Unrest in China — with Matt Pottinger
From civil disobedience we have not seen in China since Tiananmen Square, to loosening zero covid policy, and leadership tightening its political grip in unprecedented ways, this has been quite a few weeks in China. What is US policy on a range of issues – the protests, semiconductors, Taiwan and also TikTok?
Matt Pottinger returns to the podcast. Matt covered China and lived in China as a journalist for Reuters and then The Wall Street Journal. Then, in his early 30s, he made quite a career change. Matt joined the US Marine Corps, and had multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Later on Matt played an instrumental role in reshaping the West’s relationship with China, when he served as the deputy National Security Advisor in the Trump administration, and was the architect of the administration’s strategy towards China.
Today, he is regularly called upon by policymakers on both sides of the aisle, to consult on US policy towards China. He recently co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs titled “Xi Jinping in His Own Words”.
Matt is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] What you have now is a communist party run company bite dance And it's it's most important overseas platform tik tok and it has a communist party committee The editor in chief is the chairman of that communist party committee that communist party committee and bite dance have Uh, inked agreements with China's internal security apparatus, the public security bureau promising that they will make sure that their algorithms are informed by quote correct political direction.
Before we get to our conversation, a little bit of housekeeping. We're moving our publishing of our episodes from Fridays to Mondays. So starting with today, keep an eye out in your feed when you start your week. Now on to our conversation with Matt [00:01:00] Pottinger from civil disobedience We've not seen since Tiananmen Square and letting go of zero COVID policy and a leadership tightening its political grip in Unprecedented ways.
This has been quite a few weeks in China What is US policy in response in response to the protests dealing with? Semiconductors dealing with Taiwan and also what's US policy on Matt Pottinger returns to the podcast. Matt covered China and lived in China as a journalist for Reuters and then the Wall Street Journal.
And then in his early 30s, he made quite a career change. He joined the U. S. Marine Corps and had multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Later on, Matt played an instrumental role in the geopolitical story of our time. Our topic today, reshaping the West's relationship with China, where he served as the Deputy National Security Advisor in the Trump administration and was the architect of the administration's strategy towards China.
A lot [00:02:00] of those policies endure even today through the Biden administration. Today, Matt is regularly called upon by policymakers on both sides of the aisle to consult on U. S. policy towards China. He recently co authored an essay for Foreign Affairs titled Xi Jinping in his own words. We're going to talk a lot about that essay today.
I highly recommend you read it. Matt is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute and chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast fan favorite Matt Pottinger. I get a lot of I got, there's like three or four guests we have, uh, that are repeat guests that, uh, I hear from folks that they can never get enough of. One of them is Matt Pottinger. So Matt, I appreciate you bringing your rockstar status back to the podcast.
How are you? Dan, no, it's, it's really good to be with you. Uh, you, [00:03:00] you've, uh, that's a big honor if that's true, because, uh, You've got a lot of great guests on your show that I love, uh, love listening to. So thanks for having me on, uh, happy to have you sort of bizarre times, uh, which I guess is, is, um, consistent with, um, when, when I asked you to come on to banter, uh, bizarre times beginning with the month we just had, uh, in China, the month of November.
So it seems like there was a lot going on in November. And, and we were all sort of consuming the, the headlines that were not even daily, but like hourly. And can you just take a step back and try to explain to me what, what actually was happening in China in this past month? Yeah. Yeah. So November 2022 pretty remarkable because it starts with Xi Jinping having just finished his 20th party Congress in which [00:04:00] he, uh, not, I mean, to say that he consolidated power would be an understatement.
Uh, wiped out any, uh, any sign of, uh, of, uh, any other faction in the, in the Chinese communist party. He, uh, you know, retired people, uh, who had been, uh, more, more associated with some of Xi's predecessors in power. And he even, you know, we can talk later about it, but he, you know, there was even the, what, what looked to be the, uh, involuntary removal from the party congress, uh, of, uh, Hu Jingtao, the immediate predecessor.
I, so then you, you, you come into, uh, into November with the, the really the realization, just the growing realization that the Chinese economy is cratering and it's cratering because of Uh more than any other factor, uh, the [00:05:00] zero covid policy that's been in place for years now Uh in in china, and so what we saw at the beginning of the month was kind of interesting You saw the first creeping signs that there was there was a desire to try to to try to shake off this policy that that is uh, bears the personal imprint of xi jinping by fine tuning it and doing things like Uh, changing the, uh, the, the incentives for officials so that they would err on the side of being less zealous in their, in their, uh, uh, execution of the zero COVID policy as opposed to punishing officials for being too lax.
So this, this is how the month started off and it looked like they were trying to go Into something that I would call a controlled burn, you know, to let this virus start burning through the population, but but in some kind of a controlled fashion, given that Chinese people are not vaccinated with [00:06:00] advanced vaccines, they don't have access to M RNA vaccines.
That was a policy decision by Beijing not to not to approve their own and not to approve foreign M RNA vaccines. There was a decision. Mm hmm. Um, to, um, see, you know, basically incentivize officials to not to be overzealous suddenly. Uh, but the thing about Omicron, as we found out, is there's no such thing as a, as a controlled burn.
It, this thing is, uh, the honey badger of, uh, of, uh, of, uh, you know, COVID variants. It just, it just don't care. The thing is just going to rip like a wildfire if you give it the opportunity. And so as the thing, can I, can I just, just for. Just for our listeners that I just want to spend one minute on the on the numbers because I don't think people fully I certainly didn't fully appreciate it.
So so if you look at china's elderly population, so the population that's most at risk The latest numbers I saw china has a population Of [00:07:00] 264 million people over 60 years old 36 million people over 80 years old. So that's, that's like a 300, 300 million elderly people. Over, well over 10 percent of them have never been vaxxed.
Not to mention those that got the first two shots. Never got a booster. So according to one study I saw, it's been like 18 months since second doses were given out to the population that did get vaccinated, which basically means very few people are really vaccinated in this country. Compared to the U. S.
where 98. 5 percent of people 65 years and older have had at least one shot of mRNA. Uh, of an mRNA vaccine in China, it's not only the elderly that have these big numbers of, of non vax, but you have huge parts of the population that haven't been vaxed in 18 months. You got it. So it means that China's got whatever the opposite of herd immunity is, right?
