Michael Sheridan is the author of a new history of Hong Kong and China and also has another book out called the Red Emperor xiin ping and his China and that of course is going to be the topic of our discussion today he is a longtime foreign correspondent in Asia the Middle East and Europe he was the Far East correspondent for the Sunday Times for 20 years based in Hong Kong and later Bangkok he covered the rise of China and the Handover of Hong Kong the upheaval in Burma and the full of suar in Indonesia he's
now written what could be one of the most significant books looking at xiin ping his rise to power and his influence on Chinese society and politics welcome to Silicon curtain please like And subscribe to see more fantastic speakers and of course to make sure you don't miss out on the new content we publish on nearly a daily basis please do also check out Michael's book books there'll be descriptions of those and links to those in the description of this video and if you like the work done by this Channel please help to support that by
buying me a coffee or even becoming a patron Michael welcome back to the channel it's the second time and I found our first conversation absolutely thrilling and have been looking forward to this second uh conversation thank you very much it's good to be here well let's start with the pillar of the state um they're role in power and how Xi Jinping has been able to take control and guide and direct each of them we have the party we have the main State apparatus and we have the Army not all of these necessarily were in his
control uh during his rise to power how has he managed to achieve this very important to focus on the state because that is at the core of xiin Ping's leadership style China of course May will be the oldest continuous civilizational state on Earth certainly she and the ruling Elite hark back to ancient dynasties they see the continuity of the Chinese State as their main task so taking control of its levers has been Shin Ping's greatest Challenge and he's achieved it he rose to power through the ranks of the Communist Party through provincial posts after becoming
general secretary that is to say leader of the party uh he then took the post of President Head of State uh and the critical job chairman of the central military commission which controls the gun uh worth remembering that the strongest leader after ma was dsha ping the reformer he in fact never help held two of those offices but he did keep hold of the gun and so as long as xiin ping has the Army and the security State at his disposal he is a secure ruler what aspects because China's been through you know an extraordinary
roller coaster uh over the last 100 years uh as the sort of Rise of the CCP took place from the sort of 30 40s onwards what is the political inheritance of xiin ping uh from that initial revolutionary struggle how's it influenced him and what components of that has he either retained or brought back in the 21st century well the political inheritance of shuin ping from 19th century and 20th Century China is shame and pride the years of Shame when in his own words the Chinese people were reduced to Dreadful circumstances and were bullied and pushed
around by what he calls colonial power powers and pride in the Rejuvenation of the nation which is at the center of his mission he talks about the great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation he dedicated a museum to that cause quite early on in his tenure and it's a constant theme reminding the Chinese people of the shame and suffering of the past and making them proud of a new China which is not just a great economic power but increasingly a strong military power as well and this is the first of what may be several comparisons with
Russia the Bolshevik party that then went on to form the foundations of the Soviet Union that was born out of a small click of terrorists who you know struggled um in the diaspora uh rather than you know forming some huge military campaign uh to take power of course there was the Civil War that was the military sort of period there but they were formed in this I would say sort of you know seras of terrorist cells um robbing banks committing crimes in order to finance their Revolution um you know believing The end justifies the means
and it's also a group characterized by extreme paranoia because the bulvik were not the only socialist revolutionary party uh and they went on to have to purge all the others as as well you know the cuu pushing uh pushing all the other birds out of the nest this sense of extreme paranoia seems to have cut through the entire Soviet history and of course in Vladimir Putin uh is entirely resurgent how does that compare to the rise of the CCP um does it come from those same sort of terrorist paranoic roots or is it does have
a does have a different sort of political uh genetic identity one should never underes estimate the absolute importance of the connection between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties they were linked uh inextricably from the 1930s onwards equally one should not underestimate the historical uh fear and rivalry between Russia and China along their common borders uh and in the Far East now let's focus on the first of those sigin Ping's father was a uh man era communist Carter drilled in Marxism we believe he went to Russia several times he inherited from the leninist leaders of the
