Ep 435: A Primer on China

In my long journey through life I have realized that I am wrong about everything in fact Everyone is wrong about everything. The world is complex and it is impossible to grasp this complexity. So we tell simple stories about it to ourselves, which help us feel less lost.

These simple stories are often useful, perhaps partly true, but they never contain all of the truth because they cannot. And this is fine as long as we have the humility to recognize our limitations and the energy to stay curious. And yes, curiosity. To be more than just an inclination requires energy. And we have limited energy and focus on grokking just the things we need or want to grok. It's okay for everything else to be blurry and in our peripheral vision. We hardly even understand.

ourselves. Indeed, if we think we understand the world, we certainly don't even understand ourselves. our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.

Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Manoj Kevilramani and we are going to talk about China. Now, I've had a few episodes on China before and I've also done a Life in Times episode with Manoj who was a hair's breadth away from being a Bollywood superstar before he became the

China expert I most respect in India. This episode does not go over any of that territory. When I was in Bangalore last month recording 9 episodes in about 20 days, I decided I wanted to do an episode with Manoj that was a primer on China.

It would assume zero knowledge of this incredibly complex civilization and nation-state and would be like a dummy's guide. I'd start from the deep past, go back a few thousand years, and then keep zooming in, zooming in, zooming in till we reach this present moment. It would have basic knowledge and a basic framework to think about.

It would also leave some sense of how nuanced and complicated the subject is. And if you want to get deeper into it, I invite you to check out the newsletters on China that the Takshashila institution runs and the courses they teach, one of which begins in just a few days. The links are in the show notes. I hope this episode wets your appetite to go deeper. But before you begin listening to this conversation, here's a quick commercial break. Are you a watcher or are you a doer?

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Manoj, welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. Thank you so much, Amit. Happy to be here always. What's been happening with you since we have spoke? A lot. A lot. I think the... And I think courtesy Xi Jinping, the world has become, and obviously courtesy Donald Trump, the world has become much more interesting and much more complex. And so therefore, people like me are much more in business.

I think the last few years have been interesting in terms of not just writing and looking at the world, but also speaking to policymakers.

I've spent the last couple of years testifying before the US Congressional Commission on China. I've had the opportunity to engage with European policymakers extensively earlier this year. So lots of travel, lots of meeting with... policymakers around the world and also being able to triangulate what my understanding is of China and what's happening in the country with a bunch of people who've been doing some of this for much longer than I have.

around the world and an effort to try and broaden my horizons. I launched a podcast earlier this year, which looks at sort of the intersection of IR and policy and So that's been fun. It's been fun listening to people and learning from them. So yeah, been keeping busy.

So, you know, I first ran into you when I was editing the policy magazine Pragati and I remember for that we had a bunch of newsletters, you read the China newsletter, which I found was and is outstanding because of just the depth of coverage that... you know you did into china and i wondered that there is

This thing which happens with our journey into knowledge that when we first begin to know something, we get really deep and then everything is like a revelation. New frameworks come, new understanding comes. You think, okay, I've got this sorted. But then the deeper and deeper and deeper you go, you

actually begin to realize how little you actually know and how deeply complicated the subject is and so on and so forth now at that time uh seven years ago i would have called you the one indian mind i would trust in china like i thought you you know uh knew it knew the subject better than anyone else and for those seven years day in day out

You've been hard at work, getting more knowledge, doing the newsletter, etc, etc. So what is your, what's your journey through knowledge been like? Like, when are the times you feel that, hey, I don't even begin to know this? When are the times you've done some analysis and you felt that, what the fuck, man, I didn't, you know, what?

was i doing what was i even thinking it's so much more complicated there are so many things i missed what's that journey through knowledge and trying to understand china been like Yeah, I think that's the most exciting part, right? The day you get, I think on a weekly basis, I struggle with imposter syndrome. On a weekly basis, there will be a day in the week where I will seriously question what I know, what I'm doing.

I think what I've learned is that a lot of comfortable assumptions that one got into looking at the country with beginning with sort of seven, eight years ago. I've sort of shared a lot of those. I don't reflexively look at the country as friend, foe, aggressive, non-aggressive. None of those things make sense. You look at a lot more about... how people think and you realize that look at the end of the day there is a system and there are people so i think understanding complexity at that level

that systems create incentive systems create restrictions systems create structures which inhibit flows of information and things like that and then how people get influenced by those systemic factors I think figuring out those has been far more interesting for me. And as you've shared some of those comfortable assumptions, this process has been much more interesting. Also, what's been interesting is to try and...

In China, you have a Communist Party of China. It's an organizational system which governs the country. It's the party state. how that system functions, why it functions a certain way, where it works and where it doesn't work. You can think of a lot of parallels. And I think often, you know, I tell Nitin this, you know, when we have our organizational meetings in Takshashila, I tend to tell him that, you know,

This is also an organization. It's also an institution. There are elements of hierarchy. There are elements of flatness. When we look at our meetings, you can actually reflect back and think of how...

an organizational structure must function at the larger scale. So I think there's a lot of that reflection. So you suddenly realize that it's not just political science that you need to know. It's not just... ideas of leninism and marxism that you need to know it's not just ir that you need to know realism liberalism whatever it's also what you need to know is how organizational work how organizations work so how organizational theory functions

how individuals function. So how would one psychologically think about a particular development? How leadership decisions get made? So I think when you add all of those, and of course, how bureaucracies function, because at the end of the day... All of these are massive bureaucracies that are doing the task, right? So you bring in all those different theoretical perspectives and you realize that the picture is much more complex. You realize that why a certain decision gets made.

why something that may be outlined as a priority gets done immediately, whereas other things that may be outlined as priorities may take two decades and still nothing happens. For nearly two plus decades, I've been hearing the Chinese leadership talk about we need to boost domestic consumption. They are still saying that domestic consumption is greater. But when COVID hit,

China could easily mobilize people. It could easily institute shutdowns. It could massively expand manufacturing capacity and all those things. So why is it that the system is able to do some things really well? And some things, even though the top leader may be screaming his lungs out constantly, they can't do it, right? So I think all these are factors and you start to look at the subject, you start to realize that it's much more complex. So to me, that process of how do you bring in...

different disciplines into the study of a country, of an organization, of a system. To me that's been the fun part.

So long ago, I read this book by Mihir Bose called The History of Indian Cricket or something like that. I've forgotten exactly what. And at one point, he goes into sociological theorizing about why we look down on left-handedness and why we prefer to, you know, why even left-handed...

batsman will bat right-handed and all of that. And the sociological explanation he proffered was that because we wipe our ass with our left hand, you know, therefore it is looked down upon as dirty and therefore right-handedness is favored. And at that time, I thought it was...

a very dubious explanation which a foreigner must have come up with and for some reason Mihir both had some paragraphs to fill. And I think that when you're trying to understand another culture, there is a great danger you face of kind of over analysis. Like a superficial look at China could easily lead you to a place where you, you know.

give too much importance to things like the mandate of heaven or the century of humiliation or different cultural aspects of it. Whereas they have no relation with China today. Like, you know, people, one analysis I have sometimes heard by naive foreigners about India is that Indians are so apathetic because they believe in rebirth and things are playing out through multiple rebirths and that's a nonsensical explanation because

no indian actually literally believes in that right we are apathetic because of different reasons yeah in so far as we are apathetic so is that something that you realize to avoid because initially those simplistic frameworks uh and those easy

explanations must be very tempting for you because they help you you know get rid of the uncertainty and you begin you begin to feel you've rocked some stuff but later on you have to perforce get rid of them and replace them perhaps with more complicated frameworks what was that journey like so

This is a pet peeve, right? I mean, whenever I read analysis which talk about Tianxia, which mandate of heaven, which talk about things like, you know, the three warfares, which talk about Shang Yang's legalism. I mean, current culture, there is a strategic culture. Strategic culture forms a backdrop of how countries function. There are certain...

tendencies within certain societies and certain polities. The tendency in the Chinese polity is fundamentally one where everything gravitates towards the center. The tendency is of central control and not necessarily decentralization in terms of political control. These are tendencies that have existed historically. They have ebbed and flowed, but they still exist very, very strongly. And that's true. And you can look at that.

The rest of this stuff, strategic culture is a backdrop. It's like that canvas on which you are painting, on which present times and leaders are painting. It's not necessarily what the reality is. something deep in the back of your mind. It's something deep that exists without you even consciously being aware of it. But it's not stratagems. You don't pick and say, oh, okay, so I'm going to go back to this book. And in this book, there was plot number 324.

And this is what I'm going to apply. Unfortunately, a lot of the writing does that. And what it does is that it also amplifies. Firstly, it endows the other actor. with this unique sense of agency that their circumstances, complexity doesn't impact them. Secondly, it endows them with great strategic forethought and sight, which is... complete nonsense because you can't have tremendous strategic forethought in all of these areas. It's just not the way the world works.

So I think that's, but like you said, these are comfortable tropes. People tend to repeat them. There is a grain of truth in some of these things, but that's just what it is. It is a grain of truth in a big rice bag. And unfortunately, It happens. So, yeah, for me, when I, I don't think for the last, I can't remember the last time I used the phrase mandate of heaven in anything that I have done or.

I might have used the concept of Tianxia and the tributary system, but that is in the context of how Chinese strategic affairs commentators describe that system. and talk about the relevance of that system to the modern day world. And what you will see is that essentially you can have that same conversation using what are sort of conventional concepts of IR.

But they are doing it within their sort of framework because currently China is in a place where there is lots of talk about how you need to decolonize the mind, you know, not something we are unfamiliar with, the kind of talk of that, but also how you need to create your own, go back, tap into your sort of civilizational history.

find concepts which are much more rooted to your culture and reimagine the world based on that concept. So IR must be sort of localized. Sociology must be localized and things like that, which, I mean, to me, that's another problem.

That's where they are. So therefore, you're seeing the emergence of some of these ideas. But they are in a modern day world. They are being adapted to a modern day world. It's branding for a modern day world while creating some sort of sense of culture. It's like how in India, when we talk about the Arthashastra.

when we talk about Kautalia and all of that, you can't look at that and say that applies to Indian policy today. So I think, yes, it is a comfortable trope. I don't think it really helps. It may help you initially, but it can be... deeply limiting if you really buy it so therefore it's better to sort of go as close to the subject as possible and again it's like that pixel right the more closer you go to the pixel the more granular it seems eventually so i think that's what's required

So a final question before we start talking about China, which is like, how did you get attracted to China as a subject? And when you started thinking about it between now and then, what have you changed your mind on in fundamental ways, which are, you know, where it's very different how you looked at it then? So I think my interest in China as a subject to study came from, I mean, I spent obviously a few years living over there and, you know, I went to China as somebody who was...

very reticent in terms of engaging with the culture. You know, even living in China, I would often live in my own bubble, which is a very India-centric bubble. But I mean, in time, I sort of opened up, you know, there's a challenge of the language and to be able to... integrate and to be able to mix with people but once sort of you got comfortable with that I found it to be a very

friendly, good set of people who are generally respectful, who are generally trustworthy, who are generally honest, who are generally outgoing, and whose broad set of values sort of align in some ways with... you know, what I would call broadly Indian values, family culture, things like that, whatever. You know, the idea that children stay with family, with parents, children tend to take care of parents, just sort of that familiar filial piety kind of logic, which is similar to India.

there's a certain sense of comfort in that also the sense of comfort in the fact that it was a country which was a developing country which was sort of seeing wealth and how it was coping with that which is again something similar to the Indian middle class as it was becoming wealthier in the 1990s first together 2000s and so on so to me those were things that made it comfortable for me what my assumptions going there was that it would be

quite an inaccessible country. That it would be difficult to create genuine sort of bonds of friendship. The constant barrage of... you know, dragon bearing its teeth in the Indian media would leave you with a sense that there would be a deep sense of hostility with regard to Indians. In my time there, which was granted, you know,

well before our current sort of last seven, eight years of tensions in 2017, I found that not to be the case. I found generally people to be warm and friendly. Within the strategic affairs community, there was a sense of... India being an actor which is in the American orbit and therefore suspicion. But it was not hostility. But I went with the impression that this is a...

difficult relationship, right? And this is going to be difficult to sort of engage with people, to be open, to be honest, that people would be very guarded in how they speak to you because of the sort of Communist Party's rule and whatever.

And I didn't find that. I think that that's changed right now. Increasingly, you see now people being much more guarded. Increasingly, you see much more hostility. But in my time there, I didn't sort of necessarily... see it as that also I think I went in knowing that yes China was growing and it was becoming wealthy but you didn't grasp how rapidly that country was changing the kind of energy in private business in China

from a technology perspective, the kind of innovation capability, the kind of ambition in society. I don't think I was prepared to see that when I went. I moved to China in 2010. And that was when, again, it was booming. But the kind of ambition that you saw, the kind of sense of possibility, which when you went there thinking it's a communist country, closed country, whatever, it was completely different.

Those assumptions you realize were not true. Again, there were grains of truth of what the Communist Party does and how it restricts freedom, how it restricts society. All of that was there.

It was a very safe country. It was a very ambitious country. People were very free in that sense. So some of that tropes of communism and totalitarianism immediately sort of shed apart. So I think that was what... changed when I went to the country where I am today I think I have a much more nuanced view I understand to a far greater degree how information control takes place how social control takes place the limits of also that

But I also understand how there is a lot of social freedom. There is a lot of dynamism in society. There's a lot of ambition. So I think I have a much more balanced sense of the country today. Nothing inherently... hostile, nothing inherently problematic, but a sense of how politics shapes certain perspectives. I have a deeper sense of I think China's domestic concerns when it comes to its economy, its technology ecosystem. I think I have a far deeper sense of how

Chinese politics functions, how the party state system functions. So I think those things, the more you understand that, the more you realize that it's much more complex and some of those old ideas don't necessarily work.

So let's get started talking about China and the first thing I'll start with is Chinese civilization. So, you know, in India here, we keep harking back on our great civilization and we have a decent sense of Western civilizations and etc, etc. But not so much of China itself besides some really broad generalization. drops. So give me a sense of Chinese civilization. What do we know of old Chinese history, you know?

I think a lot, right? I mean, there's a lot to sort of unpack there. Officially, from the perspective of the party, Chinese civilization is about 5,000 years old. I mean, it could become older if Xi Jinping deems so, but it's 5,000 years old.

If you look at it sort of in a simplified manner, there are sort of history of dynasties that have ruled China. Now, when I use the word China in this context, it's not the geographical entity that is there today. It's not the People's Republic of China that is there today in terms of... the boundaries of the state. It is a set of kingdoms, set of territory, pieces of territory within the sort of Yellow River Valley within sort of what is...

Central China. That's why it was called also Zhongguo, which means the Middle Kingdom. So it was set of different localities at different points of time. There was tremendous competition, tremendous contestation among these kingdoms. As with time, that sort of starts to grow. So China proper is much smaller. Over the centuries, you know, over the past two or thousand years, what you see is a civilization that...

starts to do many, many interesting things. It starts to, for example, the first emperor who united all of China, Qin Shi Huang, he... sets up common weight measures, common currency, those kinds of things. So there's a unifying tendency that he sort of brings into place. Subsequently, of course, you have different dynasties. Each dynasty adds something.

Sometimes the borders of the kingdom expand. Sometimes they shrink a little bit. What you can see is maybe two or three central tendencies across the dynasties. First is that there is... a desire constantly for some sort of strong central leadership, some sort of strong king type figure, leader type figure, who brings together what is a very, what is it?

land which is constantly in conflict. And this is also part of Chinese mythology. In Chinese mythology, the idea of order and somebody bringing order to chaos is a critical component. of most conversations. So the idea of this central figure who brings order to chaos is extremely important. The second thing is that as different dynasties grow, each dynasty, when it comes to power,

It writes the history of the dynasty before it. So recording of history is a critical component of that civilization. Documentation, recording of history is something that is central to Chinese civilization. And of course, it's the winner, it's the successor who writes the history. So the successor often paints the dynasty that has just gone in very negative light, which is where the idea of the mandate of heaven also comes. So centralizing figure.

plus the successor writing the story. So essentially the successor legitimizing themselves with the idea that look, Because there were these natural calamities, because there was deep corruption, because there were all these challenges, this dynasty collapsed and therefore it lost the mandate of heaven thereby and it collapsed. And therefore we now are the sort of rightful successors. So that's where the...

concept of that also comes. But this is an interesting trope, right? It's not just history of successive dynasties, but also history of the country and the civilization is being recorded, therefore. So, therefore, you have tremendous records of Chinese history. And today, if you look at modern diplomacy, you see the Chinese government use a lot of these records when it makes claims to sort of our ancient historical rights over a particular territory.

And this is very different compared to India. In India, a lot of our literature, poems, hymns, history is sort of oral. The tradition is oral. The third thing is that at different points of time, As this empire expands and then contracts, there are two dynasties that come. One is the Yuan dynasty and one is the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty was the last Chinese dynasty.

Both of these dynasties are not of the Han Chinese people. The Yuan dynasty is the Mongols. The Qing dynasty is the Manchus. And both of these dynasties expand the borders of the empire quite substantially. And both of these anasties are also a case where the Huns were being ruled over by another ethnic group. Today what we see China as is an overwhelming Hun ethnic population with 50 odd ethnic minorities.

but in much smaller numbers. The fact that these histories of these dynasties has been assimilated into modern China and the thinking of modern Chinese and they articulated as one continuous rule. is dubious. But the fact that they've been assimilated tells you a little bit about the need to also assimilate different cultures within the sort of broader Han culture, which had a tendency to argue that, look, we are a civilizing culture.

and we are a superior culture. And therefore, even if you are somebody who's from another ethnic group, who's from another culture, another civilization, and if you've come in, if you've assimilated, you can sort of rise up the sort of system.

Three or four of these tendencies, I think you will see across the system. Now, through the two millennia or so, you will see a lot of tremendous sort of development in technology. There are the so-called sort of four founding technologies, gunpowder, paper making, so on and so forth, which, you know, the Chinese...

were acclaimed for. In the Song dynasty, there was tremendous art and literature, incredible stuff that was created. In the Tang dynasty, in modern-day China, if you go to a province called Gansu, The capital of the province is Lanjiao. They had these tremendous Tang Dynasty opera performances that happened for tourists. And it's incredible. It's beautiful stuff. And this dates back to, you know, more than a thousand plus years ago.