You've got a [00:08:00] population of people who are immunologically naive to a virus that, uh, the rest of the world has been, uh, wrestling with and, and getting sick from and dying from and vaccinating against, uh, for three years now. Uh, and so that is a tinderbox that, that, that, that helps explain why Beijing is so reluctant to, uh, to, to shift away from zero COVID.
They painted themselves, themselves into a corner with these policies. Uh, I mean, it is, it is Xi Jinping's personal policy. We're true. We, we, you know, I've scratched my head about why it is that Beijing would not permit foreign, uh, MRNA vaccines. Uh, especially when they had the, they, they had negotiated a Chinese company, Fosun International had negotiated the right to distribute the BioNTech, you know, which is the same as the Pfizer vaccine, uh, all the way back in the spring of, uh, of 2020.
And, and we're a couple of colleagues and I were able to trace the decision. [00:09:00] We're fairly confident to a couple of speeches that Xi Jinping gave in March. of 2020. So very early in the pandemic when he, when he said he visited a couple of biotechnology research labs and said, China will control the core technologies for biotech, especially core technologies related to COVID and the signal that that sent.
From interviews that we've done just talking to people across China. The signal that that sent was we're not allowed to use foreign stuff We have to have our own we're not going to be allowed to Import a vaccine that the rest of the world is using and so through that decision three almost, you know Three years ago china has put itself into this incredibly precarious position right now.
We think of china Uh, before the COVID crisis, the conventional narrative about China, uh, among the academy, among in [00:10:00] finance circles, in tech circles, was that China was this innovation juggernaut in a number of sectors, not the least of which was biotech and pharmaceuticals, and they don't have an mRNA vaccine.
So how do you square that? I mean, it's one thing for China to say. We're not gonna, we're not gonna, um, integrate with the rest of the world's pathway to an mRNA vaccine. We're gonna do it on our own, but then when you layer on this This, uh, widely held view up until the last few years that the, the China tech innovation steamroller can't be stopped.
And it's going to steamroll through Asia and it's going to steam, steam through, roll through Europe and ultimately steamroll through the U. S. And then you just see how they can't even produce and disseminate a reliable vaccine. So what, what, what, where's the gap? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so look, I mean the, the hallmark of Xi Jinping's rule [00:11:00] is.
He's really been guided by a fear of, um, the Chinese Communist Party succumbing to the same fate as the Soviet Communist Party. So that is the most important guide point for, for understanding what, what, uh, uh, you know, what makes him tick. And so on what he has said is that. We must control by we he means the communist party and by the communist party He means himself personally as the core of that party That we must control the tools of dictatorship That's the actual term he uses not mine the tools of dictatorship and by the tools of dictatorship He means that he that that he must control a strong leader at the top of the party with its monopoly on power must control Information flow, ideology, textbooks, uh, the, the, uh, uh, military, the security apparatus, uh, but [00:12:00] also, um, the economy.
And so China is still innovative. China has, it has these pools of incredible talent. It produces more engineers than any place on earth. Uh, but, but Xi Jinping era. Is that he and the party will decide where capital will be directed now and and and where it shall not be directed and As a general rule of thumb, and we've seen this through his actions, particularly over the last two years, he is not fond of consumer facing technology, including big tech platforms, which have been the most dynamic part of the Chinese economy.
Right. Hence the clamp down on like Alibaba. Alibaba, and, and on dd, which was the, uh, rideshare right app, which got got Uber. Yeah, me capped. And, uh, and many, many others, uh, where that, where those came from and where he is now directing capital is towards [00:13:00] what he calls quote, the real economy, close quote.
And by that he means hard technologies that have, uh, generally have dual use purposes, that they have civilian commercial uses, but they also have, Uh, uses at improving China's military capability and its internal repression and surveillance capabilities. And so, so the types of things that he's looking at are semiconductor design and manufacturing.
He's bulldozed perhaps a couple hundred billion U. S. dollars into, uh, sort of a state led program to make China, uh, the world's leading manufacturer of chips. It includes things like Nuclear fission and fusion. It includes autonomous systems, uh, advanced manufacturing. Uh, it definitely includes things in the biotech space, um, which, uh, which we can come back to in a moment, you know, because it hasn't helped them, uh, overcome, uh, the mRNA hurdle.
Uh, which, [00:14:00] which they really could have done. But, um, uh, but, but, but it's these kinds of things that he considers to be the real economy. It's manufacturing heavy. It's not consumer driven items. Okay. So they don't have access for now, at least to a reliable vaccine and the population is under vaccinated now.
Yeah, I mean, pick up, pick up where, where, where we left off with it, with their slight opening, right? The loosening that began at the beginning of November, the thing took off like wildfire. China suddenly was reporting the highest daily caseloads of COVID in ever. And I think they started to panic. And so what you saw was a reversion, uh, to the draconian lockdowns, like we saw.
Uh, like the spring lockdown in Shanghai and, and some of these lockdowns, uh, were hardest. And, uh, in those places that we're beginning to experiment with loosening, like the city shirts, [00:15:00] Yajuan, which is, uh, the capital of Hebei province, not far from Beijing. They had been experimenting with a, with sort of a looser approach, but then they, then, then they had to snap back with a vengeance.
Um, the city of Urumqi, which is the capital of the Xinjiang. Region in the northwest of China, which is famous right now for its repression of, uh, traditionally ethnic Muslim minority groups like the Uyghurs, uh, that that area over the over the summer had been experimenting with a more open policy. And then cases started to spread as, as tourists were visiting a ruchi over the summer and then going back to other parts of China, they were bringing Covid with them.
So there was a draconian snapback lockdown that, uh, has been going for more than a hundred days. And so that, so, so you have this sort of oscillation between experimenting with a looser policy and then snapping back to tougher lockdowns than ever. That that was what was going on over the course of November until we got to the [00:16:00] end of November.