1920s an absolute uh commitment to Soviet bolic style Revolution but the Chinese Revolution started in the countryside and the Russian Revolution started in the cities so shiin Ping's father was a rural revolutionary Who Rose to become an important commander in the battles across China uh in the 1940s his son born in 1953 uh came of age at a time when the military struggles had passed into memory but the political inheritance of the Soviet system uh was still there in fact s ping has gone backwards in communist terms because he has moved away from a collective
style leadership to a strong individual leadership a cult of the personality so in that sense his model is Stalin his model is not the reforming uh later Soviet leaders uh it is not even uh late androv chenko christov Etc it is the sole Strong Guide of the nation and he talks about Stalin uh privately he doesn't make much of it publicly but the style of Communism uh which he uh governs by is not reformist or collectivist it is stalinist uh Stalin wasn't from the intelligence Services intelligence Services essentially uh really grew and and developed under
his leadership Putin however is from those intelligence services and if you you know go along with a line of of some commentators there was a certain division of powers in the Soviet Union uh between party and the intelligence services in the 1930s uh that turned into absolute hostility and murder uh according to felinski for instance as you know one group VI for power with the other and were busy denouncing each other and liquidating each other um the FSB now seems to be in some ways dominant and the most recent move is that they are getting
their hooks into the army do you have that same set of issues in China or is there a much more delicate balance of powers you know even within a one party system do you have power distributed amongst various uh you know institutions and organs um and not really just concentrated in say the intelligence Services it's better to understand this in the words of a former senior Western intelligence official who put it to me like this uh most nations are states with an intelligence service at their disposal uh China is a an intelligence service with a
state attached to it uh it pervades every aspect of Communist Party rule from the top to the bottom in fact you can see it in sigin Ping's own words where security is now the watch word not reform the mission of the party now is to guard against foreign influences spies infiltrators uh threats from the exterior but also against internal disloyalty and there's been a change back to a uh paranoid and ferti and conspiratorial uh theme from for example the ministry of State security uh is broadcasting as we speak um videos on social media warning Chinese
youngsters and students to beware of handsome men and beautiful women who might lure them into spying against the motherland so broadly speaking in the rule of xiin ping we have seen a reassertion of the security apparatus at the center of political life uh the regime does turn on itself from time to time we've seen him purging his foreign minister uh and one defense minister and another defense minister disgraced so the catalytic effect of purges on the party was understood by Stalin to be beneficial and she has explicitly borrowed that model when he talks about an
anti-corruption struggle that is code for uh purging elements within the system who are rotting it with corruption but who are also fashioning political CLE and creating alternative power centers so it's all about the centralization of power the the Russ and Chinese relationship I think is separate from the party uh Heritage and their common uh Roots but uh there's no doubt that this is a police state it has become a centralized intelligence and security uh apparatus around the government and that govern everything and this is an interesting question because if you are cynical one could say
that the power vertical in Russia is by its very nature uh entirely nepotistic and corrupt that is not a bug it's a feature the entire system is is there and whenever someone is pointed like BV um you may be condemed to thinking he's there to fight corruption no he's there to you know weed out uh you know challenges Etc is there a sense that under Xi Jinping not only are you having people purged and potential Rivals purged but there is also a a general sense that nepotism corruption are a threat to the health of the
regime so there's some sort of genuine purges going on of those who are corrupt and nepotistic I.E it is not a core part of the system or or is it far more complex than that look we always knew that Putin's Kremlin is a criminal Enterprise run by mafias and and former spies uh and and its naked nature is is is obvious to all for many years personally I thought China was different to that it felt like it had a stronger institutional structure there were uh solid uh administrative political and managerial structures in the government of
the country and when shuin ping was chosen by the party uh the elite felt that they were grooming a manager they did not expect that they were nurturing a dictator and what I've come to realize in the course of writing the book is how important families are in China because until the Advent of shiin ping the party was moving towards generally speaking a more collectivist uh method of rule uh there were internal party contests or elections and there was a sense that uh the new men coming forward in the party emerged from Humble backgrounds I