You come to the Ming Dynasty, which is where we get all the Ming vases, the architecture, the sort of beautiful porcelain work. You get tremendous trade. In the Ming Dynasty, there was a famous sailor called Zheng He who was a eunuch who had been actually assaulted as a child, castrated, eventually part of the kingdom and the leading sort of sailor. And the Ming Dynasty

launches these massive boats which sail across the Indian Ocean. Jang-ha stopped a lot in India. At a point of time, he even negotiated in domestic conflicts between kingdoms in India. And then one fine day, this Ming dynasty, whose entire armada used to come and it used to be this awesome site. One fine day, the emperor decides, done. We're no longer doing external stuff. No more need for a navy. No more need for all this.

So you could see these sort of aberrations in decision making, but you could see sort of the heights of Chinese civilization during the Ming Dynasty also. So there were these periods, different periods. Each dynasty had its own sort of unique elements to it. Again, the peak of... Chinese sort of territorial expansion was under the Qing dynasty, where it occupied large swathes of territory. And that then started to shrink, you know, starting the Opium War in 1839, once the Brits eventually...

you know, the first sort of war started and then there was a series of conflicts which led to, which is today remembered as the century of humiliation. So, I mean, in a nutshell, I'm sort of encapsulating 2000 odd years plus in this thing. But you see a civilization which is rising, where there are breaks. It's not necessarily entirely continuous. There is tremendous infighting. But you see different dynasties succeeding each other. And some sense of...

continuity, cultural continuity, some sense of civilizational continuity, some sense of governance systems continuity comes into play. For example, at a certain point of time, you start developing centralized examination system for bureaucrats. And that examination system continues even today. And probably the world's first sort of centralized examination system for civil servants. When was it? I can't recall which dynasty it was, but I think it was about...

five, seven hundred years ago, if I'm correct. So you have these systems which are in place for a very long period of time and which continue till today. In terms of sort of cultural factors, to me, there are...

two broad strands of political culture which have sustained throughout Chinese history. One is Confucianism, which emerges about I think 200 or 223, 300 BC, more than 2000 years ago, during the warring states period. And then you've got legalism, which is Shang Yang's legalism.

So the difference between these two was that Confucianism looks at society as constructing society based on a structure of order with the family being sort of a primary unit, with the leader being sort of your benevolent patriarch. And upward mobility in that system is based on knowledge acquisition. It's not based on where you're born, where you're from, any of that. what kind of knowledge acquisition you acquire and your behavior, your sort of benevolence, your sort of nobility.

And therefore, so you as an individual who may be born in whichever family, whichever part of the country, wherever, whatever your class system may be, you can sort of rise up the ranks based on your capability in some ways. But there are certain sort of rights of nobility that you will adhere to.

Legalism, on the other hand, is a system which is sort of a leader-focused system. So, in Confucianism, the leader governs through nobility, through things like that. In legalism, the leader governs through... a certain sense of paranoia. The leader sort of is constantly paranoid because everybody is self-interested around him. All his advisors are self-interested and all the knives are constantly out. And so the leader's job is to try and be shrewd enough to...

play one against the other, to make sure that there is never a rival that comes out and the leader governs by force and that force is exerted through the law. So your governance is not rule of law, it is law-based. And I think that both these trends continue till today. So if you look at Xi Jinping today, at one level, he's portrayed as this benevolent patriarch who's sort of looking after society, deeply caring, deeply concerned about society. At another level...

His governance model is law-based. And in some ways, you could argue, given the scale of his anti-corruption campaign for the last decade, plus there is an element of always making sure that people across the system... or on their toes. So you see some of these tendencies that persist throughout the history of China. That's fascinating.

public image would be based on Confucianism, but the way he actually governs is based on legalism, as you say. I think he also, some of his public image is also based on legalism because, I mean, you need to also signal that there is a certain ruthlessness, even to society, right? You signal... a certain degree of ruthlessness with particularly corruption. So some of that is there. But you can argue that his sort of style of governance is a blend of both.

So, you know, when I look at India over the last 2000 years, you just see the multitudes, you see the diversity, you know, in a different context, David Reich once said of China and India that in China, if you're looking for a large population, look at China, you know. So the Han Chinese are one large population, but India is thousands of small populations. And obviously he said that in the context of caste endogamy.

as an illustration of our diversity at least that indian description holds true incredibly diverse and we didn't start thinking of ourselves as one people till relatively recently how was that in china because from a distance when i think of china i just think of one

monolithic entity but what's the reality there like how diverse is china um you know what are the different kinds of cultural influences over there um you know do they think of themselves as one people when does that start kind of give me a sense of the difference strands of Chinese necessity. Yeah, look, I think that it is quite diverse. And I don't think we and I think the effort

Again, since the times of Chin-Shir Huang, who'd started to impose this sort of centralized vision of the country and of the civilization, I think there's an effort to try and create homogeneity. But I think that homogeneity, even today, you will see that in an effort to try and...

create that homogeneity I think it's a fairly diverse country I think it has a lot to do with there are different for example language there are different languages in terms of dialects that are spoken across the country When I was living there, I was living initially in the south of China, in Fujian. And my south Chinese colleagues, you know, I was traveling to Shanghai.

I didn't know the language at all. And I would ask the lady who picked me up in Shanghai, you know, can you talk to my colleague in Fujian? She'll explain to you what all we need to do. And they couldn't understand each other. So they could tell me that, look, her dialect is different. I can't understand. it. So even today, I think that diversity exists, but there's an effort to try and homogenize from a language point of view to begin with.

But there are obviously, and this is not even, I'm not even talking about the sort of ethnic minorities. I'm not talking about the Tibetans or the Mongols or, you know, other groups in the country, you know. So I think that that... you will see diversity within that country and you will see an effort to try and forge homogeneity throughout history. In terms of impulses, I think because the empire sort of grew and you had...

Mongol impulses, you had Manchu impulses, you have Tibetan influence, you had influences from Central Asia because of the Silk Road and because of trade. I think you see a variety of cultural influences. You had tremendous influence of Buddhism. So you see... a lot of diversity within the country, politically, not so much.

But in society, yes, in terms of practices, in terms of dietary habits, you know, food is very different across the country. In the north, the food tends to be much more bland. In Sichuan, the food is spicy. Yunnan cuisine is fantastically spicy. South cuisine is very different, right? As you go westward, you have more sort of bread-based things. As you remain in the east, which is closer to the waters, you have more rice-based and seafood. So you see diversity in many, many different forms.

in the country. And, you know, one could argue that you also see political diversity, right, in terms of what are the priorities of even currently the leadership because of the nature of resource endowments of different regions, because of the nature of their connections with the world because of geography. You will see people in the eastern seaboard of China across those provinces which are the richest and the most profitable provinces and which are sort of part of China proper.

you will see those provinces and people in those provinces be far more sort of westward oriented. There's a history of sort of foreign... areas in Shanghai and other places. So you will see those people far more open to the Western influences and foreign influences. You will see from a literature point of view, I was very surprised when I was living in China. My colleagues were far more informed about French literature, Japanese literature, Russian literature, German literature.

I, who grew up in India, who studied in India, I had no clue. You know, they could quote philosophers from all these countries. And I used to ask them, did you study this separately? No, no, this was part of curriculum. So you studied different philosophies from around the world because you had these influences of different countries. In India, because we predominantly had British rule and then you had your own principalities in kingdoms.

You didn't necessarily absorb all of these influences in China because the country did not have a single colonial power because you had several colonial powers having their own domains, the Germans in Shandong, the French in certain areas, the Brits in Shanghai and other places. you had several influence also in china there's sort of you know there's freedom fighters if you could call it that but the people who looked at trying to create a new china not just the communist party but also others

A lot of them went to different European countries, went to Japan, went to the US, and then brought back those influences. And there's a wonderful book by Bill Hayton called The Invention of China, in which he talks about... a lot of these people and how they started thinking about creating a nation state, how they started thinking about race, the role of social Darwinism and thinking around that.

within their conceptualization of Chinese society and the future state that they would want to create. So you could see all these impulses that came into being. I mean, the fact is that today we think of China as a communist country. And the Chinese talk about, the leadership talks about how we have a system called socialism with Chinese characteristics.

But socialism did not emerge in China. Marx was not Chinese. Although today there's an effort to show that Marx and, you know, there's a, I mean, as an aside, there's a, in the last few years, there's been a documentary that's come out. when Marx met Confucius. And there's this imaginary documentary of Marx and Confucius meeting.

confucius telling marx that look what you're saying is exactly what i was saying so many thousands of years ago so we have we come from the same school of thought so there's an effort to try and indigenize some of these ideas but there are a lot of these ideas from around the world which have influenced Chinese society. And to that extent, Chinese society was open to that influence, whether it was religious influence, whether it was cultural influence, whether it was cuisine, language.

It's been open to a lot of that. While politically, again, the tendency has been to try and bring homogeneity, to try and curb heterogeneity. And those tendencies have, I think, amplified. over the last 70 odd years under the rule of the Communist Party of China. So I think, you know, there is significant diversity if you go to the country in all of these senses. So, you know, I guess effort towards homogenization would be a part of any politics, pretty standard.

Give me an insight into, say, the role that religion played in Chinese society, like this Confucianism, later this Buddhism, etc., etc. How is that playing out? What goes into the shaping of the social norms and mores of the Chinese people? If one may generalize, obviously it will be different in different parts. Give me a sense of that diversity. Give me a sense of how all of those trends, you know, play out over time.

I think substantially, right? If you look at historically, a lot of the religion, and again, I'm not in a domain that I particularly study, so I'll probably give you a sense of just experience. But historically, a lot of the... religious tendencies in china were related to sort of your very localized beliefs right and some of those survive even today right you've got your

festivals around money and paper burning and incense burning and things like that. You've got this traditional sort of animistic religion that exists, local gods, local deities. In some ways it was a very transactional religious relationship that existed. I think Confucianism obviously not necessarily related to religion. It's a philosophical sort of pathway, which is very different. The big influences, I mean, Islam has an influence in China. Christian missionaries bring tremendous sort of...

political and also religious influences. I mean, there are stories and stories of, you know, how in the 1700s, 1800s, Christian missionaries practice in China, but also get... deeply get attacked quite a bit. There's quite a lot of violence against them. Buddhism is probably the biggest sort of organized. influence in China, it gets adapted to local conditions. So a lot of your local deities become Buddhist gods and representations of that. For example,

There's a depiction of different stages of Buddha. There's a depiction of peace which is represented by Kuan Yin and you'll see beautiful statues of that nature. Predominantly today, if I was to argue, I think the faith in China predominantly, Buddhism is probably the largest faith. There is Taoism, there are other faiths, which are again a belief in a certain idea of the universe. So those existed. I think in terms of an organized religion structure, Buddhism had...

has had an outsized role. There is a sense of morality, I would argue, which was historically there about what is moral. And in that, I think the ideas of family. obedience, hierarchy. Those are the kinds of cultural norms that have sustained. So in April, for example, you know, again, there is a similarity to India. In India, we have Shradh, right, where you pay respects to the ancestors who've passed away.

In China, in April, usually you have something called the Qingming Festival, which is a tomb sweeping day where you're supposed to go to the tombs of your ancestors and clean them and sort of, you know. So it's sort of like Shrad. So there are lots of these kinds of traditions that have...

But in terms of an organized religion, I think Buddhism remains probably the most substantial. Christianity has an interesting history in China. It started with the missionaries, like I said. But again, in the 1800s, there is this massive... Movement.

a massive Christian movement led by, I can't remember the gentleman's name. It's a pity that I don't remember his name. But he leads what is called, eventually becomes a revolution. It's a religious revolution. And his argument is that he's, I think he's Jesus incarnate or Jesus' brother.

The rebellion was a Taiping rebellion and millions and millions die in that rebellion. But it's one form of how, you know, the fact that millions died tells you about the ability to mobilize millions. So I think that there was... there has been substantial influence across the board. More recently today, of course, once you have the Communist Party takeover, you've seen a crackdown on religion, you've also seen a...

formalization. So there's two parts of it. One is that you've seen a crackdown and then you've also seen a formalization and co-option of religion. So you've got official religious bodies which must represent the state sort of regulatory system on religion. and has to operate according to that. Obviously, from the Chinese perspective today, religion cannot have extraterritorial implications. So, if you are a Chinese Catholic,

You must abide by Chinese systems. You can't be part of the... And the Roman... So Beijing has to negotiate with the Roman Catholic Church, you know, with Vatican to try and come up with some sort of a system of how the Vatican can appoint people. So I think there is a...

there is friction therefore in that because now you're putting sovereignty and territorial integrity in every sense above religion that religion must also abide by that it can't be there cannot be a broader ummah your ummah is within your territory so I think that is what's happened right now. But historically, the sort of ebb and flow has been that Buddhism, I think, has been the traditional sort of Taoism, Taoism, those have remained.

but declined in influence. Those have become sort of moral codes and sort of deeply internalized ideas. Some elements of traditional festivals remain, but Buddhism is probably the dominant force. It swept through the country. Then you've got Christianity, you've got Islam. Islam today has a significant population. There are official numbers. The government puts out an official white paper on religion usually.

which has data points on how many of which religious denomination, how many people are there. But essentially, the idea is that... Today, religion is much more controlled, but historically, it's had this sort of impact on society, sometimes deeply violent, sometimes revolutionary, but sometimes, as in the case of Buddhism, to become essentially the norm. And again, Buddhism was not native to China. It was imported.

So we tend to think of China as being very insular and self-contained. And I want to examine this along two margins. And one is, you know, cultural influences. Like you pointed out that you went there and you were so surprised that people are quoting from Russian authors, French authors.

authors, et cetera, et cetera. So over the centuries, how much openness was there to influences from abroad? Because India, in a sense, was a khichri. It was happily taking everything, assimilating everything. You know, I grew up, I would say, with more of a Western upbringing than an Indian one, even.

though i was right here in india and that's not something that makes me proud but it's just the way it was for our english-speaking elites but we look at china and we imagine from a distance that hey there are no english-speaking elites there is not so anglicized they don't have that history of european colonialism they must be much more self-contained and insular. Give me a sense of that. So yes and no, right? I mean, I think that if you look at the, if you compare the Indian elite,

Again, I was part of the Indian elite in the sense that I again grew up in a much more westernized sort of, you know, although not in South Bombay, but even in North Bombay, it was fairly westernized. I think that... Even in the Chinese case, I think that there are certain sets of people, particularly along the eastern coast of China, you know, people in Shanghai, people in...

Hong Kong and then affiliated with Guangdong. These regions which sort of saw much more growth early on in the 80s. I think that there was tremendous Western influence, where you had a history of Western colonialism. But in large parts of the country, not as much. They were much more open to learning about how other societies functioned. the PRC had a deep relationship with

the Soviet Union. Even before that, the United States has had a historically deep relationship with China. I mean, Ulysses S. Grant visited the country. So again, that's as far back as the 1800s. The Brits had a deep relationship with China.

China. Even the Qing Empire, you know, you had the delegation that went in the 1700s to the Qing Emperor Qianlong talking about trade and things like that. So you've had this historical connection. I think it's sort of... oscillated between being open and being closed and that's reflected in

in how people also function, right? So a lot of the, if you go, the further in you go, the further you go into the sort of hinterlands, and those might not be very far away, right? Even sort of a town of Beijing. you might not find any substantial Western influence. You might not find any substantial foreign influence. But in the larger cities of China, you will find a lot of cosmopolitanism. And I think that's probably a product of the last 45...

odd years where you find a lot more cosmopolitanism. But yeah, but as further, like I say, you know, my example of when my first trip to China alone, I was traveling from Hong Kong to Fujian and there was an overnight bus.

And I did not know the language. I could not read. I assumed that there would be some sign somewhere, but nothing was in English. Nothing was in any other language. So I couldn't read anything. The lady who was the bus conductor, who was a lady. That's another thing, right? You'll see women in the public sphere a lot in China. She stuck a sticker on my chest. It read in Chinese. I had no idea what it was saying. I was told that my bus will reach my destination at 5.30 in the morning.

At 3 o'clock in the morning, in the middle of the night, it stopped somewhere and I was asked to get down. I couldn't understand what the lady was saying. So at 3 o'clock, I'm sitting at this bus stop. I'm calling my relative who's supposed to pick me up at 5.30 in the morning, not answering. So for the next three hours, I'm just sitting at this random bus stop. I can't communicate with anybody. I can't make out anything.

networks don't, your phone connections don't sort of work. So what do you do? So in some senses, it could be very insular the further in you go. So that is true. But I think in the larger cities, because of... the history of colonialism, but also because of openness to the world. I mean, China has been far more open to the Western world, to trade, to even ideas from the world.

much more than India has been in its modern sort of avatar in the modern Indian Republic. Today, we are opening up to foreign university campuses in India. For a long time, there has been an NYU campus in Shanghai. So they have been open to a lot of this, particularly in the 80s when they started their opening up process. So you will see a mix in my view, right? But yes, I would assume that China is less...

Across the board, India is probably far more influenced by Western ideas than China is. China has retained or reinforce some of its more traditional sort of viewpoints and it has a lot to do with geography, it has a lot to do with just where people are and what they do.

I'm intrigued by what you said about being taken aback that there were so many women in public spaces. So elaborate on that a bit because that would not be an influence of westernization, for example. So where is that coming from? What is the role of women within the family or within Chinese? Yeah, I mean, look, it's obviously a complex subject, but I would argue that, you know, historically, women didn't necessarily have...

I don't think historically society was terribly open when it came to women. There's a history of women binding their feet and things like that. And there's also a history of women in power being seen in the tropes of negativity around women in power. I think that... when you see a lot of this, I think the credit has to be given in some ways to the Communist Party and its approach towards society. They looked at individuals as

individuals as factors of production and things like that. Women had an equal role. And I think that sort of helped the idea that under Mao's rule since 1949, everybody had to work, women had to work. So that was normalized in some way. So women were asked to sort of come out in the public sphere and they did engage in the public sphere. They worked as equal people. And I think that sustained. So today, if you go to China,

At the forefront of stores, at retail and things like that, it's women who run the show. It's not men. Even in factories, and I traded a fair amount from China, getting contract manufacturing done with Chinese factories. It's the women who would be the sort of efficient managers of things. You know, in smaller towns, Chinese factories, work starts late, work starts in the second half of the day.

The men would wake up at 11.30 in the morning. They'd grab their beer and lunch by 12, 12.30. Lunch would end at 2 o'clock, which is when the men would sit to work. But the women were at it since the morning. And they were not just doing domestic chores. They were also dealing with clients. They were also managing factory floors.