When you had a, a, a few things happen in short order. Before, before we get to the end of November, let me just ask you, I'm still just to zero in on what the motivation was for those, those, those paradoxical, paradoxical moves that you're describing. Was it in response to people getting frustrated with the, um, With the intensity, uh, the persistent intensity of the lockdowns, or was it in response to meaning they knew they had a civil unrest?
They knew how they had a political problem on the ground among regular people, just frustrated, uh, or was it motivated by, look, at some point, we've got to reopen this economy. Yeah. We're really suffering economically. It's both, but the real spark was an act of civil disobedience. And so, so, but, but first, what, you know, what's going on with the economy?
Um, local governments are running out of money, they're going broke. And that is because the way that [00:17:00] local governments have been making their money and able to collect revenue over the last couple of decades. Is yes, tax collection, but more important than that is the sale of land. They sell land to property developers.
The property developers, uh, uh, borrow money from state banks. They build, uh, the, you know, they sell apartments and this, this, this cycle has been what has provided most of the provincial and city and local level financing that came to an end, uh, a couple of summers ago when Xi Jinping, uh, quite understandably.
Came, came to view the, uh, the overheated and badly over leveraged, uh, residential property sector is a major, uh, threat to, uh, their financial sector, you know, the whole financing system. And so he imposed some, uh, draconian, well, I wouldn't call them, he imposed some very strict rules that he called the three red lines.
And in short, what those were designed to do was to [00:18:00] prick the property bubble and, and really, uh, shift. Uh, Chinese, uh, uh, the Chinese economy towards other endeavors than, than building apartments that in some cases, uh, just become, uh, uh, a target of speculation. You know, there are far more apartments than there are people, uh, uh, available to buy and live in those apartments.
So the bumper sticker that Xi Jinping had was, you know, houses are for living in, not for speculation, but that dried up that revenue stream. And so what you have right now are. Governments that don't have enough money to even pay for the testing for COVID that they're required under the zero COVID policy to, to, uh, carry out, uh, constantly, they don't have the money.
So you, you have this strange situation where you actually have testing companies going bankrupt in China when there's never been higher demand for testing because no one can pay for it. And, and so part of it was an economic reason, uh, you know, the primary reason, but then [00:19:00] you had the spark in the city of Zhengzhou, which is the capital city of Hunan province.
Sometimes Chinese people refer to Zhengzhou as the Chicago of China. It's central, it's a major, uh, transportation node, uh, lots of manufacturing that goes on there, including. The guys at Foxconn who have about 200, 000 people working in a major factory, it's the size of a city itself, and they make our iPhones, they make iPhones for the world market, and there was there were some positive.
Cases there, uh, in October that led to a, uh, uh, a lockdown, the attempt to impose a lockdown on the 200, 000 workers there. And here you had the first known major act of civil disobedience, uh, over the last, uh, you know, more than a couple of years where people just started jumping the fence. They started clipping barbed wire [00:20:00] Uh, uh, hopping over a barbed wire and chain link fences by the thousands to get out of the, uh, to get out of the factory where they worked making our iPhones so that they wouldn't be locked down.
And so that, that was a, that really shook the system. And I think that that helped, uh, precipitate that first experiment with loosening a month ago. Okay. So then, so that gets going, uh, and then we start to see this phenomenon pop up all over the country. Right, or not maybe all over the country, but in a number of very important provinces the the civil unrest.
Yeah Well the the the uh, the civil unrest followed Uh the sort of snapback that took place after case, you know within just a week or or 10 days the caseloads Uh, were coming back so high in mid November that they started to reimpose these lockdowns again. And then, and then the Foxconn plant, uh, in Zhengzhou again [00:21:00] became the site of not just an act of civil disobedience of people hopping the fence, but people who had been lured back and promised that they would have adequate food and water and, and so forth, who came back.
Did not get, uh, reportedly were not paid what they were told they were going to get paid. And then the lockdown, uh, was tightened. And so that led to a, uh, a riot at the Foxconn plant that had to be put down by police wearing riot gear, uh, uh, uh, and, you know, shields and, and, and the like, but that was that, um, Was then followed by the the biggest spark of all which was a literal one It was a fire that broke out in an apartment building in a room chi member I just mentioned that room she's been under under lockdown for more than 100 days people are going going crazy But a fire broke out in a building and the fire department when it responded to the fire was unable to get close [00:22:00] to the building Uh, and, and we've, we've read that there are a couple of, uh, possible reasons for that.
Both of them, uh, directly related to the zero COVID policy. And that is that there were police barricades, uh, according to some accounts that didn't, that, that got in the way of the fire truck response. The other is that all of the private vehicles parked around the city. All of the car batteries had gone dead because no one had driven their cars or started their cars in months due to the lockdown.
So cars couldn't be moved. And so the firetruck was trying to spray its water from, you know, uh, a block away. And, uh, uh, at least 10 people, uh, perished in those flames. Some videos of the people screaming out the windows, asking to be Rescued one of one of the most horrific videos made its way across China before censors were able to catch up with that.
That was the spark that led to the first set of Of demonstrations [00:23:00] across china directed At the central government breaking out simultaneously in numerous cities and on numerous college campuses for the, you know, since 1989. So the first time in 33 years that we've seen protests like that. So I want to, you brought up 1989.
So Tiananmen Square. So. In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party clamps down on protests in Beijing, and they basically use brute force. Right? Their surveillance system, their technology capabilities, their cyber capabilities are not obviously anything comparable to the era we live in today. And so they They, it was just visually, um, obvious that this was just like tanks rolling, literally like all but rolling over people and just slaughtering, you know, these, these young, um, student protesters compare that to what a clampdown looks like today.
Yeah. Yeah. So 1989, like you said, I mean, it was brute force. They used [00:24:00] young soldiers carrying rifles and machine guns. Uh, in driving armored personnel carriers and tanks to crush the, uh, 1989 pro democracy protests. Uh, hundreds, if not thousands died, uh, in, in those, uh, you know, in that crackdown. And what, what China has done in the, in the three decades since.
Is, uh, they have funded their, their domestic security apparatus, uh, to a degree that, that no society has ever seen in history, they spend more money on their internal, uh, repression system than they spend even on their military and their military is now rivaling, uh, the United U. S. military in terms of the levels of spending, especially when you compare it to purchasing, uh, parity, right?