mean his predecessor huin and Premier W jabal were not people from the red aristocracy they were from Fairly ordinary backgrounds and they made their way up through the system what you see on the she is a reassertion of Power by the original families at the heart of the re Revolution those who came to power in 1949 and bequeath the inheritance of the party to their children the Americans found an informant from xiin Ping's late youth who knew him very well and talked of him as being one of those who felt they had the right to
rule China belonged to them their fathers had fought the revolution the others were the sons of shopkeepers and so this is a a man who is at the top of a group that feels it has the right to rule within that there are struggles and rivalries and lineage disputes which we know little of because they talk very little about them but I was able to talk to two or three members of that Elite uh and they shed a light on some quite terrifying realities which are that you know in China you live on a precipice
and if you fall there's nobody to catch you uh the Soviet system was much more brutal and shijin Bing does not kill as many people though he does kill some uh but all these Elite families live in constant fear of losing their status and their position and that's why the rich are not really protected so one member of a a very elite family put it to me like this he said in China power is power money is not power because the people at the top have things which no amount of money can buy and so
I thought that was a very instructive uh Insight from somebody who really knows uh and the same person said to me that you know if you look at Chinese history chaos and disaster followed weak Emperors cruel Emperors who were drenched in blood generally left stability and progress behind them and that is the perspective from which these people govern is that is not a million miles from the Russian mindset I remember even thinking back in the 90s that uh you know here when you acrew wealth power uh comes along with that absolutely not how how Russia
works you know money um money is accured by those who exert power it's the same sort of dynamic Al of course there will be some some subtle and differences and tapping into this idea again this is there's a certain paranoia here that everything you've got everything you've earned could be lost in a moment uh if you fall from grace um or back the wrong side for instance and how important is it that in X's youth you could perhaps almost see that he has some kind of Underdog complex here so if you have the perception that
he has the right to rule but it also comes from a family I believe that was purged in the cultural Evolution so how has that fed into his psyche all the evidence from xiin Ping's childhood and youth is of someone who uh fears and abhor chaos uh and has lived through terrifying insecurity as a young child he saw his father banished from Power the family lost their privileged house they had to go and live in a courtyard house in Beijing uh his mother had to hold the family together he himself was beaten and abused school
by the extremist red guards because his father had been identified as an enemy he was then exiled to the countryside as a as a young teenager where he lived in a cave and defecated in a wooden bucket and had to go out and hoe the fields you know this was a very very hard uh instruction it was so tough that he ran away he was caught by the authorities he was put to work in a labor gang and my researcher and I drew the timeline and we found found that at the precise moment when maidong
and other leaders were on top of the chenan gate celebrating a key anniversary of the Revolution xiin ping the future ruler of China was digging sewage ditches a couple of miles away uh under the supervision of gods so this is a a a really extraordinary story of The Heights and the depths the family uh were dispersed uh his half sister sister very likely killed herself after years of Torment by the red guards he didn't see his father for years when the two met his father didn't even recognize him and slowly they rebuilt their family network
uh their power their political nouse and made this formidable uh Juggernaut of a political machine that that eventually brought him to power but we should never forget and this is why the biography is key to the um underlying sense of permanent insecurity and a great fear of chaos and of course what xinping has done in his years in power is so dramatic and radical he's purged or punished more than a million officials that he's created a situation where he simply cannot leave power uh previous leaders have gone into a fairly graceful retirement and uh there
was a peace transition of power uh twice after uh Jan square but the amount of enemies that she has accumulated is such that I don't think he can dare leave office that's that's another another Echo with other tyrants around the world another influence must be that as he's growing up he sees the wreckage of the previous culture the rubble leftover from Imperial China in the buildings and culture of of sort of middle class and you know capitalist Etc that would have you know preceded the revolution what kind of impression does it make you know growing
up in a society that is trying to build something so new but you're surrounded by the trappings and and Rubble of the uh previous civilization well he grows up as it happens in the shadow of the old Imperial City uh the first home which his father and and and mother uh occupied was not very far from the Palaces of the Emperors he went to a little kindergarten in the old Imperial Gardens uh his father worked uh alongside maong in Jong nanhai which is a series of pavilions and offices around some Lakes which is equivalent to