So from retail to factory floors, you will see that. And you will see that even in numbers now, say, like in terms of women CEOs, women billionaires in China, it's substantial. So you see, culturally, I don't think... That barrier of women must be indoors or women must be protected and all that is broken. Also, in some ways, China is a very safe country to travel. I've been out late in the night alone, walking back home.

At 12, 1, you know, my work sometimes used to finish at like half past 12, working in the media. You come walking back home alone and you would see women also walking back home alone, you know, at 1 or 2 in the morning. It's perfectly safe. You didn't find... In fact, often you'd see

young couple sitting by the street where the woman is scolding the man and the man is quietly listening to the scolding. So you would, you know, so I think that the society is, this is not to diminish that violence happens against women even in China, but I think it's a much more freer society in that sense. I think in the public space, it's much more safer for women comparatively to India. And I think we must appreciate that. I think we must appreciate that. That exists.

And is there a deeper why to it beyond the fact that Mao looked at women as factors of production, so putting women out to work, etc., etc.? Does it go back further in the past? I don't think so. I don't think it goes back further in the past. I think it has a lot to do with, because again, historically women were seen as, you know.

bounded, must stay at home, some degree of honor and pride is, you know, they're carrying the weight of that for no reason. I think this has to do with the last 70 years. That also means, at the same time, you know, I must add that the Communist Party of China is quite anxious. about women's rights movements. And as much as there is this freedom that exists, you don't see women in power in China politically.

I think there's one state councillor who's a woman today. But if you see numbers historically, and people obviously track this, who are interested in gender politics, they track some of these changes in China, and you will see that it's usually... Men. You know, an overwhelming number of the party is men. An overwhelming number of people in power are men. I can't think of a single provincial leader who's a woman. So there are lots of glass ceilings that exist. But on an everyday basis.

I don't think you see it as much. I mean, my local police station where I had to go and register every time I traveled out of the country, it was usually two or three female cops whom I dealt with. My immediate bosses.

I worked at CGTA and my immediate bosses were women. And they were all strong, confident, competent women who were, you know, even if you read about Chinese politics, you will read a lot about how... wives of leaders have an incredible amount of business and political influence because while the leader can't do much publicly it's they who run the show you know there's a book

by Desmond Shum called Red Roulette, which I encourage everybody to read. And you see how Wen Jiabao, who was China's former premiere, how his wife essentially ran the show behind the scenes in some ways. So, you know, it's a very different system in that sense.

Let's dig into another examination of the word insular that at one hand we think that You know, China is quite happy and has no imperial sort of ambitions. They don't look at the rest of the world as, you know, territory to go out and conquer. But at the same time, you use the phrase Chinese empire a little while back, and they were clearly expanding from the Middle Kingdom, so to speak.

So give me a sense of how China views the world, both in a social sense and in terms of whoever has politically ruled China. I think politically it's obviously changed, right? So there were times where there was a sense of... Okay, historically, I think there has always been this sense of being civilizationally superior, being much more cultured. And that is where this idea of tributaries comes, right? There is a certain civilizational core which is superior.

And so there are those and then there are the barbarians outside as far as you go. And this is language that is used in Chinese history and Chinese literature. So it's not a modern creation. And the idea is that as a civilization spreads, as it sort of expands, its brightness. shall tame the barbarians, shall sort of endow them with certain degree of culture. And that comes with sort of the spread of language, the spread of practices and rituals and things like that. That, I think, persists.

the sense of civilizational superiority. There is something morally superior. And I think that persists even in modern-day Chinese political discourse. Is it there in social discourse as well? Maybe. I mean, not so much. At least not in my experience as much. To a certain extent, yes. But I don't think that's unique. I think that that's an American...

political discourse and social discourse, you will hear that. In Indian discourse, you will hear that. So I don't think that's unique. But I think at a political level, that's what's unique, that there is something exceptional. and that exceptionalism comes from a certain civilizational core. Part of that is ethnic. which is very different from American exceptionalism, which comes from a certain set of, historically it came from a certain set of ideas and a certain set of values, which were not.

ethnically located, which are not culturally located, which anybody could sort of... In this case, there is a limit. In the Chinese case, there's a limit, right? There's a limit to which an Indian can become, somebody like me can become... can rise up that civilizational hierarchy in China because I'm obviously not Chinese. So there's an ethnic boundary that attaches to it. So I think that is one thing that has persisted in that system when it comes to how...

they think about the world. In terms of the worldview politically of different dynasties, I think it's changed depending on different circumstances, right? The Yuan dynasty was much more, it was the Mongol dynasty, it was much more expensive because it was the Mongol dynasty.

In some ways, its vision of the world was very different. The Ming Dynasty was in some ways expansive in the sense that it sought to reach out to the world. It sought to do much more with the world. But at a certain point of time, the Ming Dynasty shut down everything. So something changed. The Qing dynasty at a certain point of time in the 1700s, at its peak, when China was probably at its peak, the empire was at its peak.

Its view was that we don't need anything from the world. We have everything here. If you need something from us, come to us, bow to us, acknowledge our civilizational superiority and we may bestow you. some gifts and we may bestow you rights to access to our market, right? So it was...

In that sense, probably Chiang Long was Donald Trump a couple of centuries ago where he was saying, I have the biggest supermarket if you want access, you know, I have the biggest thing and if you have access to it, you need to come and kowtow to me.

At the same time, that same dynasty, when it starts to crumble, it goes through a period of what is called humiliation. And, you know, it starts to look at the West. It starts to look at modern technology in the 1800s. It looks at the Industrial Revolution as something fundamentally...

It looks at technology as something fundamentally evil. So there are stories of how railway tracks, when they were laid for the first time between Beijing and Shanghai, at one point of time, the tracks are uprooted saying, oh, these tracks are bringing ghosts and goblins. We don't want them.

Technology is fundamentally looked at as negative. So it depends who you were, when you were, where you were in that system, what the state of the country was, what the state of the leadership was, what the orthodoxy was. The worldview sort of shifted. But the general sense of, look, we don't need the wider world, I think, has sustained, has been part of historical thinking. In some ways, that's changed.

and persisted also. So change in the sense that today, if you look at the Chinese world with the Chinese leadership's worldview, they say we need the world, but they also say we need the world more dependent on us than we are dependent on them. So in that sense, some of that historical thing of our approach to the world is somewhat instrumental. At the same time, they also argue that we are a morally superior power. We are a morally superior geopolitical actor.

We don't do these ugly things like seeking hegemony, colonial plunder. We don't do these horrible things. We are crafting something new and we will do something new based on our civilizational heritage. What that new is, they don't define very well. when I mentioned earlier that this idea of mandate of heaven, Tianshia, tributary system is being discussed. It's being discussed in this context of what kind of order do you want to construct. So you can see that today's leadership's worldview

comes from some sort of, there is a certain historical and civilizational continuity. But there are also departures and the departures come from the fact that it is a Leninist party system, party state system, which looks at the world from the perspective of regime survival. even though it is extremely powerful, which looks at the world from a sense of deep paranoia of containment and things like that. So there's this...

So there are peculiarities to the system because of its worldview, because of the nature of the system. But there is also a certain degree of historical continuity around China being a unique... splendid civilization, which has much that it should teach the world, yet it is not necessarily like America, which in some ways went on this missionary process of democratizing the world.

China will not do that. It won't impose its system, partly because its system is unique. And it's unique to its own sort of civilizational experience. Yet it is superior. So I think you see some of those things that continue.

How much of this narrative of exceptionalism do you think is actually genuinely believed and how much of it is instrumental, that it's a useful narrative for the party to justify their authoritarianism or whatever they choose to do. Like if I look at America and their narrative of exceptionalism, it's very clear that some people like Trump will actually believe it.

But most other more sophisticated minds won't, you know, they will see the world as, you know, what it is, a complex playground. So how is it in China? I think that there is belief, particularly in this leadership that there is belief. And I think that over the last

13 years now, Xi Jinping has been in power. Over the last 13 years, there's been an effort to try and revive this sense of ideology. I would argue that when Xi Jinping came to power, he probably experienced a party which he felt was devoid of mission, ideology, conviction, devoid of a sense of belief in its own sort of uniqueness.

And I think his effort over the last 13 years has been to try and revive and re-indoctrinate from a Marxist perspective, but also from a civilizational perspective. One of the catchphrases that he has today... is that, and this is a Xi Jinping contribution to Chinese canon of thought, is that

Your policy systems and your approach to society must function through what is called the two integrations. It must be Marxist in nature, but it must combine, but it must also accord with... excellent Chinese civilizational culture so it must your outcomes towards your worldview must be a blend of these two and I think this has been consciously now you see that there is

these ideas and also another concept that he brought to the fore which existed before but he sort of amplified it is the idea of certain core socialist values now these two ideas inform a lot of thinking about education, thinking about lawmaking, thinking about regulatory systems.

So thinking about, say, let's say tax policy, you might want to have certain kinds of property taxes. But culturally, is that something that you should have? Economically, it might make sense in the traditional sort of conventional economic sense. culturally, does it work for you? How did historically Chinese people who are governing, how did they do that? I think those kinds of things you've brought into place. So I think that there is a belief in exceptionalism.

How deep that belief runs is difficult to, you know, access to Chinese leaders is very difficult. So how far that belief runs is, you know, difficult to gauge. But my sense is that increasingly there is a... sense of exceptionalism the one additional phrase that I would sort of associate with this is and I don't think this is just a talking point because again I finally had the chance to visit China earlier this year

And I met with a lot of the people who deal with the relationship with India. I think that there's a phrase which Xi Jinping has amplified, which is called Chinese-style modernization. His argument is that historically, when China was developing over the last whatever decades, the understanding was that modernization, the pathway to modernization.

The end of the Cold War had clarified that pathway, right? Sort of this sort of end of history logic that liberal democracies is the way where people will go. That's the best sort of system. If you need to innovate, you need individual, you need freedom, social freedom, individual freedom.

gravitate towards that. You need minimum government, all those kinds of ideas. Modernity means that you need to provide individuals pathways for self-actualization, so on and so forth. The Chinese are today saying, well, not really. We've created a system which is a unique pathway to modernization in which you do not necessarily need representative government through elections. You do not necessarily need, you know, freedom.

of innovation in the conventional, in sort of Western sort of thought of freedom of innovation where private companies can go and explore and do whatever they want to do. You do not necessarily even need to make the individual the locus of the unit of thinking. There are certain core ideas. For example, you need democracy. But what is democracy? You need freedom. But freedom for what?

but law of to what end. So there are certain of these common ideas. You need human rights, but how do you define human rights? So there are certain of these common ideas that you need, but you need to interpret them within the framework of your civilizational experience. and your national conditions. And we have done that. And we have created what is, or we are creating what is called Chinese style modernization, which is a distinct...

process from Western modernization. And other countries must also pursue their own forms of modernization while keeping some of these broad values in mind. To me, it's a statement of tremendous... It's a statement of exceptionalism. It's also something that you experience when you meet the Chinese, like I said. You get a sense of hubris that is setting in. That we've achieved something that nobody thought possible.

And again, I met them from the perspective from an Indian context because we were there for a track to dialogue. And the view was that you guys need to understand where we are today. And you guys, therefore, need to also understand what your place is now in the world. given where you are today, which again is a sense of not just power, but also a sense of exceptionalism.

How convincing is this to you? Because on the one hand, my default notions of freedom are that economic freedom and political freedom and social freedoms have to go hand in hand. They play it plain to each other. You need all of them. You can't just have one, etc, etc.

And at the same time, the argument of the Chinese that, hey, look, politically, we remained authoritarian, but we opened up our markets and it worked. So what is the problem with that? Why do you need democracy? You know, at least on the basis of history where you see how.

Deng lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty which is a staggering achievement you can look at that and say that yeah i mean it's hard to argue against that and at the same time it horrifies me where people in india make the suggestion that we suffer from too much democracy quote unquote and yeah etc etc so how convincing do you find the chinese case and how have you navigated that look i think success makes it seem convincing right because you see outcomes and you see and this is

Again, part of the work that we do on China is, you know, documenting where it has succeeded. But a lot of the and part of the narrative of Chinese success, it's true.

China has tremendously evolved over the last 45 years. The landscape has changed. There's lots of wonderful things that are happening in the country from an economic development point of view. Unfortunately, when we tabulate all of that, we don't tabulate overall cost. We tabulate... even economic cost we don't tabulate in entirety right the amount of wasteful investment in China the amount of wasteful government spending in China I don't think people

People when they talk about China's success, think about all of that. The social costs, the costs on individual lives. It's fascinating to me that, you know, over the last decade or decade plus now, ever since we've seen China become a much more prominent global actor. Everybody seems to have forgotten that this is the same country that for decades, even while it was going through opening, had a one-child policy, which was incredibly brutal, where children were being infants.

In the womb, children were being killed, forced abortions, things like that, which is incredibly brutal. Those are costs. We don't think of those as costs, right? We think of those as, ah, fine, but they have big buildings now, right? It's wonderful. So I think some of our thinking when we think about success, we need to factor in the pathway and the cost that led to that success. I don't think we are doing that. To me, it is convincing to the extent that they have achieved certain outcomes.

And you can't argue with the outcomes. To me, it is convincing to the extent that it challenges the notion that you argued that individual freedom, social freedom, political freedom, economic freedom must go together. In some ways, yes.

But the issue is, does that freedom need to be absolute? To what extent do those freedoms can be curtailed? So there's a degree of... at what level should I need to dial the volume up and down on each of them and what levels of volume does it work for me in terms of achieving x kind of outcome if my goal is you know cultivating getting investments in

rare earths and building rare earth minds, even if I provide complete economic freedom, it's not going to happen because I'm being undercut by any other reason. So somewhere I need to curtail freedom, somewhere I need the state to have an intervention, somewhere I need to do those kinds of things. It's convincing in that extent that you need to think of different societies which must have different for whom each of these three components. If you think of them as meters on a transistor.

At what level do you set the frequency for each of those? And can you mechanically do that? Maybe, obviously not. So that's the process of testing. And I think even the Chinese system is that. There's a process of testing at each point of time. There's a tremendous degree of political freedom for at least local level officials in terms of how they operate and how they govern.

But often that political freedom comes at the cost that you fall afoul in one sense and you might fall on the sword. There's a tremendous degree of freedom in terms of people to protest in some cases. But in other cases, you can't at all.

You can't even criticize, right? You can't talk about the fact that the leader's wife went to South Korea and bought these expensive bags, right? Because you'll immediately be shut down. But if you're protesting against a local government on, say, pollution of the river,

you know, the lake near your town. You can, right? There will be a crackdown, but the center might want to hear that because it wants to respond to it because it wants to be responsive to some of these things which can become bigger protests. So it's about trying to understand. where the dials are on each of these and what's worked for China therefore. Would I want that in India? No. But do I think that in some cases you might have to...

Dial some things up and some things down a little bit at different points of time? Maybe yes. That depends on the particular circumstances that you're in. I guess these debates will play out over decades, it's too soon to tell. But just a metaphor of, you know, having a machine and you're dialing up and dialing down has such a central planning mindset connotation to it that it's kind of already sort of... triggering me let's let's talk about let's talk about

Let's talk about China's century of humiliation, right? 1839 to 1949, you described the first opium war. And, you know, there are like 110 years of kind of chaos after that, where China suffers various. tribulations in between the empire gives way to a republic and all kinds of things are happening. Take me through that period and how that period shaped mindsets today. Oh, substantially. I think that that period of...

You know, it's also fascinating that it's not so much the loss in the opium wars. or the French being there or the Germans being there. It was a defeat against the Japanese and the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1890s, which is what felt like a real blow to the Chinese psyche. the idea that an Asian power and a power who you felt was within your tributary orbit because, you know, language came from you, script came from you.

has now overtaken you i think that was a huge blow to chinese psyche i think a lot of the process in the early 1900s you know when you had what was called the new culture movement where you were saying that look In the 1800s, once that happened, once you had the opium wars and once you had those defeats and once you had surrender of areas to foreign legations, you ended up in a place where you...

There was this group of people who were called the self-strengtheners who wanted to change thinking, thinking around how government is structured, how governance is done, how you think about technology. And their view was, a lot of their view was that, you know, you need to learn from the West, learn from these imperial powers right now, adapt technology, work with them in that sense, but build your own capability.

And you need to then become sort of much more independent. And to do that, you must change culture. Culture in the sense that historically you've relied on how does one rise above the ranks in the bureaucracy in the system of power is through these examination system. The examination system is rooted in... knowing the classics as opposed to actually doing governance and you need to change all of that right obviously there was a lot of resistance from the orthodoxies and you went back and forth

And then you had this new culture movement saying that, look, we need to think of society completely anew, right? There was a movement, you know, in the new culture movement, you had these two characters called Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. China needs to rethink its culture and its culture should be based.

on the ideas of democracy and science and much more scientific thinking. And it's a fascinating period of that, right? From the late 1800s to the 1920s where you have... incredible energy science fiction being written tremendous rethinking of society imagination of how society would be like like decades from now and you have these influences of ideological influences from around the world like social Darwinism Marxism you have this flood of ideas and you have this

young set of people who are growing up among these ideas and who are writing and who are thinking about the world differently. You have engagement with India, with Tagore. You have engagement with India from the perspective of the Indian freedom movement.

you have Chinese scholars and thinkers and freedom fighters or revolutionaries coming and living in India, often talking also about India from a very negative perspective in the sense that looking at India and saying, this is what we should not become.

This sort of once great civilization, which today has fallen apart, which is fragmented for various reasons from politics to caste. This is a negative example. We should not become this. So you have these tremendous influences coming from all around the world. which shapes how society starts to

think about itself and how it wants to reinvent itself. And then in the more modern times, of course, all of this starts to vanish once the Communist Party takes over in 1949 and it becomes much more homogenized. So tell me about that.

period between 1912 to 1949 like what are the political tussles happening then of course Sun Yat-sen of course forms the Republic of China in 1912 and later on you have the battle between Chiang Kai-shek and you know the Communist Party so how is that sort of playing out And what is sort of the role of society at large in this? Like, are these just, you know, different rival armies of freedom fighting for power at the center? Or is there also a larger sort of nationalistic feeling or whatever?

happening in society itself. Yeah, I think it's a mix of those. 1911 is when the Qing dynasty collapsed. And then you have, you know, you have the Republic in 1912. And then even the Republic does not survive long. It basically breaks down into different fiefdoms and kingdoms, right? And then you have the sort of nationalist government that... comes to power. Yuan Shokhai is the leader, putative leader sort of. But you don't necessarily see them control.

vast lands. You don't see them control China in that sense. And you again see the sort of constant bargaining with local level lords and, you know, essentially military rulers at local levels. I think that in the 1920s, you start to see, in 1921, you see the Communist Party being formed. It's an ideological movement. It's nationalistic, yes.