So, so they, they, they have acquired. Anti riot gear, uh, which, which gives them some, uh, options other than opening fire on crowds, but far more important than that are the, um, really [00:25:00] the totalitarian, uh, uh, digital surveillance. You've got hundreds of millions of public cameras that are, uh, uh, uh, around, uh, Chinese cities that are backed with artificial intelligence, facial recognition software.
Everyone carries around their own surveillance device in the form of a smartphone. Um, meaning meaning they're they're involuntarily Every citizen is involuntarily. Oh total providing Uh surveillance capabilities Of how deep the the security apparatus goes into Your personal phone in china uh owners of phones, uh made by huawei, uh Reported this week that all that protest related content that they'd saved on their phones including videos and web postings All began to vanish from their phones involuntarily.
Um, so all, everything you do, everything you communicate, every, every site you visit, every, [00:26:00] every dollar you spend, because in China, you don't, people don't use cash anymore. You use, um, you use digital payment systems that are carefully monitored, uh, by the state. They, they know. Everything about where you are, who you interact with, what you're thinking, what you're reading, what photos and video images you have on your phones.
And so the other thing they've been doing now is really stopping people on the streets and in subways to make people open their phones. And then they're searching for what apps. As well as what photographs are on the phone. If you have a virtual private network, or you have a Western platform like Twitter or Instagram, uh, or YouTube on your phone, that can be grounds for a fine or, or, uh, or even arrest.
And so these are these are the same techniques that they've been using for for the last six years out in Xinjiang where you've Got an archipelago of concentration camps now for ethnic minorities They're beginning to use those techniques in places like shanghai and [00:27:00] beijing and nanjing And zhengzhou now as well So I mean you you've said that what the u.
s contends with in its competition with china is a, a military, conventional military and nuclear capability in China that's, there's nothing comparable, uh, that the U. S. has had to deal with, that, in, in terms of what China has at, at its disposal, at least in the nuclear age, that, that we're dealing now with the country at a whole other level, and what you're saying now is whatever they're investing in that, in those capabilities, is actually On par with what they're investing on their domestic security and surveillance, which is extraordinary And and they're also exporting that domestic surveillance system.
Not only to places like iran, you know their ally uh but also to Uh other other other countries in latin america and beyond we can talk we talk about that on another podcast someday. It's a very troubling Um, uh sort of trend but but in spite of this in [00:28:00] spite of this you have numerous cities Uh, uh, numerous college campuses that break out in spontaneous, uh, protest against zero COVID and in solidarity with the people in a room, uh, who perished in that, in that terrible fire.
So, so, you know, Chinese people know that the Beijing has these, uh, means at its disposal, which is all the more reason why we should be in awe of the bravery. Of those who decided to stand up the fact that beijing is now starting to back away again From draconian lockdowns and it's starting to accelerate this loosening is directly Uh, thanks to those young students those workers at places like the foxconn factory And just regular everyday citizens who uh who gathered on street corners to uh to speak out and speak up And, and, uh, show solidarity with, uh, uh, with, with, uh, [00:29:00] people, including ethnic Uyghurs, as well as ethnic Han Chinese in, in Urumqi in that fire.
So this is, this is an really kind of an, an awesome awe inspiring act of bravery. People know that they are going to face severe consequences and already are facing severe consequences for showing up. But I want to come back to the paradox. Of the of the government of the communist Chinese Communist Party's approach because okay.
So in response to the protests, they're loosening up. And at the same time, you say, as a result of the loosening up and the and the suboptimal vaccines that the that China has to distribute and how far behind they are in vaccinations. They've made their peace with the fact that the covid is going to rip through the population.
And then you have a health care system that is not capable of supporting and caring for a population at this scale that could be suddenly Dealing with the [00:30:00] consequences of covid ripping through it. There just aren't enough hospital beds. There isn't enough high quality health care I mean people have these marxist fantasies about how much better and equal and uh, uh, And and tolerable health care is in in communist countries and we're about to we're about to see a test case in that on how good this health care system is because if Covid's about to rip through the chinese population that the numbers you are projecting And the, and the, you have data on the number of hospitals and hospital beds, it just doesn't add up.
Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be horrendous. Uh, you're not going to see, um, an enormous amount, uh, because of, of censorship. Um, you, you're not going to, going to, to be able to see in real time except through, uh, snippets of video and, and, uh, And, uh, witness testimony that, that bravely, uh, gets shared with the world.
But what we're going to see is, is a horrendous testing of, [00:31:00] um, of the medical capacity of China. And we should also hold in awe, uh, the doctors and nurses that are going to bear the brunt of this and they're going to bear the brunt of it thanklessly because there is not going to be, um, uh, permitted. Uh, news coverage on, uh, the significant spike in cases and in deaths that are going to occur there.
Look, we're moving from a zero COVID policy to what's going to look like a zero death policy, except people are going to be dying by the tens and then hundreds of thousands, if not more. But Beijing is going to forbid the reporting of COVID deaths. That they're going and we've seen this testimony from very brave Chinese journalists who've written about it Uh murong xue cun is one of them who wrote a a book deadly quiet city that's out now in in english language in in in his uh accounts he he interviewed uh, chinese doctors who were Dealing with the covid cases [00:32:00] at the very beginning of the of the pandemic And they were instructed explicitly to sign death certificates fraudulently 100 percent of the time.
So everyone who died of COVID, the doctors were required to attribute those deaths to causes other than COVID. And that's going to continue, uh, except on, on, on a mass scale. China only still only has a death toll for the, for the whole three years, the pandemic. The death toll is still stands at just a little over 5,000 people.
Even though we know that there are, there are millions of people, uh, who who've, uh, who've, uh, caught, uh, covid. So, so this is going to be, uh, an act of, uh, in incredible censorship and, and repression and suppression of information. But behind the scenes, the doctors and nurses are going, are about to go into, uh, the fight of their lives.
Okay, so now that was november now, let's rewind the tape back to october which you talked you referenced a little bit But I just want to get it october. We had this [00:33:00] extraordinary 20th party congress of the uh, chinese communist party Uh, there was this dramatic removal of xi's predecessor hu jintao. Can you go back to that talk about the significance of it?