uh the Kremlin or the White House in Chinese political Parliament so he was steeped in this as as a child um his family house uh welcomed a stream of distinguished visitors while his father was uh in in office uh so he grew up as a member of an elite which on the one hand ran a political system devoted to destroying the old and bringing in the new but on the other hand as it endured in office discovered the benefits of tradition uh and the trappings of authority and the uh benefits of rulership that accumulated all
Chinese rulers in the past so it's a combination as he States himself between Marxism and Chinese tradition what they call the excellent Chinese civilization and he talks very explicitly in in recent speeches about the sinification of Marxism so they believe that they have a new Mission which is to make Marxism modern and relevant for the modern world in particular the so-called Global South and that the Chinese model of strong leadership political stability and uh efficient Administration is one that they are now seeking to export for the first time since the 1960s so hence the recent
Summit in Beijing with lots of African leaders more investment for Africa accompanied by schooling political training uh administrative training a whole sway the benefits that bring soft power along with the power of money so it's a civilizational model which shining preaches and it is rooted in what he calls the Chinese people's uh Instinct towards Collective Behavior I would dispute that uh but also the benefits of a strong ruler and the Imperial Echoes are right there which is why I call him the Red Emperor uh this is actually EX ordinary and it um this wasn't on
my my script for the episode but it does what you've said prompts it there this temporary Alliance such as it is between China and Russia has been sort of examined in various details but what you said there suggest something rather interesting about it in that China has the idea of a civilizational model rather than just sort of tearing down the Western International order it has an impression of what it would like to see in its place it seems to me that Russia has no idea nothing to offer except being an anti-west um an anti- rules-based
order uh kind of I think someone's compared it to the sort of uh the school shooter mentality um just taking everything out and destroying everything without any clear conception of what comes next could it be that China sees in this sense Russia as a rather useful partner as a kind of bulldozzer to the Western International order so it can clear the ground for its own Vision to unfold both she and Putin are dedicated to making the world safe for autocracy she went to the Kremlin uh exited stood along alongside Putin on the red carpet and
said there are changes unseen in a 100 years and we are driving them now he said that to an open microphone because he wanted that message to get out this is of the most cautious well scripted and best protected politicians on the planet so that was not a mistake on the other hand while the Chinese are actually quite content to see the Russians acting as agents of chaos and destabilizing what we might think of as a western order uh certainly in in Ukraine and also in the Middle East by the way they also don't want
a number of things they don't want a nuclear uh escalation they're very firmly against that they don't ultimately want uh Complete destabilization because that's bad for the global economy and markets but they do want to tilt the balance and Al to power uh in their own way now one thing I'd like to emphasize is that while Putin and she have talked of a friendship with no limits there are in fact very severe limits and we see those limits emerging more and more thanks in part to clever American diplomacy and intelligence work the Biden Administration has
done a full court press in pushing back to constrain China uh and to prevent the emergence of an overt strategic military alliance between Russia and China let's look at the reasons why one thing I discovered in writing the book was that xuin ping himself secretly hates and fears Russia I found a Declassified American document from The Carter white house uh which detailed a visit to Washington by she's mentor and first Patron the then defense minister gang B in this document gang B sits down to lunch with the vice president of the United States in 1980
and tells him why they did the sinos Soviet split he says that Stalin was China's only friend after Stalin the Soviet leaders were arrogant and presumptuous and they wanted to reduce China to an agrarian satellite state which would be the The Granary of socialism they told the Chinese not to build any industry and said they wanted to station troops and Naval units on Chinese territory and the Chinese defense minister tells the Americans all this and at the time Sujin ping is his junior private secretary in the room with him all the time in Beijing handling
secret documents he grew up without much of a formal education absorbing this lesson from one of the key influences in his life so at the back of his mind are those 19th century treaties by which the Zars seized all the Eastern provinces of China on the other side of the river and made them part of the Russian Empire uh and while uh in fact only in recent days President of Taiwan has commented that rather than get worked up and trying sees back Taiwan why aren't they trying to get back the stolen provinces of Ching Dynasty