But ideological in the sense that it looks at the communist world and says that we want to be creating a people's republic. You see the Chiang Kai Sheikh's party, the Nationalists, the Kuomintang work with... the communists. And they work with them with a nationalist agenda, that you need to achieve freedom, you need to throw out the colonizers, and you need to create a Chinese state.

And this sort of united front that is created in the early 1920s very quickly falls apart. And you see fighting between the two of them. By the 1930s, you see the nationalists controlling largest... parts of the territory being represented as China at different international platforms. They don't obviously control a significant amount of the territory that they believe accounts for China.

But they are essentially chasing the communists out. So there's a civil war that's going on. In the early 1930s, you have something called the Long March, where the communists retreat. and they retreat all the way to Shaanxi, where you have the base in Yanan. And at different points of time, they set up different Soviets, different bases. All of the sort of internal fighting gets... overtaken by the Japanese invasion that begins in the early 1930s and then...

It sort of extends until you have the Nanjing massacre and then the world war. So in that period, again, you see the communists and the nationalists sort of talk about working together. They do work together in some cases until obviously that.

threat of sort of the Japanese war sort of collapses at that point in time in the 1930s you have a period where there is talk about can we create two Chinas in some way and that talk obviously doesn't get too far because the Japanese threat in terms of how people in all of this. Mao's strongholds, the Communist Party's strongholds were the rural peasants. His strategy was that, look, we need to mobilize in rural areas.

The nationalist strongholds were your traditional capitalist class urban centers. They had a stronghold in those areas, but also increasingly they started losing support because of corruption, because of loss of territory in some cases. of the Japanese invasion and their inability to counter Japan. So all of those things eroded their base. They started losing public support. Again, corruption was a big factor in all of this.

And the communists were able to then sort of make strides, particularly in the rural areas, which brought with them a lot more number of people. So therefore, they were able to sort of overwhelm eventually the nationalists. And by 1945, when again the sort of civil war reignites, despite the American support for the nationalists, you see them wither away. And again, by...

1948 1949 they are largely a done deal and by 1949 even Chiang Kai Sheikh moves away and goes to Taiwan and he sets up base over there obviously the

Communists are unable to chase him out till there, but there are a set of islands, Kinmen, Matsu, and then Taiwan, where the national set up, and of course, those are now the Republic of China in that sense. So, it was a... period of civil war interrupted by a massive foreign invasion and the world war which sort of provided moments of pause it was a period in which you had

somewhat of a division although it's unfair to make it that way but if you were to think of it simplistically there was an urban rural division in that sense although not entirely but there was an urban rural division Mao also obviously worked with urban workers but his focus was and this idea of whom do you focus on more was also a point of deep contention within the communist party that do we

focus on the rural areas do we focus on urban areas who are our primary sort of which is our base and eventually Mao wins that argument and then purges the guys who made the other argument but So you see these sets of frictions across the board within the two sort of big forces between them, but also within them individually.

significant role of the Soviet Union. I mean, in forming that united front, the Soviet Union plays both sides. It works with both sides, even when they're in conflict with each other. The Soviet Union works with both sides. So it is probably the biggest foreign actor within the system. throughout that period, apart from obviously Japan eventually when it invades, the Soviet Union is probably politically the most salient actor throughout those periods, throughout the 19...

Since the fall of the Qing dynasty, the formation of the People's Republic, it is probably one of the most significant actors in their entire period. And subsequently, of course, it becomes extremely significant until the Sino-Soviet split, just because of its nature of... relationship with the Communist Party of China.

And just as you know, in India, we talk about the competing ideas of India. Were they competing ideas of China also? Like, for example, in the whole Communist Party versus Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party battle is playing out. Is it a battle between two competing ideas?

of China or is it a battle between two different forces with a will to power and it's just a question of who wins and then whoever wins because they are espousing a particular vision for the nation there's a part dependence to that and that becomes a road they go down I think they were competing ideas. I think the Communist Party's view was driven from a mix of sort of Marxist revolutionary ideas, which is transnational.

along with a certain sense of traditional conventional nationalism, Chinese history, conventional Chinese imperialism, dynastic history, and things like that. It was obviously also based on this class divide, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and things like that. So Mao's conception of citizenry was also very different. The people meant a certain set of classes.

certain sets of groups of individuals. Chiang Kai-shek's view, I think, was much more conventionally nationalistic. I think his view was of China as a normal nation state that would emerge. Both of these, of course, were very different from how conventionally Chinese society had been structured, how conventionally Chinese politics had been structured, and how conventionally Chinese rulers saw the Middle Kingdom, saw Jianguo.

and its space in the world, it came from a civilizational perspective of superiority, like I said earlier. So it was not a normal nation state. So we talked about the Opium Wars, one of the biggest shifts. that was required after the Opium War, and particularly after the defeat with Japan, was the realization that we are in a new world, a world of nation states. What does that mean for us?

it felt like a huge step down from being this civilizational entity which was superior, which didn't have borders, which had frontiers and things like that, and which, you know... now suddenly you are in this sort of legalistic nation-state world which feels like a step down. You are one among many from being that one. So there were different visions of what China is and what it should be. Not just between the nationalists and

the communists, but also the traditional sort of thinking of Chinese leaders. Before we go in for a break, a quick mischievous question. In a counterfactual where Mao loses and Chiang Kai-shek wins, you know, would China be very different today? Like I look at Taiwan and it seems pretty awesome to me.

So would China itself be fundamentally different in ways we possibly cannot conceive had the other guy won? I mean, yes, right. It would be different in the sense that you would probably have seen a far more... You would have seen a... military sort of rule. I mean, Taiwan had authoritarian rule for many, many decades, right? Taiwan's democracy is very nascent. So you would see, you would have probably seen authoritarian rule.

You would have probably seen authoritarian rules supported by the U.S. through those first few decades where Chiang Kai-shek lived. You would have probably seen a lot more civil... friction that is not to say that the first three four decades of the communist party's rule did not see friction you saw the cultural revolution you saw the great leap forward you saw tremendous friction I presume you would have probably seen less planning you would have probably seen

early economic development, but then you would have probably seen political friction, you know, because of the nature of authoritarianism. As people's wealth rises, you would have probably seen much more friction when it comes to that. I think it would have been very different. It would have been such a massive American outpost.

during the Cold War in the region. So you would have seen far more intrigue between the US and the Soviet Union on China. So I don't know, it would have probably been far more unstable in some ways, but also it probably would have been prosperous in some ways early on. at least early on down the road would it have become I think probably the safest argument that I can make if I think through this is that you've probably seen China become the primary

region for contestation between the US and Soviet Union, it would have become a genuine swing power very early on. And it would probably leverage that swing status. much more very early on, probably leaning much more towards the US. And now what would that have meant for us? It probably would have meant for us that we probably would not have had a border war in the 60s because...

Chiang's accommodation of Tibet might have been somewhat different and his approach to the Lai Lama might have been somewhat different. His approach to the boundary with India might have been somewhat different. And this is all conjecture, but I presume it might have been somewhat different, at least for us also. We would have not had the sense of, I mean, one of the reasons of our frictions with...

China at that point in time was also because of the role of the CIA, which would have been very different, I would assume. So yeah, for China's own trajectory, there would have been differences, but also China's relationships with its neighbors, it would have been very different.

Fascinating. I think that Counterfactual is an eight-hour episode in itself, but let's take a quick break and then the other side of the break, we'll finish this one. Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?

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Welcome back to the scene on the unseen. I'm still chatting with Manoj about China and we have just reached Mao. And you know, when we think of the monsters of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, I think more and more people have come to the conclusion that Mao was really the worst of them, especially if you just do a count of the number of people who died under Mao and everything that happened.

So take us through that period of Mao's rule, 1949 to 1976. Yeah, I mean, one of the most tumultuous periods. in Chinese history and also a period that today you see Chinese history gloss over quite a bit, right? It talks about it from the perspective of achievements rather than complexities, failures. number of deaths, those things don't get mentioned. Look, Mao took over a country which was yearning for some sort of leadership, which had been ravaged through...

a civil war, had experienced the horrors of the world war, particularly massacres under Japanese colonial rule. It was a country that was deeply divided. And he... Under his leadership, the Communist Party provided some sort of unity, some sort of sense of future, a vision for what China's place in the world would be, but also what...

Chinese society should be. And it was a vision which was revolutionary, which was completely different to what society had been used to in many ways. Mao also, when he became the leader of the PRC, he was also unquestionably in command of the Communist Party of China. That said, he... was in command of the party along with several revolutionaries who were battle-hardened, who were not...

sort of juniors in that sense. Mao had become the ideological fountainhead, but these people had significant say, significant sway. People like Pang Da Khai, they had significant sway in the party and what they could do.

What you did see was initially tremendous sort of optimism, tremendous sense of what China can achieve. And if you look at some of those early conversations, you know there's a book by Li Ming Fu called The China Dream which he talks about if you read that book you see how there was so much thinking about how oh, within five to seven years, we'll leap forward and we'll catch up with the US and we'll do these fantastic things. So you see that optimism, some deluded optimism in some way.

you also see economic policy actually yielding dividends initially. And that's just because you're starting from such a low base of nothing. And you're organizing society, which is entirely party state controlled. And soon that planning sort of hits roadblocks. And then you see the problems of this one man's dominance emerge.

where when he announces this great leap forward where you'll be doing collectivization, where you'll be doing, you know, planned agriculture, planned industrialization, where you'll be doing things like... you know, backyard smelters, backyard steelmaking, things like that. And everybody must be engaged in that to produce the capacity.

You also see very poor quality, but you also see terrible outputs. State procurement only incentivizes so much because there's no private market. And at the end of that, you start seeing... people suffering much much much more than where they had been but you also see

You see protests, but you don't see substantial protests because you've just come out from such a tumultuous period and you believe in this vision that's being articulated and you are, you know, you know, as in India in the last decade, we've heard a lot about, right? So I think there's a little. bit of that that's going on. But you see pushback from party folks, you know, folks, there is reporting of these sort of poor performances happening, this reporting of angst, this reporting of poverty.

But you see this inability also to sort of articulate that to the central leadership, to Mao in particular. he obviously does not want to adapt. But you see this sort of politics start to play out. So within the first decade, you see politics within the system internally, which often, you know, people in India tend to...

misread Chinese politics as assuming that it's a unitary system. When we began this conversation, you said India has too much democracy. That's one of the arguments that people give. There's a lot of, I mean, to me, that is a euphemism for there's too much politics, right? Everybody has a say, everybody has to have a, everybody's a stakeholder. In that system also, there is too much politics. It happens a lot, but it happens within sort of certain parameters.

So I think you see a lot of that in that early time and you see Mao feeling threatened. You see him feeling that his position is being threatened and then by the Great Leap Forward hurt him. Eventually it hurt him politically. He felt that his position was threatened and he...

launched a sort of pushback against what he presumed, who were once his partners, you know, brothers in arms, comrades in arms. And he launches a sort of crackdown on all of these individuals. And those happen within the context of... party meetings where people have to eventually acknowledge mistakes and criticize themselves. But even then, this man is sort of entering a stage of deep paranoia and he's becoming far more ideological.

This is sort of the 1950s leading up to the 1960s. It's also a period in which Mao is struggling in terms of his relationship with the Soviet Union. You know, after Stalin's death, Mao believes that he is now the elder. of the communist movement in some ways. He has a very different vision of how communist revolution must take place around the world. He doesn't believe in Khrushchev's leadership.

He also finds Khrushchev deeply problematic because Khrushchev essentially distances himself from Stalin and criticizes Stalin. And Mao believes that's a complete no-no. You don't do that. And that's partly a bit of...

channeling your own concerns in that regard because you are worried that once you become irrelevant there will be criticism of you or as he felt that the Great Leap Forward was doing for him in some ways right so you also see the relationship between China and the Soviet Union start to become much more rickety. You see lots of ideological fighting and debates, you know, power sort of struggle between them. Mao has an issue with how the Soviet Union deals with India. So you see friction for Mao.

all the way across all these domains. At the same time, he's promoting revolutions abroad. In Africa, in the Indian subcontinent, he's promoting revolutions. So it's a much more, it's a sort of a complex picture of what's happening. But by the end of the 1950s, you can see that Mao is sort of losing steam. He's losing authority. The 62 war with India is a great opportunity.

to reassert that authority. So among many reasons why that war happened, one of the reasons was also Mao sort of reasserting authority through a conflict. And then, of course, after that, his paranoia continues right and he launches the cultural revolution in which he's trying to upend the entire system so right as much as Mao saw the party as his instrument he saw

He saw the society as an instrument through which he can even control the party. And you must therefore engage in continuous revolution. That was Mao's idea. And therefore, he launches a cultural revolution. I mean, the most famous story about the cultural revolution is that he watches a play. In the play, there is, you know, pushback against, there is criticism of one of the elders, there's criticism of one of the leaders. And he looks at that as a...

play on public criticism of him and the party's internal criticism of him and then I'm obviously butchering the story but essentially he looks at that and his paranoia reaches its peak and he launches a cultural revolution and that cultural revolution essentially targets the party's elite. He mobilizes students, he targets intellectuals.

And he says we must eventually come up with a new culture of everything. And this purge must be continuous. So that's sort of that period. And that's a decade lost for China. If you think of from the perspective of... economic development, individual liberty, opportunities, growth of people, all of that is a decade lost, right? You see so many people sent to the countryside to the education camps for labor and things like that.

And then you see 1970s, you know, in the late 60s, you know, the Soviet Union and PRC relationship completely craters where Mao's primary threat is from the Soviet Union. By the late 60s, the US and China are talking and you can see a sort of pragmatic turn taking place.

And of course, in the early 1970s, the US and China somewhat normalized the relationship with the Nixon, with the Kissinger visit and the sort of conversation with Nixon and all of that. And that begins a process of, I think, an end to... the beginning of the end to some of these deeply ideological revolutionary streams, which are decades of lost opportunity, decades of mass killings, decades of incredible violence, decades of deep social mistrust.

And you start to then see sort of that stabilizing. In 1976, Mao dies. By the time he's dying, China is already moving gradually towards some degree of openness because the relationship with the US in particular has been normalized. But you still have this sort of sting in the tail. You have two years of high-level political drama with Mao's successor, Hua Guofeng, who...

is famous for a phrase called the two whatevers. So his governance philosophy was whatever the chairman said, whatever the chairman did, we will do that. And of course, a prominent actor more than Hua Gofeng was Mao's wife, Jianqing, who was the leader of the Gang of Four. Anyway, two years of political intrigue and infighting within the party. And you see the Gang of Four essentially being put on.

trial. You see Tang Xiaoping becoming paramount leader. You see a new process of collective leadership start to take shape as the 70s start to end and the 80s begin. And you see in the early 80s, you see a resolution on historical affairs, which is sort of puts a punctuation mark on the Maoist era. And that resolution, you know.

Colloquially, you'll hear things like, oh, the resolution basically says Mao was right 70% of the time and 30% of the time he was wrong. It doesn't say that, but it basically acknowledges that the cultural revolution was a problem. The sum of the... philosophical arguments, this extreme left ideology that was imposed was disastrous.

But there were some good things in terms of national consolidation, in terms of building some degree of industrial capacity and base, in terms of some achievements such as nuclear weapons, rockets, space program, things like that. that you did some of these things which were beneficial. The satellite program and things like that. You did some of these things which are beneficial.

Program for primary health care through what was called the Barefoot Doctors Program, which worked very well. So you did do some of these things. You did do some degree of investment in medical research, you know. So some of these things were beneficial, but broadly the policy, because it veered towards the extreme left, it failed. And we must now have a corrective sort of approach to this, where our policy must not move.

far to the right, far to the left, find a way in the balance. Now, obviously, this left and right is in a very Chinese context of what left and in the Communist Party's context of what is extreme left and extreme right. And so the party line... must be thought of in a much more sort of pragmatic way. So you move towards that and you move towards prioritizing economic modernization as opposed to Mao's priority, which was revolution.

And that's where you see sort of the dung shopping era come up. But that was sort of, in a nutshell, that was the Maoist era.

Yeah, to just give perspective on for my listeners, like what I think of as a classic illustration of central planning gone wrong, that whole mindset is during the great leap forward. Mao said that, hey, sparrows are eating grains, farmers are suffering, sparrows must be put to death.

So there was a purge of sparrows and the ecosystem was complex. Sparrows ate locusts. Once the sparrows were gone, or once enough sparrows were gone, locusts proliferated, crops were destroyed, and the resulting famine kills between 30 to 45 million people, whatever you can argue about the number.

Absolutely kind of crazy. Tell me more about Deng. Like, you know, we often have arguments about, you know, the great man theory of history. And I wonder what you feel about that. Because at one level, you could say that after the excesses of the Mao era and all the lessons,

that you could have drawn from them that some modernization was inevitable etc etc but you could equally say that many of the things that then uh dang did were truly extraordinary you know in terms of for example putting ideology to the side like

once he famously said that it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice at another point he said that you cross the river by feeling for stones and these are very non-ideological even at a level anti-ideological kind of statements which you wouldn't expect

a party leader to make. So give me a sense of the kind of man he was, the kind of milieu that he came from. He had actually been purged by Mao and had kind of made a comeback. What was the kind of politics he faced? Do we have a sense of what his beliefs were, if anything? Or was he just trying to to do what works both in terms of coming to power, remaining in power and doing what's right for the country. Give me a sense of the man.

Yeah, I mean, he was purged more than once. He was purged a couple of times by Mao and he came back at each point of time. He was obviously one of the sort of early revolutionaries who'd fought. So he had military experience. He'd fought with Mao and the others. was somebody who, I mean, Ezra Vogel has a great biography of Deng Xiaoping, which is very nuanced, very detailed.

Tang in the 1970s in particular was some, I mean, in my sense, he was a pragmatist. You know, he was not somebody who didn't believe in the ideology of the Communist Party, but he was a pragmatist who understood power. He was also somebody. who looked at the world as it is, or at least as far as possible, right, looked at the world as it is. He was also somebody who deeply believed. I mean, I don't think he was a political pluralist. I don't think he believed in political pluralism.

He was somebody who believed in the party's mission, who believed in the idea that China needed some sort of central leadership. approach towards power was very different from Mao's. And it grew to become much more different than Mao's. And that, I think, played out in the 1980s in terms of how he thought about the role of power. I think it was also something that I think one of his...