What happened to the party congress why this was so unprecedented? Yeah. Well look the party congress. Um Uh, marked the end of the first decade of the of the Chinese dictator's rule in the beginning of his second decade You you really get a five year term So this will be his third five year term But because xi jinping did not identify or elevate anyone who could conceivably be considered a successor To him what he was really marking Uh was that that he's got he it's at it's at best halftime right now in the in xi jinping's rule that he He intends to rule for at least another decade um, he codified his ideology [00:34:00] Uh and his worldview, uh into the party charter, you know, the communist party charter Um, uh, literally through a resolution that amended that charter, but also through his his work report that he, uh, issued, uh, like, like every general secretary of the Communist Party issues at the beginning of the party Congress.
And, and what he focused on was this idea of struggle as really the new guiding principle under his rule. Struggle, that word. Um, is a, is really a Stalinist. It's the word struggle in the Stalinist and Maoist sense of the word. Uh, and it has a lot of meanings, but it, but it's really about, uh, identifying and isolating internal, uh, enemies, enemies internal to the party, internal to China and external to China, and then mobilizing the party and all of its, uh, formidable security.
Uh capabilities and and also really the acolytes of the party against those enemies within the party Within china [00:35:00] and beyond china's borders. And so that's one thing that I I just one of the reasons I like staying in touch with you is when you read The western accounts of these meetings like the western account of this 20th party congress You get the official translations of what happened at these meetings, and you've pointed out to me that, that the Communist Party changes, like really micromanages these translations.
So for what, what is seen in terms of Western media consumption is not actually the words that were chosen. And you, like this one you've zeroed in on, right? Struggle. Was in, was you, if you actually can do the translation from Chinese, which I cannot, you can, and people who work with you can. Um, but, but the, but the official translation to English did not use the word struggle.
That's right. That's right. The word is dou zhang, dou zhang in Chinese. And it was, uh, uh, it was selectively translated. I think once they mentioned the word struggle in the, in the Xinhua English [00:36:00] language, but all of the other references to struggle were. Uh, we're deliberately mistranslated using euphemisms like improving efficiency or, uh, persistence Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know these these kinds of phrases a persistent hard work was was uh was one of them and so The party is, uh, doesn't really want the outside world to know what it how the how the party and how Xi Jinping talk when they're talking to themselves, which is which are the important conversations that are taking place.
So if you look at Like, like we, we did in this foreign affairs piece that, that, that, uh, Matthew Johnson, uh, who's a, a colleague at the Hoover Institution and David Fyfe, who you know, uh, who, uh, was, was in the state department, uh, and, uh, what we did was we looked at 10 years worth of Xi Jinping's internal facing speeches, as well as documentary films that he commissioned and textbooks that, uh, quote.
Uh, directly [00:37:00] his ideology, the state ideology of Xi Jinping thought, um, uh, the, uh, and what we found is that frequently the party doesn't translate those speeches at all into English or when they do, they wait weeks or months or years before, uh, before even releasing those speeches, uh, in Chinese form. Uh, but these are, these are the important speeches.
It's not what Xi Jinping says when he's meeting with a foreign dignitary or when he's giving a speech at Davos. It's the speeches he delivers to the Central Commission of the Communist Party. That is the guidance that he's giving to that whole formidable system of almost a hundred million Communist Party members so that they know, uh, what's what, what, what, what his priorities are and how to conduct it.
So if you, if you wade through. And those speeches, which haven't been translated into English, uh, and it's, it's not fun work. I got to tell you, you, you, you end up with far greater insight at the end of that exercise about what matters [00:38:00] because there's, there are consistent threads, uh, about, uh, that, that really, um, paint a picture of his worldview in his own words.
Okay, so I want to quote from this foreign affairs piece. I mentioned the piece in the in the introduction. It's it's a it's a terrific Essay, I I cannot recommend it enough again It's it's called Xi Jinping in his own words what what China's leader wants and how to stop him from getting it We're gonna post it in the show notes, but I just want to quote from it.
So you you we often point to Putin describing The breakup of the Soviet Union or the fall of the former Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. And you point out that it's not just Vladimir Putin. Who's made that point about the Soviet Union, Xi Jinping. Has also pointed to the former Soviet Union.
And in this foreign affairs piece, you point to a speech that the G gave a closed door speech to a communist party leadership in December of [00:39:00] 2012. So, you know, basically a decade ago. Uh, just right after the U. S. presidential election when Barack Obama was, was reelected. And I might point out in an election where Mitt Romney pointed out, uh, that, that Russia was a, uh, was a major geopolitical threat and was derided for it.
But here Xi is pointing to the experience of Russia in the former Soviet Union. And I want to quote from this, because apparently a Chinese journalist, according to you guys, Um, released the speech in, in early 2013, Xi writes, again, a decade ago, Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party collapse?
Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was their, was that their, an important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. It's a profound lesson for us to dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party to dismiss Lenin and Stalin and to [00:40:00] dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party's organization on all levels.
So he's looking here, Xi is looking at the experience of the former Soviet Union and saying it is easy to get confused by this. It is historical nihilism. And we got to be on guard or we are headed for the same path. Yeah, you got it. I mean, this is this is the first major address that we know about after his elevation to the general secretary almost exactly 10 years ago, as you said, and the speeches that follow that one follow very different, very, very similar themes.
In January 5th, 2013, he gives a major address to members of the Central Committee and, and, uh, my colleagues and I've come to view that as really his inaugural address. In essence, it's the closest thing to an inaugural address, but, but he hits very similar themes and [00:41:00] basically says, look, the mission here.
Is, uh, is to ensure that we achieve communism and that, uh, capitalism, uh, perishes, uh, and, uh, and, and it is inevitable that it will perish and that socialism, by which he means socialism is practiced by the single party dictatorship, uh, uh, becomes, uh, the standard for the world. So. You know, people, people may, may scoff at that and say, yeah, but I mean, that's not realistic.
Maybe it's not realistic. I, I happen to think it's not, uh, realistic that he's going to achieve that goal, but the problem is I'm not convinced that Xi Jinping, you know, understands that, okay, that, that, that Xi Jinping understands that his, his, you know, uh, reach really exceeds his grasp on these issues, much like his best and most intimate friend.