China which is of course a mischievous point but it's one that is worth making here's the key point the Russians and the Chinese do not trust each other there is a long history of rivalry and Border conflict uh at present the limits to their cooperation on Ukraine are becoming clear we can see from commercial reports that uh many smaller Chinese banks are not handling rubal transactions anymore uh they cannot agree on Energy prices to cment the partnership between them as as commodity powers and there is a series of limitations on uh how much weapons technology
is transferred and how it is done so American pressure uh and Western sanctions on Russia uh with the threat that that implies to their Russian partners are working but in order to make them work the one thing the Chinese and Sh ping in particular will understand is if their opponents are strong and if they are consistent and it's extraordinary isn't it your description there um really gives the lie to this propaganda that Russia is an anticolonial power the sort of behavior you're describing there of imposing these restrictions or attempting to on China is nothing short
of of 19th century European imperialism um another area I wanted to jump into because again I think this is this you know might shed some light on X's character he seems to have entered an extraordinary struggle with the emerging Tech oligarchs um of the Chinese economy and in some ways they were powering and starting to help you know sustain that extraordinary economic growth um cutting them down to size seems to have had a significant impact on Chinese growth rates amongst other things does he care about that and for him is this struggle between the oligarchs
uh Tech oligarchs in particular um does it take on a far more existential character for him in China as in the uh Western democracies the growth of the tech sector took government by surprise the digital economy Advanced far quicker than civil servants administrators and and and governments and Regulators were able to grasp we're now seeing in the West how uh politicians are trying to catch up with a a juggernaut that has gone beyond their control in China it emerged very quickly that digitization was transforming the economy with astonishing speed because it was so Innovative and
it was so intelligently done that it enabled the Chinese economy to LeapFrog various stages uh that the Western economy experienced so for example the transition to uh Advanced Digital methods of shopping traveling uh organizing your life moving around intensified by the way during covid-19 because of uh digital passes and vaccine certificates and so on so the the online economy went incredibly fast in China it generated huge fortunes within a couple of decades and the emergence thereby of very very wealthy people who were careful to say out of open politics but nonetheless played politics because for
example one particular tech company stacked its boards with the Sons and Daughters of the poit bureau and uh ran a very complicated offshore share ownership system which funneled rivers of cash through entities which was then available to be dispersed as patronage to the members of the boards and the Sons and Daughters of the pollit bureau now that's great so long as your personnel choices remain in power when the faces change the patronage changes as well so what you're seeing in China is the cutting down to size of big wealthy entrepreneurs who had aligned themselves with
some of these ruling families and now find themselves on the wrong side of politics that's what this is all about pay no attention to talk about corruption and criminal investigations and Regulatory things this is about power it's about the control of money and distributing the fruits of Chinese prosperity to a handful of wealthy families and the the the struggle is not between some sort of public will or public good and bad entrepreneurs it's between families and clans at the top as to who has the most influence over that economy so where under xiin ping uh
are there checks and balances on the system and Power um and with the huge increase in wealth and the growth of the middle class are there areas where you can create a critique of aspects of the system to try and improve it and make it more efficient um where do these boundaries or limits lie and has yining rolled them back compared to where they were going uh let's say a decade or so ago the reality is that in xiin ping China it's an increasingly imperial system and there are no checks and balances the official organs
of the state and the party contain mechanisms which are meant to be corrective the main instrument is one are called the central commission for discipline inspection which is sometimes called you know the anti-corruption Watchdog and so on uh it has sweeping Powers it has parallel powers to the justice system uh it can take away members of the party uh and detain them practically for an unlimited time uh in order to extract confessions and prepare cases but the central commission for discipline inspection is not a hammer against corruption it is a chessboard on which the various