If you were to think of him as great, I think one of the greatnesses was that lay in the fact that he was able to evolve at times. He was able to draw lessons from what extreme centralization of power and policy can bring.

Like you said, the idea that I will cross the river while feeling the stones. is a reflection of that, that you're able to have some degree of reflection, some degree of perspective, and not get caught up in what you think are your sort of beliefs. At the same time, like I said, politically, he was very, very clear that... The one-party state is important, but you also need to think about what are the best pathways to achieve outcomes for national power.

I think that's what drove him. I mean, one of his big changes that he brought about after the sort of 1978 third plenum was... the idea of four modernizations uh you know defense technology economic and so on so forth he he was not looking at politics at the same time he came up with something called the cardinal principles which essentially meant that the party's ideology and

political position must not be challenged. So politically, therefore, that was a balance restock, right? Politically, you stay where you are. Economically, you start to modernize as much as you can. And you start to sort of open as much as you can. I do think that he was a believer in the market as a...

as a useful tool to try. I don't think he ideologically believed in the market, like free markets. I think he believed in the market as a useful tool to try and achieve certain outcomes. And again, you tinker around those to try and achieve those outcomes. Throughout his period, he...

Throughout his period of power, particularly the 1980s, which was the height of his power in some ways, he didn't necessarily seek the political offices that today we seek. Xi Jinping occupies three primary political offices. Deng Xiaoping didn't... look for them he looked at a core committee of people a collective leadership particularly of party elders whom he would work with but also in terms of official positions of authority he had to redraft things the constitution was redone

he had individuals who rose up to power and they were in capacity leading the country, right? So there was Hu Yaopang, there was Chao Siang, and eventually there was Jiang Samin, who were all, who served as general secretaries.

with whom he worked. And he gave them all a certain amount of leeway in terms of what they could do, but he also kept training them in at different points of time. And he played a delicate game of sort of behind the scenes politics. So in that sense, he was also quite ruthless. But he was ruthless driven by a particular purpose. And his purpose in that sense was national power. And to that extent, if it meant that you need to...

charm the Americans by visiting Texas and wearing a hat and going to the rodeo? Yes. If that meant that you need to host Gorbachev? Yes. If that meant that you need to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square? Yes. So there was nothing... ideological in that sense. There was nothing dogmatic in that sense. It was about objective and purpose-fit tasks for objectives rather than thinking of

anything from a dogmatic perspective. Mao in that sense was probably much more dogmatic, right? His approach was much more dogmatic that, you know,

So, I mean, therefore, ideology is a fun word, right? Because it depends on how do you define ideology. Jude Blanchett keeps saying this, right? If you have 10 people in a room and you ask them to offer their definition of ideology, you'll probably have 11 definitions. So, you know, so in my view... ideology is akin to somewhat worldview and I think Deng was ideological in the sense that his worldview was very clear that you need to cultivate national power he therefore articulated things like

We must achieve what is called a moderately prosperous society by a certain time, you know, in the early 2000s. We must grow from there to sort of massive national power. So his vision was that. And he worked in that context. And I think it has a lot to do with just the experience of learning iteratively as time went on, evolving with times, but also being somebody who'd fought.

who was a communist, but who was also a nationalist. Mao also had deep nationalistic tendencies. But Deng probably was not, like I said, not as rigid in his left-leaning perspectives. He was much more open.

And that's probably what allowed him to succeed. And he didn't necessarily... I think his biggest advantage was having drawn the right lessons from Mao's centralization of power. And to not seek... that position but to rather say that I can be kingmaker I can control I can ensure that the vision continues that means distributing power to ensure stability

that also means that because power is distributed, there will be times where I will find myself in a position where I don't have authority. So, for example, after Tiananmen Square, there's a big debate in the party, right? And through the 80s, again, Jude has a great book.

called The New Red Guards, in which he talks about the politics of the 80s and economic reform in China. Nothing was a given. Nothing was a given that because Deng Xiaoping has outlined his vision or because the Central Committee has outlined his vision at the third plenum in 1978, this is what will happen. There's a lot of two steps forward, one step back, sometimes one step forward and two steps back. So there's a lot of...

ugly politics that's going on throughout this process with different groupings coming from different ideological perspectives and different interest groupings competing with each other. And after Tiananmen Square, the fact that... China faces sanctions. There is a retreat when it comes to economic reform. There's a retreat. But it's also a period of time which is coinciding with the Soviet Union collapsing.

So there is this deep rethink about what's the pathway that we need to take? And is it safe for us to be engaging in, you know, something akin to glasnost and perestroika? Will we fall? So there is this deep sense of anxiety and economic reform is stalled.

And then Deng Xiaoping embarks on what is called the Southern Tour, in which he basically makes the case for much more economic freedom. But that Southern Tour, him being the paramount leader also, that Southern Tour does not get covered in party media. They block it out.

it gets the whiff of the southern tour comes to the Chinese mainland because it is covered in Hong Kong media. And then that information starts to flow. And then a couple of months after his tour, the speeches and the ideas sort of start reflecting. Now, again, archives, until they open, it's very difficult to make out why what was taking place. But what we understand is that there was clearly internal resistance to those ideas. And when those ideas started appearing in party media...

places like the People's Daily, is when you know that Rift ended or the argument was won decisively by one side or the other. Now, what went on to that is very difficult to know. But it just tells you that even as paramount leader, he did not have complete control.

He was not fully powerful. He was constrained by many other actors within the system. So I think that that bit is something that is, and again, that was something that he did voluntarily in some ways, right? He subjected himself to collective leadership at a time when... He probably could have had ugly fights to try and reclaim the top position, whether he would have gotten it or not is a different matter altogether.

So is it then fair to say that there were three imperatives driving him? One is strengthen the party's hold on Chinese politics. Two is strengthen his own hold within the party. And three is do what's good for China. And for Mao, perhaps a third of those.

do what's good for China, was never forefront because the first two were such a battle and he was just kind of figuring that out. And also he had the wrong ideas on how to achieve what's good for China. So is that a correct kind of summation? I would say so, perhaps, yes. I mean, I think... Mao's view of what was good, like you said, was something completely different. I think his view of what was good was revolution. Society must keep returning till it keeps reforming itself.

Deng's view was in a very conventional sort of national power sense that we need to deal with poverty. We need to create opportunities. We need to become a power which can take care of its... interest in like its territorial integrity, its disputes and things like that. We need to become a normal nation state. But

inherent in our sense of normalcy is that we are a great power. And to get to that great, to sort of materialize that great power status, we need all of these things. So in some ways, I would argue that perhaps, you know, when I talked about the Opium War, I said that This was a challenge for China's traditionalists to try and think of China, this superior civilization, as one among many. Deng acknowledges China as one among many.

And says that among these many, yes, we are one, but we must be higher up this hierarchy as a great power. We must be a pole in ourselves. And our pathway to getting there is. these things. So in some ways, that's the sort of acceptance of that reality that the world has changed and it's happening 150 years after the first opium war.

And I've heard China given as an example of a communist country that actually had a growing economy, but the way its economy grew has nothing to do with communism. In fact, in all of these three imperatives, there's no communist anywhere. So give me a sense of what Deng did in terms of... economic reform that made all of this happen.

Many things, right? So, I mean, the thing of communism, increasingly, I would argue that people should de-emphasize the communist bit about China, but emphasize the Leninist thing about China, right? The party is, it's a Leninist party state system more than a communist ideological sort of system in that sense.

in terms of how the organization is structured and how things function. What did he do? He began by sort of price decontrol, right? Removing price controls, removing controls over output from the state, procuring everything from farms. to saying that you can cultivate a private market for agricultural produce. The government will procure X amount, but you can sell beyond that. And that created a market to, you know, starting to create.

free trade zones, places where you could do foreign trade, starting to allow some degree of capital mobility, opening up to foreign investment, to giving away what were industries controlled by the state. companies controlled by the state. At one point in time in the 80s, there's this famous story about, you know, the suitcase sort of fact, suitcase companies where, you know, essentially people who were agents of the state and or members of the party are agents of the state.

They become suddenly this class of private entrepreneurs and essentially... you know, they take away what are companies which are state-run companies and they carry the suitcase of the company out and now they are, you know, private capitalists essentially. So you created this private capitalist class through this. A lot of it was obviously benefited. The beneficiaries were parties.

state members, princelings and things like that. But that started a process of opening up to the world, allowing Chinese people to travel, see the world, students to study abroad. and then come back. That brought with it lots of political challenges. I mean, a lot of the student movements were a product of being open. But I think that process of saying that we will be open to the world from an entire... I think that reducing control to begin with was where the 80s went.

In the 1990s, you saw much more focused movement towards reducing the size of the state. So there was, I mean, people don't realize this, that in the 1990s, the Chinese leadership, the Chinese government fired hundreds of thousands of... state employees. Just let go because you're going to trim down the fat. There were protests, there was pushback.

But no, but then there was opportunities, right? The economy started to grow and there were opportunities. So people went to the private sector to the extent that, you know, by the time China was entering the WTO in 2001, it had a very thriving private economy.

ideologically, the party had to reformulate its ideological disposition towards the private sector under what is called Jiang Zemin's theory of three represents, in which he essentially says that the party now also represents these private sector forces.

So the process was one in which you start to... reduce the state's role in terms of price, in terms of factor controls, in terms of flow of factors internationally and within the country, in terms of creation of certain markets across different sectors. so that you create opportunities for people and you shape incentives in that sense while not giving up political control. You create zones where you can experiment with not just foreign ideas and capital and technology, but also...

be open to sort of foreign influence across the board. So I think those were, in a nutshell, the kinds of reforms that were implemented. And again, the approach was that if something works, you pilot it.

And then you expand it. If it doesn't work, you step back. But you should pilot things. He gave a lot of autonomy and under him gradually over the period of years, there was no one model. A objective has been set. for example, on agricultural production target. States, provinces, cities are free to experiment how they want to get there. An objective has been set on, say, some sort of technological development goal.

regions are free to experiment how they want to get there. Historically, you would be asked, you would be told, how do you do this? Now the objective is you go and figure out your own way. And as times went on, cities and provinces competed. to demonstrate the effectiveness of their models, which also became

a part of political competition, right? So if my model works best, if the Gujarat model works best, I should become Prime Minister. If the Telangana model works best, I should become the leader, right? And that model then gets replicated in other places. So there was a lot of that model contestation.

which also became part of factional contestation in the party. There's a great paper by Olivia Chung on factional model making where she articulates this and she articulates how that model, how that system works even today.

That was one of the things where you didn't impose a vision. You provided a broad guideline, a broad target, and you said, you must go and figure out how we must do this. And each must do this according to the local conditions, which meant that there was a certain degree of decentralization. in terms of policy implementation. He also was quite okay with the influence.

of foreign actors within China in some ways. There was not so much of cracking down on foreign influences within China. It was just from how you dressed, how you spoke, what you wore. I don't think there was that reflexive nativism. under Young and subsequently also. I don't think that was the case. So I think some of this process, right, the final sort of important point is that he, and this again goes back to the ideology argument.

he forced a sort of division of labor between the party and the state. So your Reds and your experts. This has been a... traditional debate. And under Mao, he wanted people to be more red, be experts, but be more red. Deng said, you must have a division between the reds and the experts. The party can handle politics. The state must be technocratic.

must achieve outcomes and state officials must be driven by those objectives rather than so there was a that became a division of labor it became and you know any sort of polity once you have influence in certain domains you're also politically significant so the state had far greater authority and state actors had far greater authority and not all of them needed to be party members even today not all of them are party members

So he created that division where you had technical expertise prioritized and therefore used to know in the decades that followed, you heard about Chinese technocrats and things like that. Under Xi Jinping, now we've seen a rollback of all of that. Now, Xi Jinping quite explicitly says, and his rulemaking explicitly says that you must value virtue. or you must value ideology or morality and party morality much more. The primary...

You know, in Takshashir and GCPB, we teach economic reasoning and I keep telling Nitin this, that you teach economic reasoning and that is great. But also, you know, the Chinese are telling you today and they're telling their officials and carders and society.

The primary quality that you must have is political reasoning. Your political correctness must be first, right? So under Xi Jinping, we're seeing a reversal of all of that. But those were some of the sort of things that Deng Xiaoping did which worked.

A couple of things I want to double click on and the first of them is earlier you mentioned that Deng did not believe in markets for ideological reasons or whatever. He wasn't a market person that way but he saw them as a good mechanism for achieving certain goals. And I wonder to what extent as economic freedom began working for him, as markets began working for him, to what extent he would have or the state would have started drawing larger normative lessons on freedom.

frameworks for doing things like the value of economic freedom the value of private property etc etc like for example it it seems to me that one principle which is certainly adopted in practice if not in words was the one of federalism and decentralization if you have

different provinces competing with each other you know that's federalism right there in action and you know it works so well and you would then imagine that it becomes one of the normative frameworks through this through which the state views you know how to govern yeah so what

Was there a larger sense of lessons percolating through from being isolated instances of things working to becoming broader guiding principles? In some cases, yes. So let's start with the federalism bit, the decentralization bit. I think that... There is a tension within the system that exists.

Again, partly because of the nature of the party state, the Leninist party state, but also partly because of its approach towards federalism. And also, again, you go back to Chinese history and culture. There's a phrase, you know, the heavens are high and the emperor is far away.

So Beijing or the central leadership understands there's only so much control that you can have. So you create this competitive environment and this competitive environment is created only within a system of central planning. Because there are central directives of what you must be doing and what you must be doing and then you compete within that thing. And then the center is constantly anxious.

about the accumulation of power of an individual at a provincial level, about, you know, what their influence might be within the broader party state system, corruption. and what that could do, the development of cliques and things like that. So as much as you allow and you are happy with that process of decentralization and you see that as a pathway to growth, at the same time, you're constantly paranoid and you're constantly also trying to control them.

So therefore, you see lots of purges, you see lots of anti-corruption campaigns, you see lots of central inspection teams going and doing things. And I think this has been a feature of the system. To me, this is one inherent tension within the system. So I don't know how much of that sense that look, decentralization is fundamentally good, is internalized. I think there is a belief that yes, you need it, but only to a certain extent, right? Which again takes me back to my...

dialing up and dialing down the thing on private property. I think that that is something that has fundamentally changed. You know, in China, all land is owned by the state, right? But land, you get land use rights. That's essentially, that's as far as you, legally, that's what you get in terms of private property ownership, right? That you've got land use rights.

I think the idea of private property in terms of land, but also private property in terms of capital, in terms of technology, intellectual property, so on and so forth, I think that to me is internalized.

I think that's a shift that's happened. I don't think one would have thought of that in the Mao. That's a shift that's taken place and that's internalized. In terms of, you know, any other domains which is the third domain that you talked about you talked about private property you talked about federalism and there was one more thing that you said which I can't recall now but

The idea of, oh, factors, you know, the flow of factors, what's the role of the market? I think that it is internalized to the extent that you need markets and markets are efficient. Efficiency is important. So you need markets. And if you see what China is even today doing under Xi Jinping, it's actually a leader in many domains in terms of market creation. So for example, if you are looking at data,

or if you're looking at carbon trading, China is a leader in many ways in terms of creation of markets in these domains. At the same time, There is a belief, deep belief, that politics must guide the markets, right? You can't let the markets be to themselves. It's about how you define market failure.

where intervention must happen. And in the Chinese increasing sort of there's no hard and fast definition, but my reading of the system is that the definition of market failure is far broader than what economists would be comfortable with.

Because the definition is a political definition. Inequality and what that inequality does from a political point of view is where market failure is thought of. If capital is being allocated today, If capital was let free, it would look for efficiency, it would look for the highest returns, and it would go in those directions.

for the current leadership when it looks at that it says no no this is a problem because capital is going into the property sector capital is going into gaming capital is going into consumer technology

But we don't need that because what we need is we need robotics, we need hard technology, we need that sort of stuff. So I'm going to direct capital through traffic lights to go there because we see it as a market failure that capital is going there because it's a politically defined sense of market failure.

So to a certain extent, yes, the value of markets exists and has been internalized. For example, 2013, one of the early plenums under Xi Jinping, there was a phrase that was read out, which was, the decisive role of the markets in allocating factors of production must be maintained. And everybody who read that in 2013 said, oh my God, Xi Jinping is an economic reformer. Wonderful. Obviously, that statement still exists in every plenum document on the economy.

But the definition of markets and market failure is political.

Let's talk about the state and the party. You know, from the outside, one would think that both are the same, as you've just pointed out. They're actually not quite the same. There's a subtle interplay going on there. You spoke about the balance between the Reds and the experts and all of that. So give me a...

sense of how that evolved during Deng and how that has changed since because I would also imagine that ultimately you know Deng might have at one point become secure enough in his role within the party that he can you know change the alignments

and take it in particular directions. But for his successors, a will to power would have been a very powerful force. How you get to power within the party, how you then consolidate your power within that and the influence you want to have on the state, all of those come into play. So, you know, how did that dynamic shift, say, in the last 50 years? So if you think of the 80s and you think of what happened to the party in the 80s, it went through tremendous political convulsions.

In the 1980s, you had three different general secretaries, right? You had Hu Yaobang, you had... You know, particularly after the constitution was changed and all that, you had Huya Bang, you had three prominent ones, right? Huya Bang, Chao Zeyang, and then you had Jiang Zemin. So I think there was clearly a search for a formula. of what will work and what kind of distribution of power will work between the party and the state.

When Jiang Zemin took charge, I think he became general secretary and he became eventually president. But he didn't get the military position, right? The military position came a little bit later because Deng Xiaoping held on to it. And eventually there was a transfer of the third position to him. So he then controlled the party, the state and the military. And in that sense, and Deng Xiaoping, before he died, he had set the stage for the next generation that was to follow.

It was already clear that Hu Jintao would be the one who would take over from Jiang Zemin. And the understanding was likely that he would get the same three positions. Obviously, he also didn't get all the three of them at the same time. The only person in the history of the... Chinese system who's gotten all three positions at the same time was Xi Jinping. So what happened politically was that in the 80s, you saw lots of friction. You saw purges of the leaders. Huya Bang died.

And that led to lots of protests. And then that led to Tiananmen Square and things like that. Zhao Ziyang fell because of Tiananmen Square. Jiang Zemin was sort of a compromise candidate who came into being. I think there was lots of political factional infighting, genuine ideological infighting about what needs to be done, what is the direction that China must take, which settles in the early 1990s in some ways, right?

Particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it sort of settles by 92, 93, you know, and then through Jiang Zemin's sort of tenure till 2002, I think it starts to settle in one direction. that the direction of the system becomes clear. How the party functions is fundamentally, it's a hierarchical system. It's a system of transference of pressure.

So to achieve outcomes, you transfer pressure from the top to the bottom and then the bottom has to deliver. And the bottom has to be accountable to the top and the bottom constantly evades accountability from the top. It's sort of the cat and mouse game that goes on.

The other part of how the party functions is that you accumulate power through a patron client network, right? And you establish a patron client network as far as you can. How do you build these trust networks, you know, in such a large... society is such a large polity you know people that you've worked your way up with people who belong to your clan

people who belong to your provincial areas, people who belong to industries where you've probably been regulator, where you've worked, whatever. So that's where your sort of network comes and that's where your faction comes. Conventionally, there are... two sort of conventional factions that people talk about, which is the Shanghai gang, which is sort of the eastern seaboard kind of people who are much more pro-markets, pro-economic freedom also.

capitalists and you know control everything and then there is a far more sort of left-leaning communist youth league you know which has your sort of conventional welfare sort of approach to things And then, of course, this is a rudimentary division. And then you've got obviously many, many sub factions. Factions tend to be very loose groupings, which come together on different regions. But these are sort of your two big...

networks that exist. Xi Jinping in some ways, again, was seen as a compromise candidate. You've also got princelings who are children of former leaders. Xi Jinping is in some ways a princeling. His father was vice premier. His father was a fairly powerful figure under Dung. And his father differed in some views from Dung in many ways.

have these different factions which compete for power within the party. You have different individuals which are competing for power. You have provincial and city level leaders who are competing for autonomy, who are competing for investments. At the same time, trying to prove themselves because in the Chinese system, A civil servant is not a professional civil servant. A civil servant is often a politico-bureaucrat. So their objective is to rise above the party hierarchy.

And the limit for them is that they can lead the party, they can lead the country, right? You will not see a civil servant in India assume that the limit for them is prime minister or president, right? So I think that that... difference exists and that's how the party functions and again all of these are factors of inherent tensions within the system right when you have a patron client network which supports one and the moment one sort of grouping comes to power the moment one assumes power

As much as you don't become ruthless, you try and take care of the other because sooner or later you will lose power. You also try to undercut the other. Because you might have a political agenda, you might have an ideological agenda, you might have a business agenda. So I think all of that plays out in the system. From Dunk's perspective, I think his view was that I need to create a system that lasts.

particularly after the experience of Mao. So I need to create a system that lasts, which means that I need to harmonize some of these sort of power contestations. And that is where he came, you know, the idea of collective leadership. came into being. And the idea of distribution of authority, distribution of responsibility, division of labor, all of that is what he starts to institute within the system.

How does someone like Xi Jinping come to power within China? Like in a democracy, fine, it's a question of rising within your party and then getting votes from the voter, etc, etc. How does that work in a one-party system? Like who are you voting? What are you promising them?

the kind of political games that you're playing i get that there are factions and you need to rise up within the faction but what is the kind of politicking with someone like xi jinping would have done to get to this uh position of power what is typically required what are the games being played there I think it's a difficult balance to try and keep your head down but still get noticed. And, you know...

And I think that's what you must do, that you must stand out, but not stand out enough. You must stand out as somebody who's delivering on what the boss wants, but not demonstrate yourself. as competent as you present a threat to the boss. I think that's probably the most important skill is to stand out while being nondescript. And I think in some way, Xi Jinping did that. Like, if you look at him...

in the 80s, in the 90s, in his sort of early career. I mean, he's the son of a princeling. He's the son of a very senior leader. He's also been part of a family which got purged during the Cultural Revolution. He's keeping his head down. and he's doing what is required. He's implementing whatever is being articulated. He's trying to achieve whatever outcomes have been articulated. You gradually rise up the ranks through that process where you, you know,

are a loyal soldier who has some degree of dynamism. So that heroism balanced by some degree of loyalty and some degree of being impersonal sort of, I think that balance you have to strike. One of the qualifications, particularly to be at the top of the party in that sense, is that, you know, you need to be demonstrating ability to govern larger sets of, you know.

So you go from cities to, you know, from counties to cities, from cities to larger sets of agglomerations, and eventually a large province, right? So Xi Jinping did...

which is one of the most important provinces, which allows you to cultivate networks also, but it also demonstrates a certain degree of competence. It helps if you are part of the party hierarchy, you know, So I think there are multiple factors that go into it and you're demonstrating a lot of your signaling is to the elite and the elders about...

how accommodating you would be, how you would be different, but also, you know, continue down the path. So there's a lot of that process. And like I said, I think a lot of it has to do with knowing your place while you're rising up. So showing that you can achieve outcomes, but also not necessarily challenging the structure in the system. And I think that's what he did well.

And I think hindsight biases, you look back and you think everyone who got to power was the outstanding leader of that generation. They would have been there anyway. But I guess, you know, Chinese politics well enough to know that along the way, there are many, many people who are doing really well. I mean, Xi Jinping had challenges, right? Jinping had challenges. Li Keqiang, who was his premier, was much more accomplished, much better known.

He had tremendous support from the Hu Jinta faction when Hu Jinta was in power at that point of time. So there's a bit of political balancing that's going on. Bo Xilai, whom eventually Xi Jinping purged, was extremely popular. He had mass following. channeled sort of Maoist themes of Red Songs. He had presented his governance model as an effective governance model which challenged the sort of orthodoxy. So he was flamboyant. He was outgoing. And he has shown that, right?

So there were challenges. It's not like there were no challengers. And to me, Xi Jinping, when he assumed power, he was seen as fundamentally a safer bet. as somebody who would continue down the path that has been outlined, as opposed to somebody who would rock the boat far too much. That said, by the time, and I mean, he's obviously put in a position, he becomes vice president in... 2007 in the 17th plenum is when he 17th congress party congress is when he essentially

gets to the Politburo Standing Committee and then is a vice president. In the 18th is when he essentially becomes general secretary. But his sort of anointment happens five years before that, right, in 2007. He's seen as a safe bet. As opposed to somebody, he's in a somebody who can be worked with and somebody who can be sort of cajoled and manipulated. But by the time he's actually taking power in 2012, things have changed quite dramatically. China's growth is starting to slow down.

There have been a couple of massive corruption scandals. There's been the case of one of Hu Jintao's closest confidants' sons. riding a Ferrari, crashing it in Beijing, in a popular street in Beijing, and there being massive public outcry around it, and eventually sort of political action against these people. So there's been...

this deep public grievance which is with corruption and with sort of venal political class that you can see. And there is a fear in the party that policy stasis has set in. Ideological erosion has taken place. There could be public uproar despite this tremendous economic growth that we are seeing. And we need to do something about it. We need to stop. We need to take some steps which are decisive. So in some ways, as much as he is this nondescript individual, he's also endowed by... Agency now.

to take some really decisive things, measures. And he takes the ball and runs with it. And he says, not just decisive measures, not just targeting people who historically nobody would have believed would have been targeted, sort of breaking whatever your old pacts would be.

don't go after families, you don't go after people at the highest levels. He consolidates his authority throughout the system ruthlessly, which I don't think anybody anticipated, you know, even within the system when that was taking place.

You mentioned the mass following that Bo hired. You mentioned the public outcry after the Mercedes accident, etc., etc. In a one-party state where there's no democracy, what is the relevance of these? And what is a manifestation of public feeling? Like, one question that one might well ask is that in all of these years, in all of these decades, why were there no popular uprisings? Right? How is it that the people...

People are okay with one party, one state. And no matter how well the economy might be doing, you would still have moments of uprising. So, you know, why was there no popular uprising? Was there a way that, you know, did public opinion play a part in keeping... the party accountable? Did public opinion matter to the party? You know, give me a sense of this. Public opinion matters to the party a lot. I think that historically what you have seen is this

Let's look at it firstly from the public. What is it that you want from your political leaders? You want... In a country where in the 1960s, 70s, people were dying of starvation, you know, significantly, you want... opportunities, you want wealth, you want growth, you want food, you want basic necessities, right? You want all of that to begin with. So you want your life to be better than your father's life, right? That's the first thing.

From the 1980s, the party has delivered that. People's lives have gotten better. When I was living in Beijing, I remember talking to some of my colleagues who were Chinese colleagues who were working within Chinese media. And for them, it was this huge thing to be working in Chinese state media.

It was very different. For me, that wasn't journalism. So I came at it from a point of view of, look, this is not journalism. For them, it was a case of this is an honor that I have the opportunity of working here. And a lot of them would tell me stories about how, oh, somebody, everybody knew somebody in their family, a relative, an uncle, an aunt or somebody who died of starvation.

One of the most sort of vivid stories I remember is one of my friends telling me that her uncle, her father's brother, younger brother, died after, I mean, of starvation when he could not eat anything. He started eating rocks. and he died eating rocks so when she looks at her life today compared to just one generation ago it's a big difference right so

In that sense, you have achieved something which you feel satisfied by. So you don't necessarily push back. Now, that doesn't mean that things stop over there. You want many other things. What the party has done well is that it has incorporated people in some ways. in their own surveillance, in their own sense of

well-being and the idea that the party is there to keep you safe and the party must be there to keep you safe. The sort of siege mentality has been cultivated. So while people feel that... I have now enough. Firstly, there's a siege mentality. Secondly, there's a sense of I have enough stake in the system. Do I want the system upended? If the system is upended, what do I get? I get possibly chaos. Do I want that chaos? No. Better than that, chaos is the system.

However unfair or unjust it might seem, it's better than that chaos. In the 80s and the 90s, early decade, first decade of the thousands, one could have looked around and said, yeah, look at the United States, look at the West, there is something better there. Today, I don't think even that exists, right? Because you look at the West and you say, no, don't want that. Don't want that kind of...

partisan nonsense that's going on in the US today. So that's the other thing. There is a sense of siege. There is a sense of stake in the system from the people's perspective. There is a genuine improvement in lives. Today, I would argue that belief that is my life going to be better than my father's is probably shrinking, but still substantive enough for that not to lead to massive protests. And then there is this case of, you know.

When you look at the world, you see, what do you think you want? Do you want to create chaos, but to what end? Do you want to protest, but to what end? As far as protests are concerned, you see a lot of protests in China. You see a lot of protests. Sometimes those protests get... protests get cracked down upon sometimes those protests succeed in terms of creating change depends on where the protest is and about what if it is a protest about

against a local government about some sort of issues which align with the central leadership's priorities, for example, environmental issues, you will see the central leadership respond. It means sacking local people, they will sack them. If it means a protest against

the central leadership on issues of certain kinds of freedoms and political issues, you will see them cracked down very hard. If it is a protest which has the potential to have a ripple effect across cities, you will see them immediately cracked down on it, whatever the issue may be.

because the biggest fear is that something mobilizes across cities. So you have a fairly sophisticated surveillance network which allows you to do this. You have... a fairly well attuned sort of year to the ground system in the party which tries to figure out what's going on in the country at the same time you allow

protests as pressure valves to sort of release the pressure from time to time, particularly on issues of governance which align with parties' priorities. So to that extent, those individuals and the people at large tend to believe that If we align our pushback along the priorities that may be their developmental priorities, we're getting outcomes. So it's not a non-responsive government, right? It's responding. And they internalize the fact that there are certain things that we don't do.

The rest of it we can do. When you do those certain things, you fall afoul. So if you create a citizen's charter of some kind, you fall afoul. And so people who've tried that over the last decade and a half have unfortunately fallen afoul. If you try to lead... an ideological sort of, there's a feminist movement in China, which has been deeply cracked down upon.

challenge the party on certain values and fundamental issues. On issues of development and daily necessities and things like that, you can, right? For example, when the party was, when they implemented the zero COVID policy, there were reports of, you know, when the

party central leadership, Sun Chun Lan, who was the vice president, who would go and do reviews and, you know, visit places. And she'd visit this massive gated community and where people would be shouting from the balcony saying, we don't have food, we don't have this, address this, address that, whatever.

there would be a crackdown on local officials get this done get that done so and there's a so it's in that sense the system functions it's also the case that the central authorities are quite smart they always tend to wash their hands by shifting blame to local authorities so Again, zero COVID, what you saw was that the local leadership in Wuhan and Hubei took the hit eventually. Although it was very clear the central leadership knew from very early on what was going on.

By their own acknowledgement, they knew it in early January. But still, it was a local leadership which was incompetent and which took the hit. So there's a bit of transferring of responsibility. But you do see, therefore, protests across different issues.

on different themes, where they align with the government's priorities, where they allow the government to sort of, the central leadership to sort of ride the wave, they will do it. Where it allows for certain weeding out certain factional opponents, they will leverage it. So it's in some ways very Machiavellian. how they deal with it. And I think people understand that. People understand that and then they think about what is the alternative.

And I have far more stake in the system now than I had in the past. So do I need to upend the system? So I think it's a very rational, pragmatic, calculative sort of thing rather than some sort of emotional outrage, right? So you've given me a very good sense of why China grew as much as it did within the 10 years that, you know, you have a greater role of markets as a mechanism towards prosperity. You have more federalism. You have more of an emphasis played on experts.

the state as opposed to people who are purely aligned to the party where does it start changing like you would imagine that even after dang once his direction has been established it's in the party's interest the state's interest to just keep it going but things do change and under g they

quite drastically so take me through why it changes and what those changes are what is she doing which is different and why and what is the impact of that so I think the change I think the impulse for change starts to begin towards the later half of Hujinta's administration, where, again, several reasons, right?

Firstly, like I said, there's a certain sense of policy stasis, right? Like in India, at that point of time, it's quite ironic. At the same time in India, we were having this conversation around policy paralysis. There's a certain sense that you're missing the boat, you're missing the decade, you're missing the opportunities, the kind of...

reforms that you need to take, the kind of sort of market interventions that you need to do, you're not doing. There was a sense of political failings because the party was increasingly seen by people as an instrument for people to become members and get ahead rather than something you know that you're governing you're providing outcomes to society and things like that that you're reshaping society in some way or the other there was a sense of

so there was a sense of that ideological decay at the same time there was a sense that look we are increasingly becoming powerful and internationally and we need to assert ourselves much more I think the 2008 financial crisis played a big role in that there's a lovely quote by Then Chinese VP, not later he became VP, but then Wang Shishan, who had a comment.

Hank Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, telling him that, you know, at the height of the 2007-2008 crisis, where he tells him that, you know, we once thought that you were our teachers. We now learn that there's nothing more for you to teach us. So there was a sense of... We're in this whole new world and we must think differently and we must do things differently. I think that's the period where you start to see changes.

being debated and discussed. Then as you see this sort of internal party political contestation with Boshila and the others become public when you see the Ling Ji Hua San case and all of that become public, you see a sense that there is an existential threat to the party.

So something different must be done because there are opportunities, but there are deep threats and you must do something more. Xi Jinping assumes power within that time frame, right? He becomes general secretary and immediately when he becomes general secretary, he signals... some of these actions that signal some of this change that he announces firstly what is this China dream concept that he had that the idea that you must have a dream of a modernized country and you know

And everybody must have their own China dream, whatever. And that China dream is articulated from a foreign policy perspective also. He, at one of the first party meetings after the Congress, 18th Party Congress, he announces they... coin what I call the eight point regulation the eight point regulation is on conduct right so conduct against the four unhealthy habits of hedonism, bureaucratism and so on and so forth. So you start to...

Cracked down from a disciplined conduct point of view. He institutes what's an anti-extravagance campaign. So no more, you need to tighten your belts. You can't be doing the kind of banquets and golf coursing that we've been doing. And we need to change all of that. And we need to not just...

change it but also send the message that the party is not this venal corrupt entity and it's not a pathway for people to become rich so he's trying to signal all of that an example of the extravagance campaign it was really fun i was working in cgt and when that campaign was ongoing

And one of our colleagues was leaving. So we had to do a farewell party. But we're in the midst of this anti-extravagance campaign and anti-hedonism campaign. So if the entire team exits together, there will be questions. So, and we have a farewell party going on at a restaurant nearby. So in batches of three, over a period of two hours, we exit the office to be able to go. eat the bits of our pizza, drink our beer, say farewell and come back and get back to work.

So that's the level of sensitivity, right? People are increasingly concerned at that point in time that if you get up at a private function and you just at a private event and you said something which is politically incorrect, it got recorded, put up on social media, you're doomed. So you start to see this sort of control over society shifting at that period of time. You also start to see a greater emphasis on ideological purity, the idea of reds and things like that.

That's the milieu in which Xi Jinping starts to impose all of this. He also starts to, in 2014, late 2014, he organizes the entire military together, the top military leadership, and he tells them enough is enough. you know, we're going to weed out the corrupt, we're going to change things. I don't know how seriously the military top brass takes him, but over the next few years, there's a bunch of people that he just targets and he eliminates.

And by the time 2017 comes, which is the next party Congress, so the first five years of his rule, things have fundamentally changed. He has consolidated tremendous amount of power. At one point of time, there's a stock market crash in 2016.

The party intervenes forcefully. So the state intervenes. significantly in the markets and then subsequently buys significant amount of equity in different companies and things like that as a measure of support. But essentially it means that even from an economic perspective, freedom is going to change now.

Step by step, you see him sort of controlling all of this and he sees this as a political necessity because if you don't do it, the party might crumble and the system might fail. So he sees it from a sense of existential threat. And he sees himself, you know, as an agent for that change. And as an agent for that change, when you're making that change, you're making everybody's your enemy gradually.

you know with each person you sack you're building more enemies so you need to insulate yourself with much more right and one way of insulating yourself is by appointing loyalists in key positions another way of insulating yourself is gradually ascending the party's hierarchy in terms of thought and ideas and everything and establishing yourself as a sort of apogee of everything. And I think that's what he's trying to do.

By 2017, he achieves a lot. So in the first five years itself. And it's probably a measure of how much freedom he also had from the party's elite to do some of these things. And how also maybe when he starts to take some of these actions, particularly when he starts to sack the, when he goes after Joe Yong Kang, who was the...

former head of internal security, probably the most powerful person in China in that sense from a security perspective. And he takes him out and, you know, and again, it's a breaking of a norm. You're taking out a former standing committee member, which you'd never do.

that sort of probably also scares people, right? That you could be next. So there's a sense of paranoia also in the country about what's going to happen. Fast forward to today, in some ways, he's completely reshaped the party. Unlike Mao, I mean, he's probably as powerful as Mao was. But unlike Mao, who saw the party as a tool, but he saw the party as a tool that had become useless and he could have sort of circumvented it and gone to the people and done things to the people.

