago I had Carl Minzner on the show.

You actually namecheck him and his poem in your essay. Because he basically made the argument that Xi’s ascension meant the end of the reform and opening period. And that’s certainly not how XI Jinping himself thinks about it. He still talks about deepening reforms, but, you know, they are clearly neither the market liberalization nor the political liberalization that Carl or maybe even Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, or others, have had in mind when they’ve talked about reform? So, is it that Xi’s counter-reformation is analogous to the Catholic Church’s pushback in, what? The 16th century against the spread Lutheranism and Calvinism, or is he reforming against something? Is he countering a reform with a different kind of reform? What do you think? How does that work in your mind if you could unpack that?

Jonathan:

Yeah. I think you’re right — I owe a real intellectual debt to Carl Minzner for using that phraseology because I think it really popped with me. And I think there is a decent analog with the original counter-reformation going back to the 16th and 17th century because it’s both about countering the pathologies that you see developing in your own system. But what happened in that kind of reformation was also qualitatively different from what preceded it. Catholic Church was not the same after it. And I think that’s similarly what’s going on with Xi Jinping. He’s trying to get back to basics in many ways and go back to his heritage as a princeling and the Party as he knew it under his father.

But because of the transformation that China’s gone through, through the ensuing years, you can’t go back to the future, right? This isn’t a Michael J. Fox movie. You’re going to land somewhere new and different in that process. So that is part of why the term really resonated with me. And I think, you know, when you look at the Party documents, they don’t talk about it that way. And I think you’re quite right; they still talk about this very much as continuity. But I think that’s partially for their own ideological purposes. This is the same reason that Deng had to say Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. They can’t really jettison that heritage or push back against it quite so explicitly.

So, it’s a little playful, and I’m trying to put things a little bit more starkly, but I think it helps generate productive thinking about how do we construe what it is that Xi is trying to do and accomplish here, and what is on his mind? And how did she see things when he arrived in Beijing as the heir apparent back in 2007?