power centers have placed their people so one of the things I discovered in writing the book was that in fact each of these factions and cl lands have their own people inside the commission so they are able to steer or divert or influence or give warning of Investigations into individuals so like every other organ of the State uh the anti-corruption mechanism has become uh contaminated by feudal family Politics the the notion that it is some sort of auster impartial uh investigation body is a fiction so it's it's just another Forum in which the game is
being played in China and by the way um many people have said to me don't think the power struggle is over there is still a power struggle it's just being fought out in the shadows Russia uh is is different in that its economy is largely based on hydrocarbon extraction so in that sense you don't need a complex economy with a basis of rule in law or impartial Judiciary to uphold differences between various contracts what you need is a Sil key to protect your lines of distribution and control of extracted resources that's sort of how that
vertical Works China however has a vast uh complex manufacturing architecture does it therefore need a more complex education system does it need at least part of the Judiciary to have a degree of let's say impartiality um and does it need a far higher degree of trust uh between people because if you're going to engage in you know the complexity of of contracts of value added manufacturing economy you you need more than simply uh you know the sort of gangster protections uh let's say the Russian economy requires more part of Chinese capitalism came in the 1990s
when the reforms of the 80s uh bore fruit and you saw the emergence of these extraordinary uh entrepreneurs some of whom interacted with Sujin ping there was a man called L changqing who was in fact China's biggest Smuggler uh and he controlled at one point I believe a sixth of petroleum Imports into China uh he emerged as a uh romantic figure almost a Robin Hood from rural Origins who made himself into one of the richest people in the country eventually fell from Power FL was brought back is now in prison so there are these um
Paradigm Tales if you like uh of the excesses but let me be very clear I do not write off the Chinese economy I am not a doomster the Chinese economy is so big so sophisticated so populated with Talent so full of really uh intelligent hardworking well-trained people that I would never underestimate it and uh I don't play the markets you I don't dispense economic uh consultancy I just write what I see what I see is a huge Juggernaut of an economy of 1.35 billion people it reminds me of the American Army in World War II
uh at the start in the North African campaign the Americans made hideous blunders you know bad generalship lost lots of people messed up their supply chains uh had the command all wrong but it was so big and it was so determined and it was so well resourced that it just went on rolling forward and I see the Chinese economy like that uh they are doing things in certain Chinese cities that are already far in advance of the West in terms of urban control planning infrastructure they're able to do so of course because of their authoritarian
Powers so I'm not saying that is always a virtue but it is a fact so many Chinese will tell you that the economy is delivering for them Visa V the lives their parents LED not many people in Russia would tell you that and and that leads to a really interesting uh you know potential future because you have here a an authoritarian system allbe a as you say with a very sophisticated complex economy that is able to generate wealth maybe not as rapidly as it would with free communication and uh you know free association nonetheless it
is a wealth generating e economy and through sheer size that is always going to be absolutely uh massive you also have the emerging capabilities to invest in the next level which is AI driven Automation and there only really two blocks on the planet who can seriously syn the amand of capital that's required for these transformational Technologies it's the US and it's China so are we shaping up for not just aort Monumental clash between different perceptions of human civilization one you know centrally managed authoritarian and the other sort of you know chaotic Democratic Etc but also
wealth generating but also you're going to see a clash on the of these digital Technologies and one must assume that the Chinese will be able to utilize these Technologies to reinforce their social model I.E you've got the uh I won't call it a digital goolag but you've got the surveillance society which AI is going to you know enable that to the nth degree well let's deal with the governance first uh suan ping is 71 years old roughly the same age as as his friend Vladimir Putin uh I say in the book that the nation's best
hope is that he will be the last emperor I also say that China is a country capable of stunning achievements which we have seen from vaccines to space shots to highspeed trains and that it should have outgrown its Emperors but it has not I do believe he will be the last emperor I think that what may emerge from him is that a phrase hated by communist theologians uh of peaceful evolution uh the best hope for China is internal change within uh the party and the ruling structure as we saw in other Asian nations in the