That's his quote in describing him. Vladimir Putin, who, uh, thought that he could, uh, topple, uh, and annex the whole country of [00:42:00] Ukraine in a matter of days. And here we are almost a year later into the bloodiest war in Europe, uh, since 1945. And, uh, you know, Xi Jinping, I, I think, um, may Have ambitions and goals that at a minimum, we need to understand and and respect that these are deeply held, deeply rooted beliefs and goals on the part of one of the most powerful people in the world.
And I want to there's another document you guys refer to document number nine, I guess, of communicate on the current state of. The ideological sphere, uh, which was leaked, uh, out in the summer of 2013 where there seems to be a fixation with what, uh, is referred to as, quote, color revolution. And as you point out, this term originated in the first decade of the, of this century when a series of uprisings in the former Soviet Union, um, became known [00:43:00] by colorful names.
And, you know, there was the, there was Georgia's Rose Revolution. Uh, in 2003, Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004, Kyrgyzstan's tulip revolution in 2005. Um, and so there, there were all these color revolutions, which it's just interesting that he, um, Xi and his leadership are focused on that as like the real threat or, or the, or the, or the seeds of real threats to.
But was in the case of these former soviet republics and now you're seeing versions of that right now in china These are I mean, they may not be defined by color. They're not color revolutions, but this is exactly what he was afraid of Yeah, exactly. And so you mentioned document number nine, uh, which was also, it was a secret document that, uh, that was leaked and, uh, but it is unambiguous.
Uh, the Chinese Communist Party does not want the outside world to know about things like document number nine. I remember confronting at an event, a [00:44:00] senior Chinese official, uh, I think it was in late 2013 and asked her about a document number nine. And she, she just flat out denied. Uh, there being such a document said, uh, you know, don't, don't talk.
What year, what year was this that you confronted her? I think it was late 2013 and she said, look, you know, that you're talking in rumors. She said, in fact, that this document, it is one of, it is an extremely important document within the communist party because it, it, it's basically designed to stamp out what it calls quote false ideological trends.
And it includes a long list of those things that constitutional democracy, uh, the notion that values are universal, that Western. Uh, what we sometimes call Western values are universal. Remember, China, China has signed up to, uh, the, the UN conventions that, that state that these values, uh, are, are universal about human rights and, and civil, uh, and civic rights, um, here in their internal documents, they're [00:45:00] saying.
No, the concept of civil society, it says, is verboten, um, economic neoliberalism, journalistic independence, uh, challenging, uh, the party's version of history. All of these things, uh, are, are really, uh, and it, it also warns against, as you mentioned, color revolution, right? And this is the thing that really keeps Xi Jinping up at night.
The idea that. Um, people are, you know, in neighboring countries or at home are going to begin agitating for those same rights that the Communist Party externally claims to uphold, but internally, uh, in documents like this one, say are totally verboten and, and pose a grave threat to, uh, the Communist Party dictatorship.
So, uh, so, so this is, this is the stuff that, that really matters. It's these are the, these are the, this is the guidance. The hundred million nearly members of the Chinese communist party are following day in and day out was, is this, is this [00:46:00] fixation on other uprisings in the case of the former Soviet union, a, a, a real G is it like unique to G or previous or predecessors of G focused on other such revolutions or uprisings in the form of like the 1956 uprising in Hungary or the 1968 uprising in Prague or the 80, 81, you know, protest movements in Poland that You know, the Soviets of the Warsaw Pact had to clamp down on each one of those in various forms.
Were previous, were predecessors of Xi focused on those the way Xi is focused on the color revolutions of the early 2000s? Yeah, they were. And, and, I mean, those, those color revolutions that, you know, began at the beginning of this century, uh, were things that, um, uh, you know, Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, was very concerned about.
Uh, remember the talk of this jasmine, uh Revolution potentially breaking out in China. His predecessors were equally well, I would say they were [00:47:00] also concerned, but Xi Jinping was the first leader at the very top to begin talking openly about color revolution is a major threat the way that he has. He uses that phrase, um, uh, not only in documents like Uh, document number nine, but, but he is, he is quoted that, that, um, that phrase, uh, much more recently and personally, including, uh, in conversation with Vladimir Putin and in their readouts of, of, uh, meetings with Vladimir Putin and discussion of their no limits pact that they, uh, uh, uh, agreed to in February of this year, right on the eve of, of Putin's reinvasion.
Uh an attempt to decapitate, uh, the government of ukraine so, uh, so look xi jinping is is a product of the party that he now heads. He is not a, a, a total aberration in terms of the end states and the goals that he's seeking. Uh, what sets him apart is the speed at which he's [00:48:00] trying to, to achieve them. Uh, and the means by which he's trying to, to achieve those, uh, end states.
So, so his personal imprint. Is, uh, on every policy today. He is the most important person to read and watch and understand if you want to know where China is being steered, uh, and, and, and what it's, uh, at least its immediate future looks like. When I look at, but before we, before we let you go, when I look at some of the other personalities that he has elevated or he has made extremely relevant, I just, you, you said a number of these figures in your Um, number of these names in your foreign affairs piece.
I just want to, uh, focus on two of them because I think they speak to a lot of what's going on and what we're dealing with. So one is, and I, and I may mispronounce the name, He Weidong, who is, uh, who's a military leader in China and has just been elevated by Xi to be one of the two vice chairmen of the, of the military commission.
So what's, explain what that means to be vice chairman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, Xi himself is the chairman. [00:49:00] Yeah, you're right. Xi Jinping's got a lot of titles and, uh, the least important of which is president, by the way. I wish people wouldn't use that phrase, uh, in, in our press reporting and the like, because it's, it's not a, it's a ceremonial title.
His more important titles are. General secretary of the communist party and also chairman of the central military commission of the communist party And that's that's chief that makes him the commander in chief because the the military is not a state organ It is loyal Uh only to the party and so this is the party body that that uh directs the military's uh, Manning training and equipping and planning for war And so xi is the chairman of that group and he has two vice chairmen.