Xi Jinping sees the party as a necessary tool.

everything that he has done is to strengthen the party system structures and things like that Mao didn't do that Mao was much more destructive so his view is that Xi Jinping's view is that I must work through the party system and I must also work through the legal system to create legislation which further institutionalizes my authority so in that sense I would argue that he's much smarter than Mao in terms of how he's done things he's somebody who's

believes in systems and structures and somebody who's using those systems and structures to institutional authority, which makes it very difficult to challenge him. For example, and I learned this very recently, if Xi Jinping was to die tomorrow,

you would have to have a new general secretary. The procedure for appointing a new general secretary in such a situation requires a calling of a party meeting. For such an extraordinary party meeting to be called has to be called by the general secretary.

another party regulation wow so how would a dead general secretary call that meeting right so structurally you've changed rules in such a way that it makes it much more complex and it sort of your authority becomes far more institutionalized and very difficult therefore to challenge right to be able to

gather a group of people, you need the authority. And if those authorities don't exist, then who's going to do it? And this goes back to the legalism you spoke about earlier that the rule of man by law, not the rule of law, but the rule of man by law. Exactly.

So give me a sense of how China has really then changed under Xi. Like if I'm to take a time-lapse camera and place it say in the middle of Deng's realm and then we carry on all the way to Xi. What are the ways in which it's changed in terms of the economy, in terms of society, in terms of politics? consolidation? I think substantially it's changed, right? If you look at Chinese Communist Party's sort of version of history and, you know, just we talked earlier about how

Historically, in Chinese dynasties, you used to write the history of the previous dynasty. Even the Chinese Communist Party, that's another thread that runs through this civilization. Even the Chinese Communist Party uses history as a tool. So in 1980s, early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping had the history resolution.

which was the second history resolution. And then you had the third one under Xi Jinping in 2021, in which large parts of history has been adjusted, to put it mildly, to make the case that there is a... thread running through which legitimizes everything that Xi Jinping is doing today so there's this long plan which is playing out you know and it's this beautiful vision which is playing out which is obviously not how history works but what's happened in his era is that

Politically, you have collective leadership died. You today have Xi Jinping as the paramount leader. The party's ideology today is governed by what is called the paramount of the many ideologies that the party has in its canon. You know, it's obviously Marxism-Leninism, but...

The 21st century of Marxism, the interpretation of Marxism in the 21st century, according to Xi Jinping, is Xi Jinping thought on socialism and Chinese characteristics for a new era. Why is this so long and complicated? It's because of internal politics, right? He wanted Xi Jinping thought in the canon system. Thought is higher than theory. So Deng Xiaoping has a theory. Hu Jintao has a scientific outlook on harmonious development and things like that.

So, Deng Xiaoping had a theory, yes. Jiang Zemin had the theory of three represents. Mao Zedong had a thought. So, Xi Jinping wants a thought. He got a thought. But could he have gotten just Xi Jinping thought? No. Because that's where the internal politics comes in. So he has Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for the new era. Because socialism with Chinese characteristics was a Deng Xiaoping phrasing.

And that phrasing has been retained because of internal sort of dynamics, but also allows Xi Jinping to make the case that I am... in continuation my policies are in continuation of dungist vision right that we our system remains the same and mine is a new interpretation on that system so that's the new ideology an ideology means power So that's the first thing that's changed. He's become, in some ways, omnipresent because of his ideology. Politically within the system, he has broken...

what were norms, not rules, but norms of giving up power after two terms. I told you previously that Jiang Zemin, once he got all three positions, the chair of the military commission, the presidency and the general secretary of the party, he gave when he was transferring power to Hu Jintao, he gave up the... general secretary position and the presidency. He didn't give up the chair of the Central Military Commission. He held on to that for a couple of years. And then...

He gave that up eventually. Hu Jintao gave up all three at the same time to Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping has held on to it extremely tightly and he's carried out constitutional amendments which allow him to remain president for life. because there are no term limits. Within the party rules, there were never any term limits, but these are norms that you do it after 10 years. And he's just said, nope.

The times that we are living in are extraordinary and you need an extraordinary leader. And hey, I'm your guy and I'm going to stay here. And that's been justified in the party canon, of course, because he's riding through some difficult times. The giant ship of China is sailing through these turbulent storms and you need a helmsman to ride them. And that's Xi Jinping. In terms of his...

Increasingly, this is his third term now. Increasingly, with each term, what we have seen is that he's been stacking the top leadership, the Politburo Standing Committee and the Politburo, with people who owe allegiance to him. So today we have, you know, in the past, what you used to see was in the standing committee, whether you had five people, seven people, nine people, how many ever, you had a sort of factional balance. Today there is...

Absolutely no balance, right? Essentially, everybody is a Xi Jinping person in the Politburo Standing Committee. The only one person that I can say who is not a Xi Jinping guy is somebody called Wang Huning, who is an ideologue, who has been one of the key ideologues.

for China in its modern history. He served Jiang, he served Hu, and now he's serving Xi. So he's a survivor, right? And he's somebody who's adapted well. And a lot of his views, I mean, he wrote a fascinating book called America Against America. after visiting the U.S., which has driven a lot of Chinese thinking about America also and, you know, about how America is a failing society and a system and things like that.

So that's where politically we are. Across provinces also, people who are essentially coming up have been people who've been much more closely aligned to Xi Jinping in some ways. But there is a catch there politically, which is that Xi Jinping is now in his early 70s. The party's rule used to be that if you are 68 and above, you retire from the positions. But Xi Jinping is not retiring. He's broken the rules for some people, not for everybody. But for others, he's enforced the rule.

But he is now 70 plus. The next generation of younger leaders who are going to come are people with whom he has no direct networks. These will be much younger people who are in their 50s, born much later, who've never experienced Maoist China also in some way.

These are very different sets of people who are coming in. So his personal networks will weaken. So that will make it much more complicated. So the future, obviously, as he holds on to power, is going to be much more complicated in terms of... how much he can sustain. And of course, every dictator faces a dilemma of succession. So does Xi Jinping. He's in his third term, halfway through it. In 2027,

In the autumn of 2027, we'll have the next party Congress, the 21st party Congress. He's likely to continue to hold on to power. But sooner or later, he'll have to think of succession. So that's when I think for us watching from the outside, things get interesting. Economically, China has moved. It was sort of moving gradually towards freer markets. It's obviously gone back from that. Today, we are seeing a much more planned economy, but also an economy which is...

Essentially, looking at the world and leadership, which is looking at the world and saying that we're in an era of strategic competition, the state needs to direct capital. We're no longer in the era where efficiency... is what matters. We're in the era where resilience self-reliance these kinds of things matter much more.

So we need to sort of also intervene much more heavily. Now, one can argue whether it was Xi Jinping that initiated this era in some ways, but that's the place where we are at. So what we're seeing is far more state intervention in the economy. We are seeing far more planning. We are seeing far more.

you know, far more government intervention in terms of where capital is allocated. And that means that sometimes you see arbitrary policies, whether it's with regard to the property sector, whether it's with regard to... whether it's with regard to online education. So you're seeing these sort of arbitrary inputs, arbitrary sort of interventions with the agenda of trying to direct capital towards what are seen as strategic ends. And the inefficiencies that come with that.

are accepted. The challenges that come with that with regard to employment is fine. We'll deal with it. So you're seeing that sort of technologically driven, strategically focused economic policy approach. Most recently, there was something called the fourth plenum that was held in October 2025. And in that meeting, you know, in early 2026, you'll see the 15th five-year plan come out.

The focus of that is going to be this technological driven growth, but technologically driven industrial growth. And that's the priority. You're not really focusing on services and other domains. You want to become, retain your status as the world's manufacturing center.

Those plans talk about how manufacturing must be the backbone. So in some ways, it's a preparation for what kind of world you're seeing, you know, with Trump and power and things like that. So that's from an economic perspective that's taking place. From a social perspective, I think there is deep... There are deep challenges. China's an aging society. It's rapidly aging. The dependency ratio is flipping. There are challenges with regard to social security. There are challenges with regard to...

Wealth generation, there are challenges with regard to elderly care, with regard to the fact that you no longer are having, your fertility rate is abysmal. So you are a society which is struggling now. So will you need to... be open to more immigrants. And in that case, what does that do to social relations within China, which is in some ways still, you know, culturally much more closed than other places. It's not like Japan, but it's still much more closed.

What's the impact of that? What's the impact on families and structures of families, particularly when these are families where you had single children and those single children have single children and now you have aging families. So what's the impact? of that on those families housing is incredibly expensive so increasingly you have a generation which is unable to afford homes

which has also meant that because you're unable to afford homes, you are not really marrying because homeownership is a key ingredient for marriage socially. So you have these sort of frictions. I mean, the fact that you have an insane sort of... you know, sex ratio where at one point in time, a couple of years ago, this data told you that there were

33 million more men of marriage abilities than women. And therefore, you see random stories of, you know, Chinese men traveling to places like Cambodia and Nepal and search for wives. Because, you know, so you're seeing all of this stuff. And I think so. There's lots of social friction. There's lots of frustration because increasingly the generation that's growing up today is struggling with the view of what's our future going to be like.

is it better than my parents' future? And I think that question today has become much more prominent. It's still not at the level where you will see serious pushback, revolt, or things like that. But you will see youth frustration being expressed. Like a couple of years ago, there was a campaign that became popular. So social media viral campaign called the Lying Flat Movement, which basically said, look, life is too difficult. There's so much to do. I'm tired. I cannot do all of this.

So I'm just going to lie flat, which later on, you know, around the world we know as quiet quitting. But quiet quitting before it became quiet quitting was lying flat. And that came from Chinese youth who were just saying there's too much to do in life and I can't do everything. So I think. Socially, there is a lot of tension. There's a lot of friction. Wealth inequality is a huge issue. Wealth and income inequality are huge issues. I think the leadership is very cognizant of it.

And when they look at the United States in the West and see the rise of populism, which they attribute a lot to inequality, that sort of gives them sleepless nights. So I think those are sort of different dimensions of where China is.

So the way you described Xi's evolving ideology, it seems a hark back to the immediate post-Mao phase of the two whatevers. Whatever the chairman does, whatever the chairman says. I presume whenever Xi Jinping goes, the next guy would probably come in and say whatever. the chairman did but then it depends on how he goes and how things happen.

so here's a question for you and you no doubt are not an expert on this because nobody is nobody studied it the sample sizes are too low and how do we even study it which is what goes on in the head of these megalomaniac authoritarian leaders because Xi Jinping there's some like Putin, you have aging men who are...

So incredibly powerful that they don't trust anyone. They are possibly ruled by paranoia. You know, there is that photograph of Putin dining at a long, long, long table with the next person one mile away from him. They don't trust anyone. Nobody's going to give.

them good criticism or constructive advice because hey you can't dare to disagree with them so they are essentially living in a fantasy world in their heads and what really goes on there what are they aiming for surely as an age as a 70s come as a big begin forgetting shit

as they fall down in the bathroom. Surely there are points where they realize human frailty and that, you know, mortality is upon them. You know, what are your thoughts? What do they think? What do they want? Good question. What do they want?

I would distinguish Xi Jinping, not because he's Xi Jinping, but just because he's a product of a system from, say, Putin or Trump or somebody else. I would distinguish him in the sense that he is still... accountable to the system in some ways he is above the system he is no longer one among seven or whatever he's above the system but he's still a product of the system and he's still in some ways accountable to the system

He has to demonstrate things back to the system still because there is a functional system. Now he can manipulate, like I said, rules, structures, flows of information, all those kinds of things you can leverage. But so to that extent, I think. you know, there's a certain check on whatever megalomania there could be. There is a sense of paranoia. You know, recently there was a, I can't remember where, in the New York Times or one of the papers, there was a news report about how

In the Biden administration, when Xi Jinping and Biden met in San Francisco, the Chinese delegation was anything that Xi Jinping touched, they were constantly rubbing it clean and scrubbing it clean and whatever. So they were worried about DNA or possibly something like that. So there is obviously paranoia within the system also, and I presume with him also. You can't have created so many enemies and not have paranoia. When he travels to Tibet or Xinjiang, you see a certain, there's this...

where nothing is announced and suddenly he reaches and only when he's there and when things are done, you get reporting of he was here. So I'm sure that that happens in sensitive areas like Tibet and Xinjiang or whatever. But you can see that there probably is paranoia. and that paranoia, you can't escape that. So I'm sure that that is there. I'm also sure that there is, if you look at Xi Jinping in terms of what he has said, and he talks a lot.

There's a lot of writing. Xi Jinping is probably the most prolific author in the world. You know, the China Media Project is a great website if anybody's interested looking at Chinese discourse. And I remember some years back, they had a report about how many books have been attributed to Xi Jinping.

Every year there are multiple books that come out attributed to him of his speeches and comments on different subjects. So Xi Jinping's thought is divided into several sub-thoughts. So he talks a lot. So if you just look at what he's saying. Fair amount of what he's saying he's doing. Not so much the democracy bit and the freedom bit and, you know, but a lot of the policy sort of approach that he's talking about, they are doing. So if that lends any credibility to what his thinking is.

He clearly comes across as somebody who is fairly self-assured, is fairly clinical, fairly ruthless, who's also somebody who has a deep sense of mission. And that mission is not necessarily personal, messianic and things like that. It's a mission...

which he looks at from the perspective of where he thinks China should be as a society, as a country, both of them, even as a society. Social transformation is also one of his things. He also has a sense of what... individual life must be like what's a good life right and I think that if you

read about when he he talks a lot about his time you know during the cultural revolution being sent down to the small little place where he lived and he worked he talks about hardship he talks about how it is essential for children as they are growing up, as much as you enjoy whatever, and as you grow up as a youth.

You must embrace labor. You must embrace a certain degree of hardship. You must embrace some of that. Now, whether he practices with his own daughter, that's another matter altogether. But at least from a social vision point of view, you see that being articulated.

So you can see that there is a certain sense of mission that drives the guy. Some of that mission is obviously a good justification to make the case that therefore I'm the right guy to be here. So there's obviously cynical politics and all of that. So that's why I would distinguish him in some ways from Putin, at least in terms of what he has said and how his policy has turned out. He sees himself as the...

that's the bit of megalomania where he sees himself as the man who is going to resolve all this. I don't necessarily think that he's thought so much about his own mortality. Again, we have very little information, but if you were to look at September this year, there was a big summit meeting in Tianjin in China, the SEO summit. And after that, there was a big celebration of the 80th anniversary.

of the world war and there was this video of Xi Jinping, Putin and Kim Jong-un walking together and audio from that video leaked audio, hot mic. where they were talking about how oh you can now live till 150 you can do organ transplants and live for as long as possible so who's saying to who

I think it is Xi Jinping and Putin talking and Xi Jinping is saying some of this stuff. Now, whether it's tongue-in-cheek, knowing fully well that this audio is going to go out, whether it is whatever. But even then, the choice of this as the conversation tells you that...

They're also cognizant about the fact that there is a time limit set for everybody. But I don't think he's sort of, I don't think the thought is mortality. I think the thought is that paranoia plus mission sense plus a sense of belief in I am somewhere chosen, but what you're chosen for and how you imagine what you're chosen for, whether like Bush said once, the hand of God is behind me or whether...

Reagan who had his own sort of things about divination. I think there is a certain sense of that because you can't be in that position without feeling in some way that you are non-biological. So I think some of that is just the nature of the... Please also.

Let's double click on the phrase you use social transformation, which you said he has views on. So tell me both his views on social transformation and the larger feeling within China on how society is evolving. Because within India, you see a lot of hand wringing on.

You know, our society is getting too westernized and we need to go back to being sansakari, whatever that means and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, what does Xi Jinping mean by social transformation? And within China, what are the sort of the fault lines around which people talk about society and culture? So I think what Xi Jinping means by social transformation, I mean, it's vast, but I think the first thing that I would say is that it's firstly, it's around the role of family.

you know, the priority of family and the traditional values of family and things like that. The family as a unit matters and it must continue to matter. And you must have that community bond within family and then the broader community. That's the first thing. Secondly, you must... have a broader bond with society you can't become isolated you know gated communities tense and yourself and things like that those are all fine to my mind the third thing is around

which I talked about, which is around, you know, this idea of hardship, the idea of labor, the idea of not expecting things to come easy, the idea that you need to continue to work hard and do things to achieve whatever outcome and some bit of that. physical pain is necessary for your growth. And I think that's a product of the fact that China became wealthy very quickly. And that meant tremendous change. And that meant tremendous excesses.

And those excesses, because of the inequality, create a lot of political challenges. So therefore, there's emphasis again that, you know, everybody must learn to be able to deal with hardship. And so if you have hardship, don't whinge. Learn to live with it. Or as in one of his speeches, like he told the youth, eat bitterness, learn to eat bitterness. So there's a lot of that with regard to the younger population, right? There's an element with regard to men and the role of men in society.

which I think that is much more significant than his views and role of women in society. I think on the role of men in society, there's a lot of writing in the last sort of 7, 8, 10 years in China. around the idea of masculinity and how we no longer want quote-unquote sissy boys.

Men must be men and men must do manly things. If you're this young teenage guy, stop sitting at your place and playing video games. Stop doing that. Men must have some sort of your... traditional roles right where men work out men go out men do things outside men build things with their hands things like that right the idea that you should not be this uh effeminate

character and I think that that has become there's much more sort of language on that about how men need to be in some ways reclaim some of the traditional roles the feminization of men is Not something that is appreciated. I think that has to do a lot with any sort of any of these populist leaders, men. They seem to... hark back to some sort of traditional roles and I don't know why that is the case but all of them right across the board you see this right any conservative

populist leaders who are coming up all of them have this certain role certain sense about men I think there's a deep sense of anxiety around gender identities and all of that you know because it can't seem to get their heads around So I think, and again, I'm not some young fellow. I have my own struggles when it comes to gender fluidity and all of that and thinking about all of that. It seems difficult, you know, intuitively.

you don't think about it intuitively. But again, I'm a liberal, so I end up thinking about it from the perspective of the idea of liberals wanting to, the core of liberalism being self-definition in some ways. So, you know, I can see... But somebody who's much more conservative, who comes from this sort of traditional background, I can see why they find it difficult. And they seem to go back to all of that. And I think there's also a sense about that social order.

that this is what men must do. And so I think therefore, I mean, I'm obviously spitballing here. I don't necessarily know how, why this process happens, but there is an element of that, that there is this real pushback against... men who are no longer fulfilling traditional gender roles you know and this is not just in terms of you know how they engage with women but also in terms of like if you're a man the job of sitting in gaming

and making wealth while gaming is, what is this? What are you doing with that? Are you doing something productive with your hands? Are you building the future? What's the productive value of you? playing whatever games for eight hours and making whatever kind of money. Yes, you're making money, but what do you add into society, right? So you must be having social contributions. And that's partly what men must do.