past uh meanwhile make no mistake about it the Chinese are completely across AI they uh recently convened important party meetings to study it there is a huge effort going in at the national level to uh computational Power to uh Big Data models to the acquisition of very very Advanced Computers that will allow researchers to uh LeapFrog their Rivals uh in other countries and also behind this of course is the chip war between the United States and China over access to very very high performance components that will en enable these advances so the Chinese are already
there they know that artificial intelligence will be transformative uh I in fact I was just listening to the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair uh this morning in a recent interview speaking about how we in the west have not yet woken up to the positive possibilities of AI and his insistence that it is going to be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution so very interesting that Tony Blair and the Chinese government uh uh share a vision of the benefits that can ACR to Mankind through AI however the difference is that Mr Blair at least has
some restraints on his yearning for government power and the Chinese have not but I think the two are intersecting aren't they you know you may get a better generation of leaders coming up uh and they may turn the fruits of This research to better use uh the one thing we haven't talked about that I'm afraid is is uh in the background all the time is the Spectre of war and a war however limited would be incredibly damaging both to the global economy and of course to the Chinese people themselves that leaps the question of historical
mysticism because whereas geopolitical analysts the sort of as it's been called the uh you know 5D chess kiss singer type of realists will look at Russia's action and try and look at them in totally rational manner but there's a big doll up there of paranoia and historical mysticism uh and and all this stuff that that is I think required to explain Putin's actions because you cannot look at it through a purely political or economic sort of rationality is she subject to any historical myths and delusions that might lead him to throw the economy over uh
in order to say mount an operation against Taiwan for instance or is he perhaps far more uh politically and economically rational or do we perhaps not even know we know quite a lot about how xiin ping thinks and uh one of the very senior Americans I interviewed for the book who has had access to I imagine the best material on him says that shujin ping is a risk taker who will gamble but not recklessly he's not going to take a big risk if he thinks he might lose that's quite an insight and uh the talk
about Taiwan uh is very uh fiery um they use violent language they utter threats they are playing with fire to use their own phrase in the seas around China uh constant uh bumping up against rival navies and so on I don't believe there's a decision for war or Invasion they've taken various lessons from Ukraine uh not least the sheer horror and chaos and tragedy that this crime has Unleashed sending tanks down the uh the road of a neighboring country to murder its leaders and occupy it is something which we thought was consigned to the uh
late 20th century um so they see the absolutely negative impact of uh the Ukraine Adventure on Russia the Hideous casualties imagine those casualties in a society like China where many families only had one child and where male children were particularly venerated it's it's too hideous to contemplate and I think that there is a war party in Beijing they do want to exploit weakness they would like to expel the Americans from Asia and they would like to restore China as the dominant power over the what they call the two Island chains that girdle it in the
Pacific in that way they would subdue Japan uh keep Korea in check uh make the other Southeast Asian Nations uh vassals who would accept Chinese claims in the Seas that's a big Vision but it's a very risky Vision uh the American mission in the last year and a half has been to convince xiin ping himself not to make a fatal mistake like Putin because if they start a conflict in the seas around China it will be a direct conflict with the United States and the Americans have left them in no doubt that they would fight
and I think that is a hidden but perhaps the most significant aspect of the diplomacy of the last 18 months or so that is why blinken and Sullivan and Austin and Rondo have trooped to China to give the same message I think it's working and if so the Biden Administration will be able to claim that it has averted World War II frankly and that is an extraordinary contrast to those who are looking at the Ukraine situation and interpreting some of the actions of Berlin and Washington as being really manipulated and coerced into fearing Russia I
know this is a decades long process but Russia is very good at using nuclear threats to limit West support for Ukraine and for generating red lines seeing the US stand up to China and present these things in a completely unambiguous way excuse me that does not exud endless weakness that's extraordinary why does America not fear China because it is of course another nuclear power the Americans don't fear China as such they fear the loss of freedom of navigation and Commerce in the Pacific and they fear the subjugation of three democratic nations however imperfect their systems