He reappointed Uh zhang youxia as the first vice chair, even though zhang youxia is is now 72 years old He's three years or four years past what what it was normally Uh supposed to be a retirement Uh, [00:50:00] time. And I think it's partly because, uh, he has been leading Xi's, uh, efforts to, uh, really to prepare for war, uh, particularly against Taiwan.
Uh, and he also is, uh, someone who fought alongside Xi Jinping's father in, uh, his, his father fought alongside Xi Jinping's father during China's civil war. So there's, there's a, there's sort of a, uh, uh, royalty kind of tie there, uh, red royalty, the second vice chair. Has gone, as you mentioned, to a guy named,
who was a 65-year-old who actually had to get promoted, uh, a couple of levels in order to get this job. And what's notable about him is that he was in command, command of the ground forces in the western part of China, uh, during that, uh, uh, period of, of high tension and violence, uh, with India in the summer of 2020.
Remember, there was a, uh, a hand-to-hand combat. [00:51:00] Uh, between Indian troops and, and, uh, Chinese troops, uh, who had, uh, according to the Indian accounts had strayed into, uh, uh, Indian territory. These, these are contested borders. Uh, but then he was moved, uh, uh, He Weidong was moved from the Western command there to, uh, the Eastern theater of China, uh, the, the part of it that is focused on Taiwan.
And he oversaw the, uh, Uh, the, the exercises, the military exercises, and what, what I call a dress rehearsal for war in August of this year following the Pelosi U. S. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi's trip, trip there. So it gives people should, should, uh. You know not not feel a great degree of comfort, uh in in these two picks Okay, and then the other name I want to ask you about is uh Zhang fuping if i'm pronouncing it, right who's the editor in chief of bite dance who also Interestingly bite dances as we all know owns, uh owns [00:52:00] tiktok Um, this individual also happens to be the secretary of the company's communist party committee So just for people to understand that major companies In China have a communist party committee.
Inside the company, is that right? Yeah, you got it. I mean look all of You know bite dance like so many of china's dynamic consumer facing platforms Uh, many of them were started by people who were not communist party members Uh, as far as I'm aware, the founder of ByteDance, uh, was not a communist party member.
Uh, Jack Ma was or is, uh, but, but he's more of an exception. Um, but what, what we saw starting particularly in 2017 onward was an effort under Xi Jinping to have the party assert control over these. These, uh, you know, uh, tech platforms. And so there [00:53:00] were, um, uh, communist party committees that were set up or strengthened in all of these companies.
By the way, you never read about this in any of the, uh, uh, any of the public filings, uh, to the sec or to the New York stock exchange. Uh, this is a, this is a huge oversight by the sec, uh, that, that you, you see no mention of the fact that the communist party committees of these companies are actually the most powerful components and decision making bodies in these, uh, companies.
And so what's happened is that most of the founders have been driven out of their companies or pushed to peripheral roles and, and removed as chief executives, but you have seen the rise of in prominence quietly, but unmistakably. And never reported to the SEC of Communist Party, uh, Committee Chairman.
And the ByteDance, uh, Communist Party Committee Chairman, as you mentioned, is Zhang Fuping, who also has the title of Editor in Chief of ByteDance. And so ByteDance By the way, so we are, we're talking about the fastest [00:54:00] growing internet and social media company. In the U. S. I mean, it's not a U. S. company, but it is a company that is the fastest growing service or product that Americans are using and consuming.
But not only using and consuming, it is now becoming a primary source of news. Remember when everyone thought it was teenage girls dancing? It is a Pew Research poll. Uh, just a couple of months ago found that this is becoming a major source of news uh for for americans particularly, um, Very young ones, but really age 30 and under Uh, and so what you have now is a communist party run company bite dance And it's it's most important overseas platform.
Tick tock is Is is now Perhaps the most powerful media and news company in american history [00:55:00] and it is run by Uh again, it has a communist party committee The editor in chief is the chairman of that communist party committee that communist party committee and bite dance have Uh inked agreements with china's internal security apparatus the public security bureau Uh promising that they will make sure that their algorithms are informed by quote correct political direction Uh, and and they've talked about how they are going to they've pledged to quote Uh boost network influence and online discourse power and enhance public security propaganda guidance influence and credibility They're I've just described for you the parent company of the most powerful, uh, media company in American history This is a grave grave, uh risk Uh to and oversight by the u.
s government, uh, you know to it is a grave risk to our democracy I think it's a grave risk to free [00:56:00] speech in the united states. So It seems that the u. s government The U. S. administration, the Biden administration, in many respects has been like a continuum between the Trump administration and the Biden administration on a number of China policies, obviously dealing with the not letting China become a dominant manufacturer of semiconductors, of chips, uh, the way they have in other areas of telecommunications, uh, the way they IP in manufacturing and in some pharmaceuticals and in advanced batteries and in solar panels and I can go on and on and on.
They, they seem to be willing to, to, uh, plant a flag and not let China, um, you know, uh, accelerate their, their, any kind of dominant role in, in semis, which is, I think, very important. And yet you point out that there seems to be a reticence about confronting them over A company like TikTok and, and, and the, the sort of the, they're, they're fine with hardware [00:57:00] confronting them on hardware, but not, um, digital, digital content and news.
What's going on? They have the, they have the tools to do it, but like you said, so far we're seeing a reticence. To be clear, countries like India has banned TikTok. India banned something like 200 or more than 200 Chinese apps with a snap of their fingers. Uh, with, with, with no, you know, that was a very wise decision on the part of the Indian government.
Uh, every democracy should follow suit, should follow India's lead with this respect. But you're right. I mean, the, the, the, the story of the Biden administration on China policy is one of, of primarily continuity. With the Trump administration, China policy. And I think that's a great thing. This is, this is a bipartisan issue.
It cuts, like you said, across party lines. This is a basic national security challenge. Uh, the biggest, uh, certainly in, in, uh, generations. And, [00:58:00] um. And where the the Biden administration is now facing a crossroads, you know, they will either take action like India has done and they've got the tools to do it to, uh, to get rid of, uh, you know, uh, Chinese controlled or heavily influenced, uh, uh, content platforms.
Uh, where, where the algorithms are literally governed by the Chinese Communist Party, um, uh, or, or they will, um, make, do some kind of mealy mouthed mitigation measure where they say, well, as long as they, uh, you know, as long as they protect, um, uh, do a better job of protecting the data of, uh, their American users, they're, they're welcome to remain The most powerful media news company in American history, uh, heavily influenced over overseen and perhaps controlled by the Chinese communist party.
That will be a, a, a significant, uh, uh, detour away from what I think has otherwise been a pretty good thrust of, of, [00:59:00] uh, Uh, of the, of the, uh, China policy of the Biden administration. I mean, the, the, the data thing is, is only part of the picture. And it is true that tick tocks algorithms, uh, are on, are extremely, in fact, unique in the degree to which.
Uh, the lengths to which they go to capture, um, data from their users, data that they should not need in order simply to, to make, uh, uh, uh, you know, the content, um, more interesting or attractive. And so. This is really it's really sort of it'd be like saying look you're welcome to sell fentanyl Into american communities so long as you promise so long as the fentanyl dealers promise That that they're going to protect the data of their users and not send it back to the drug cartel This is the equivalent in digital terms to that.
So I I really hope the biden administration Uh, steps up and [01:00:00] takes actions to protect our democracy, protect free speech, protect the public health of, uh, of our citizens, uh, because, uh, you know, uh, tic, tick tock is, uh, is a serious problem. Okay. I want to come back. We'll come back to that. Uh, we're going to wrap.
You've been incredibly generous with your time. I just want to, there was one question I meant to ask earlier and I didn't ask, and it's been something that I've been thinking about a lot recently. And I just, even though it's a little out of order, it seems to me that Over the last couple, basically ever since China ascended to the world, the WTO, and Seemed to begin a real integration with the global economy.
There was this, again I'm saying this from afar as an observer There was like this deal that the Chinese Communist Party had with the Chinese population Which is we will dramatically improve your quality of life. We will move Hundreds of millions of people from rural areas into urban areas. We will create [01:01:00] a vibrant And large, uh, and, and, and, and long lasting middle class, uh, by virtue of these steps, we are taking this liberalization, if you will, of our economy, but political repression.
And the tools of political repression are not going to change. We are still a version of a totalitarian regime. And that's the deal, even if it wasn't articulated as, as crudely as I'm laying it out. That was the deal. Your life will get better, there will still be incredible political controls, and controls on free speech, and controls on, you know, a whole range of, of areas affecting people's civil liberties.
But your economic quality of life will get better. From afar it seemed like most of the Chinese population had gone along with it. And it It seems to me like now that whole deal that whole formula is falling apart because because of the economic [01:02:00] Uh trouble we've we've talked about a little bit here and we've talked about headwinds that china's running into self inflicted Uh, and we've talked about on previous episodes with you previous conversations with you And because of covid and we can go on and on and on the whole economic deal is not As reliable as it once was, and yet the political repression is still robust and reliable, and could that be part of what the Chinese public is reacting to?
Yeah, this, this sort of a contract, like you say, which was, isn't explicit, never was, but What was sort of the mood of the country in the post Tiananmen Square Massacre era? The idea that look the party's gonna gonna control politics keep your nose out of it But we're gonna give you more opportunities to to, you know, get rich to to live where you want to live marry who you want to marry uh, and and that it is now threadbare unquestionably when you see For the first time in 33 years, uh, the [01:03:00] spontaneous protests across China that, by the way, involves students.
They, they involve workers like those who were rioting at the iPhone factory. Uh, it involves just everyday middle class and, you know, everyday people, um, who gathered on, on street corners in solidarity with, uh, victims, uh, of, uh, of the zero COVID, uh, uh, policy. Uh, what, that, that sends a very loud signal. Uh, that the that, uh, contract that you spoke of is, uh, is in breach on one side.
And, um, and, and, and I'm quite confident that Xi Jinping, uh, his, his not missed this fact, uh, given the, the reports on his meeting with the European council president just a few days ago, where she acknowledged that there were protests and acknowledged that they were related to zero COVID. And, and he also acknowledged that, that it's going to be very important.
Uh, for trying to, to figure out, um, [01:04:00] uh, vaccination, although he didn't, he didn't talk at all about foreign vaccines, but, uh, but you know, this, this shift back towards a loosening posture back towards that experiment. Uh, that we saw a month ago, um, is a sign that, um, uh, the people's voices matter. Uh, if, if, if China does lift zero COVID and shake this policy off, it will be precisely, uh, because of those people who are brave enough.
At enormous risk to themselves consciously knowing that they were taking on those risks the fact that they spoke up Uh is heroic every everyone in china owes, uh, those those demonstrators uh for uh, uh, potentially, uh reversing what's been An extremely destructive, uh policy. Hey, by the way, one one thing that occurred to me when we're talking about tick tock There is a bill Uh in congress that's been forward forwarded Uh, by, [01:05:00] um, Senator Rubio, uh, and Mike Gallagher in the house, right?
And yeah, Rep Mike Gallagher in the house to ban TikTok. I, look, I think this needs to apply to all of the content, um, uh, providers that, uh, you know, are, are governed and regulated by, uh, uh, Beijing. Uh, if beijing is going to try to influence international audiences, it should be constrained to having To do so on digital platforms that are regulated by and uh and accountable to democracies Uh, I will uh, in fact, i'll have gallagher We've had mike on before and we'll have him back on to talk about talk about the bill.
I know you've you've You've written about it and been informally involved in some way um So, Matt, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You've been incredibly generous with your time, uh, and your, and your insights, as always. So, um, lest I, I, uh, Overstate my welcome as the host and, and, [01:06:00] and risk not getting you to come back on again.
I'm going to wrap there. So thanks, uh, thanks for this conversation. It was, uh, incredibly scary, interesting, enlightening, uh, so I'm grateful. Dan, thanks a million.
That's our show for today. If you want to follow Matt's work, you can do it at the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University, hoover. org. Or, at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies, FDD. org. And also check out on the Foreign Affairs website, Matt's recent essay that we talked a lot about in this conversation.
Call Me Back, it's produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.