to a sole authoritarian dominant power that is why they fought World War II against the Japanese so uh I don't think it's a question of fear on an existential level as obtained during the Cold War but it's a determination that the Chinese should not be lured into making a fatal mistake because a conflict in in East Asia would get very high powered high intensity very quickly it would be extremely destructive Shin ping knows that there is also the vital calculation that when do regimes like his lash out they do so when their back is against
the wall and they can't see an exit so the the Americans have been very careful I think in crafting a framework in which China has to accept that it's going to be constrained until it modifies its trading practices its Ambitions the Chinese know the risks that a war would bring and they also view Ukraine and Putin's Adventure as in the phrase of the Napoleonic Statesman uh it was worse than a crime it was a mistake I mean it is clearly a mistake Putin is strong enough to uh endure it uh he's faced down his Rivals
and death Exile whatever but but the Chinese don't want to go that route um it would throw away the fruits of 40 Years of hard work and reform the claim to Taiwan is one that both Mao and D sha ping said should be handled with patience and a future China and a future Taiwan could indeed grow together the issue is the governance model in each and the fact that most people in Taiwan don't want to be ruled by the Communist Party certainly not by the Communist Party under Sujin p and of course the treatment of
Hong Kong the erosion of its uh freedoms uh the demonstration that actually two systems under one country is insupportable and one needs to be erased or realigned uh that that evidence there I think is incontrovertible that they will not tolerate uh plurality of political systems I feel strongly about Hong Kong because I wrote a history of it I live there uh I know some the people who are presently in jail for things that would not be crimes in any reasonable Society so what we've seen in Hong Kong is a betrayal uh it is lies uh
the Chinese made a binding treaty under international law uh which successive Chinese administrations claimed to uphold and they have thrown it overboard uh there is no political freedom in Hong Kong Hong Kong people are not free to practice their way of life uh and Mainland Chinese control uh is increasingly evident so what that shows is that Mrs Thatcher was right in the 1980s to warn the Chinese that if they kept their promises all would be good but if they did not keep their promises the world would judge China so the world should look at Hong
Kong and what is happening to innocent uh people there it should also look at Hong Kong as a city that is transforming from a Global Financial Center to Chinese financial center that is the reality that Hong Kong is a Chinese City and we all need to face that fact the problem is which China and the China of xiin ping is one that is not going to tolerate the lasay fair political economic Financial uh activity that other leaders allowed in Hong Kong China more or less kept its promises from 1997 to about 2014 uh and and
people in Hong Kong benefited many who had to exiled themselves came back what we've now shown is that when you're at the uh mercy of an authoritarian autocracy bad things can happen very quickly uh and there's a time to get out and a time to stay and most people in Hong Kong sadly no longer have that choice the last question really is reflective of the character in your book which is chi Shing ping and we have a pretty good idea of what Vladimir Putin would do when he's cornered because he's felt cornered on several occasions
in the last three years uh we know that the result is Extreme violence extreme escalation and he's prepared to burn the house down to save his own skin this this much I think is apparent what do we know of the character of Xi Jinping if his back was put to the wall either externally or perhaps more likely internally how would he react how far would he go to protect his own power and let's say sort of lineage to retain status of his descendants within the system we know some things about shuin Ping's character they're well
attested he's a loner uh he is a risk taker it was a big risk to bid to be the leader of China and he pulled it off he is a drinker he likes a drink sometimes more than one or two and he is someone who is very very resilient he has withstood shocks and setbacks and kept on plotting forward he went up the ladder of communist power uh in steps it wasn't a meteoric Ascent it was a steady progress he's someone who is very stolid I've watched him sit through hours of these dreary conferences in
Beijing without moving a muscle and he is a man who clearly has got a lot of inner reserves how he would react in an international crisis we don't know but I would imagine he would be cautious we really don't know enough about the internal politics to determine how he would uh react to a threat or a conspiracy he's clearly put down several such attempts uh but he's never been against his back has never been against the wall um he's got all the key people in all the key places right now I think he is likely
to rule for Life uh and should he die in office it will be like Stalin surrounded by fearful Associates uh q a future armanda ianucci movie possibly it may not be as absurd as the uh the Stalin version uh Michael I strongly recommend people read the book it's absolutely fascinating I'm going to have a a second go to sort of go through it in in a lot more detail there is so much in there to ponder upon I'm very grateful to you for sharing some of those insights with our audience today thank you