They must therefore build with hands, do sort of difficult things to do. So I think there's a bit of that in terms of this sense of social transformation. One big part of social transformation is thinking about how... what kind of future jobs will people do, you know, and preparing people for that. So therefore you see a lot of, you know, indoctrination with regard to youth and universities and colleges and whatever.

talking to them about how you need to be focusing on proper jobs, right? Conventional jobs, right? You need to be thinking about factories, industries, and things like that, other than some of the other things. So I think there's a lot of that which you're seeing in terms of his view of society. His view of society is hierarchical and that remains. His view of society is placing the community as a priority, placing the broader sort of...

ideological community as a priority. So those are, I think, as opposed to individualism, right? I mean, I talked about core socialist values earlier. Freedom is a core socialist value, but core socialist values are divided. at three levels. So there are 12 values, four for each level. There is a national level values, social level values, individual level values.

freedom is not an individual level value. I can't remember if it is a social value or a national value, but it is not an individual level value, which means that under the socialist system of thought, the individual freedom doesn't matter.

society or the community's freedom matters. Freedom is social value. So community's freedom matters. So where your individual freedom... collides with the community's freedom, whether it is about playing music loudly, whether it is about you wanting to dance in a park, if the community is uncomfortable, you must submit to that from a freedom point of view. So I think those are the kinds of social transformations that he's talking about. Fascinating stuff. Let's talk about China's view.

about the world like you mentioned that book about america their views on why america does what it does and their increasing sort of disdain for it you referred to that incident in 2008 where the gentleman tells hank paulson that hey you know you were teachers but now we realize you can't teach us give me a sense of how do they look at america in particular um not just in terms of how does the state look at america but also how do the people look at america

If you look at, I mean, I'll start with the people. But if you look at the people, I mean, you look at surveys from China, obviously, it's very difficult to get authentic service. But Tsinghua University, which is one of the leading universities in China, they do a strategic sort of survey, strategic studies survey.

And the US consistently is probably the most unfavorable in terms of public perception or second most unfavorable because Japan is most unfavorable. So, and I think that's a consistent trend. To be sure, India is third in that list of the most unfavorable countries in terms of their perspective. I would say that increasingly today, from the public perception point of view,

The U.S. is no longer looked at as an exemplar, as a model. None of that, I think, holds anymore in the public imagination. I think the U.S. is looked at, even from the public perspective, from the lens of a threat, from the lens of a country that is increasingly internally dysfunctional, a system which is dysfunctional, increasingly racist.

but yet has certain amount of dynamism in its economy and its technology and all that. And I think that is appreciated. But from a social perspective and from a political perspective, even for the people increasingly, the US is no longer, it's not like... That's the place that we want to be.

That said, I would assume that if you are Chinese and wealthy, you will park your wealth abroad. And if you have the opportunity to go and live in California, they'll probably go and live in California. I think that opportunity, particularly if you're wealthy, if you're, you know, if you're students and whatever, increasingly...

it's a challenge because the US seems hostile. Although I still think a fair number of students will go, but it increasingly is becoming hostile for them. So I think that is where largely public perceptions might be. From the state and sort of strategic affairs community's point of view, the US remains the preponderant global power. I don't think they have any doubt that the US, that China today does not match American power.

But what they do realize is that there is a relative shift in the balance of power. China has much more capability than it has historically had vis-a-vis the US. And I think this year, last year in particular, with the trade war that Trump initiated and how the Chinese hit back and how they were eventually able to

coerced the US into a truce and into a truce in which I think Beijing has gotten more out of it. So if it was a boxing match in this year, Beijing is ahead on points. Just from the fact that I don't think any one of us expected... that they would be able to arm twist the Americans into a truce, but they have managed to. So to that extent, I think there's a certain degree of confidence in dealing with competition with the US. I think that they look at the US today and they see the country.

as going through its own internal convulsions. Some of those convulsions are very, very useful for China because it makes American foreign policy impotent. It makes its... allies question the US and it makes China much more it gives China much more room for operation so that's great but in America which is organized which is politically functional which

can work with allies and partners, somewhat like, say, what at least the Biden foreign policy was, for all its limitations and for all its faults. And even the fact that in those entire four years, you saw America still go through deep internal political turmoil. That's problematic for China because there they feel that there is a mission where America is looking to contain China's development and to ensure that there is significant gap between the two countries which

The gap in itself is not a problem, but the gap with the political will to coerce China from America, I think that's where their concern is. So they look at America predominantly from that lens. They look at it very pragmatically from the perspective of... a very realist prism of strategic great power competition. It is very unsentimental. It is not at all

Whatever the language may be of, you know, morality, goodness, people-to-people ties, our deep connections, your flying tigers took part in this, all of that is great. But it's a very unsentimental, pragmatic, hard-nosed look at. strategic competition and I think that is to China's benefit and to their credit that their leadership tends to have such a clear view and they are quite clear that in the international arena

morality is extremely important because it allows you to make a pitch and make a narrative and draw people to your side. But morality without power is meaningless. You need power. That is the fundamental currency. So they are investing in power and they are investing in building that capability to blunt coercion from others and to build tools to coerce others. And as they are using those tools, they are realizing that those tools have...

uses that they did not even imagine they could have had. So earlier this year, in 2025, you had the Chinese You know, the American side imposed tariffs. The Chinese retaliated with additional their own tariffs. Then there were export controls and the Chinese retaliated with export controls on the US on rare earth magnets. Those export controls.

inadvertently applied to companies of countries like India and European countries. Now the Chinese have cut a deal with the Americans but the limitations on Indian companies still remain. So I think they have learned that, well, you can use these for other countries even without targeting them.

So we can continue to arm twist other countries even if we may not. So we can play, even if we have a truce with the United States, we know that the proxy competition will go on. So we must build these tools even for proxy competition because now this is... emerging into some sort of although not like the Cold War competition of the US and Soviet Union but some shades of similarities where you will sort of have competition

That was not an economic competition. This is an economic competition right now. But you will have this competition playing out in third parties, third countries, other markets and things like that. So I think that's the world that they are currently looking at. And again, any Chinese document. Any speech by a Chinese reader talks about a world which is going through unprecedented changes, unprecedented in a century.

extreme turbulence, an environment in which for China, risks and opportunities are going to coexist. Our job is to mitigate the risks, leverage the opportunities. So their analysis is very clear, very unsentimental about these issues.

so economists know that the economy is a positive sum game foreign policy realists know that they're playing a zero-sum game right so when it comes to something like trade for example how does china look at it like is the way it looks at america fundamentally zero-sum

adversarial game that there is only so much power to be had in the world and therefore they will always look at america as an adversary who they can be friendly with at times but you're fundamentally an adversary and we need to watch for you and everything we gain will be at your expense or you know, is that the dominant worldview there? No, I think they do what they want from America is accommodation.

So there can be a positive sum game. You want accommodation. Their view is that the United States is hell-bent on hegemony and therefore the United States will not accommodate. It must accommodate. And only when you accommodate, can you have positive some outcomes between us? So that's their view, right? And they will say the United States is fundamentally unaccommodating and accommodation and the definition of what does it mean to accommodate you?

is changing each day as China's power grows. So as the elephant becomes bigger, it needs more space. So China is saying the elephant is continuing to become bigger. I need much more space. So please back off from Taiwan. Please stop supporting Japan. 30 years ago, I was not necessarily saying that to you. I was still saying, look, I don't like what you're doing, but okay. Today, I'm saying back off.

And oh, if you don't back off, I know Nancy Pelosi came and visited. So now I'm going to blockade the island and show you that I can do it. I can surround the island. So that's the case. That's what they're saying.

that you must accommodate us. We can have tremendous positive outcomes. We can learn to live with each other. The world is big enough for both of us. But for that to happen, you need to accommodate me. The problem is you are hell-bent on hegemony and that's why it's not going to work out.

The day you decide to accommodate me, great, we'll work out. But then remember the elephant as it keeps growing bigger, that working out will also start, the space for working out will start to shrink, right? Competition will move in other domains. And I think they understand that also.

And as the elephant grows bigger, it is, of course, nudging, nudging, nudging against his neighbor, Taiwan. So tell me the dynamic of that. Like, of course, that's basically China, in a sense, splitting into two in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek and, you know, the Republic of China is what Taiwan is. What has been China's attitude towards Taiwan over all of these decades? And what is it now? I think the attitude has historically been that...

this is part of undivided China and we must get it back. I think only it was only pre-1949 that there was one meeting where there was a point of time and I think there's a book by Salman Wasif on China's foreign policy. I can't remember the name of the book, but in that he quotes one conversation in which Mao was sort of very close to accepting two Chinas.

You know, it was not Taiwan and the mainland, but two Chinas essentially in theory because of the communists and the nationalists. The PRC's view since 1949 has been there is only one China and you must respect one China and Taiwan isn't.

part of China. It's a renegade province which must be returned to China. And that view has largely remained unchanged. What they have accommodated is countries establishing informal relations with where the relation is essentially cultural and economic but not political. That has been defined as other countries saying that this is our one China policy, that our policy is one China, but we are not saying which is China, but we can have these sorts of relationships with Taiwan.

PRC guys were okay with it because they, in the 70s in particular, wanted to work with the Americans. And this is despite the fact that there was a resolution passed in the UN in the 70s which talked about the one China principle, right? And there are tremendous, right now, this is a matter of like big legal contestation. The Chinese have been, the PRC has been pushing it. In 1992, the PRC and the Taiwanese side arrived at a commitment which is called the 1992 sort of principle and in that

Both sides agreed that there is one China, but neither acknowledged which is which, which allowed them sort of room to engage with each other. And since then, there's sort of economic links have deepened. There's tremendous Taiwanese investment in the PRC. There's lots of trade that happens between the two. Economically, the link remains very, very deep. Over the last 10 odd years, that relationship has frayed. And it's frayed because firstly, the PRC's power has grown.

Secondly, in Taiwan, you had the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party. It came to power. It's the sort of more independence-leaning party. It came to power. The Kuomintang lost out. The Kuomintang lost out soon after... You know, Ma Ying Zhou, who was the president then, he had met Xi Jinping. It was a historic meeting between the two, never, not really happened in modern era as much.

It was a moment of optimism between the interest rate ties. And then Maying Jo loses the election. The Kuomintang loses the election. The DPP comes to power. The DPP has obviously very different views. And the PRC starts imposing costs on them by isolating them.

And by starting to cut off different kinds of bonds and trying to punish them economically in another means. And then the relationship basically starts to break down. The PRC says you must recognize the 1992 principle. The DPP says we don't. Our interpretation of it is different. Our interpretation is that we are different entities now. We evolve differently and so on and so forth. So that friction continues till today. So today what you have is Tsai Ing-wen who was the DPP.

chief who was the president for two terms. She's now gone. Now you have a new president called Lai Ching Tha. And Lai Ching Tha is seen as much more radical than Tsai Ing-wen was. And so the friction in the last two years has become far more intense. The relationship has become far more difficult. As the PRC's power has grown, it feels like it's trying to set up a new normal in the region by using much more force.

In every joint statement, any joint declaration with any country, it calls on countries to respect what is the One China principle. The One China principle is different from the One China policy. The One China policy is that I believe... Actually, the one China policy is taxable. You can define it the way you want to. The one China principle is something that the PRC has defined in which it says there is only one China. Taiwan is a part of that China.

And that one China has one sole representative government, that is the government of the People's Republic of China. So which is that there is one China and which is the PRC, the sole representative of it. And Taiwan is part of that. The one China policy is there is one China, but hey, we don't know which one.

So that gives you some ambiguity. The PRC has been sort of now on this rampage of trying to ram down this idea of the one China principle, calling it increasingly now they call it part of international law based on that 70s UN resolution, part of

the victory of the Second World War. So it is part of the international order that was created after the World War. So denying that means you're denying the world order which was created and things like that. So they've been on an aggressive sort of approach to do that.

There's been lots of talk about the fact that, and particularly in the US in the last many years, about how by 2027 you will see an invasion of Taiwan. I don't think Xi Jinping, I don't think the PLA is ready for an invasion. I don't think he's interested in an invasion. I think what he's interested in is... seeing if you can manipulate domestic politics in Taiwan to the extent that you get the Kuomintang back to power.

And once that happens, I mean, increasingly the relationship between the Kuomintang and this Communist Party of China has become far more close. So the effort over the last few years has been to... intervene in Taiwanese politics, delegitimize the DPP and see if you can leverage internal frictions within Taiwan to have a government which is much more amenable to some sort of a, you know.

one country, two systems kind of system that you had with Hong Kong, with Taiwan, or to create some sort of a federation or some sort of a civilizational Chinese entity, whatever, some sort of a bond that you create, which is amorphous, but legal. And I think that's preferred option. If push comes to shove, conflict is not something that is ruled out. But it's not, I think it'll be sort of the last, last, last extreme option. I don't think Xi Jinping is trigger happy.

I love all the semantic games. Like earlier you spoke about, you know, the distinction between Deng's theory and Xi's thoughts. Right. And now we have the one China policy and the one China principle. Right. It's it's lovely how they do all this. Even our prime minister. semantics and acronyms especially.

Let's talk about India. Often to many people, and I've done many episodes on it, but I must confess, even to me, it's a little bit inexplicable. How do they see India? What do they want? They are so much more powerful. They can, in effect, do whatever the hell they want. What's the game? What are they playing at?

They look at India. When I was living in China, i used to go around for some weird reason i don't know why youth makes you do stupid things i used to go around asking some of my chinese friends why did you guys attack us why did we have a war in 1962 and honestly none of them knew that there was a war in 1962.

Because for them, there was some small border skirmish. We never had a war with you guys. That's changed. Today, there is a recognition across Chinese public and mainstream view that there was a war. And the Chinese won that war. So historically, the Chinese had downplayed that conflict. Today, it's not so much the case, right? And I think what's happened increasingly over the last decade is that...

The perception of India, firstly, as a hostile, threatening actor, has gained ground. Secondly, there is a view, which has been there in the past also, of India as a outpost of Western or American power in this region sustains, that suspicion sustains. Thirdly, there is a view that despite all of this, You know, India was once a country which was at parity. Today, you know, it's a very patronizing view. It's a view of, you know, you tried, but you couldn't do it. You know, so...

You are an inferior actor. You are an inferior power. You are significant enough to matter to us, but you are inferior. And you must also acknowledge that you are inferior to us. And that means you must know your place in the world, in the hierarchy of the region and the world. So you must stop being this irritant that you are to us. Fourthly, they look at India and they say, it's a growing consumer market.

Goldman Sachs says that by 2027, India will have a 100 million high quality consumer market. Let's assume that we continue to grow at 6, 6.5, 7% or whatever, hopefully. By another decade, you are at about 170, 200 million. That's a very big market. So they look at that market and they say, we want access to this market because Western markets might end up closing to us much more.

So they look at that and say, yes, this is an opportunity. Then they look at the rest of the Asia or the Indo-Pacific and they say, is there a country in this region that fundamentally can... hinder our rise, hinder our expansion into the Indian Ocean, hinder our sort of global presence. Yes, India can. It may not defeat us, it may not, but it can obviously play a massive spoil sport.

how do we either coerce it or how do we essentially co-opt it? So what are the carrots and sticks that we need to think about? So that's one part of thinking that goes on. Can we get it on board enough to legitimize our perspectives on, say, that trade must be de-dollarized, that payment systems must no longer be simply swift. But why don't we join our payment systems, right, with these chips? Can we get it to endorse some of our initiatives and some of our goals?

which would then have a cascading effect with other countries also maybe. So that's one thing of how they look at India, right? And then there are views of India when it comes to Indian domestic political analysis. And some of the Chinese analysts will look at India. from a lens of caste and Hindu fundamentalism and things like that. Some of them will look at it simply from a perspective of a sort of, this is nature of Indian politics of

turbulence, turmoil, coalitions, breaking, then some degree of, you know, forces of binding things together under certain identity and then collapsing again. And they will look at it cyclically. So there is study of India and all of that things. But my sense is that the current leadership views India predominantly from the perspective of an economic opportunity for trade, for investment. But...

worrying that that economic opportunity should not undermine China's space. So if you export a lot of your low-end factories to India, Are you doing the same thing that the Americans did to you and strengthening your adversary? So that's one of the things. Second thing is it's an inferior regional actor, but substantial enough to create roadblocks for us. Third thing is, can we...

keep its activities limited in terms of its engagement in the US? Can we keep its power contained while trying to co-opt it to endorse some of our initiatives? I think that's the sort of terrain of how they view us.

and do they have territorial designs on us. Like I recently heard about someone who went traveling through Arunachal Pradesh and was hit by Airtel with a roaming bill and Airtel claimed that she had been in China. Right. So Airtel almost seems to be doing the PRC job for them.

in a manner of speaking so you know what are all these skirmishes about do they have designs on Arunachal yeah they do I think they view Arunachal as I mean, at least, and they've done a lot in the last few years to tell us that they have territorial designs, right?

Large parts of Arunachal is seen as South Tibet and they're sort of incorporated within their maps. They have assigned Chinese names to places in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang is something that they obviously claim as critical part of South Tibet. Across the western sector in Ladakh, we've seen intense conflict over the last five years. The Galwan Valley incident was obviously in some ways a watershed in that regard.

China has built up tremendous resources in that region when it comes to military capability. I think they do have territorial designs in the sense that they do see, we don't know what. where some of their designs end when it comes to say even Ladakh because they've never really shared maps and clarified things.

But they do have designs on the, you know, they do see, they would like to see the territorial dispute settled in their favor. Now, what their favor means is part of this conversation. But what they have done with us in the last... eight years, is that they have pushed the envelope because they have seen that, I think there's a belief that this asymmetry now obviously significantly favors China, the asymmetry in power. And once you have an asymmetry, which is material,

And once that asymmetry is internalized by the leadership and you start to believe that we are a big power, this is a regional inferior actor. And if you are a big power and if you have a dispute with this regional inferior guy, You will push to see how far can I push to settle him. Otherwise, what's the use of my power? So if I don't use it, the power doesn't even exist. You know, power exists in its utility. So that's what they're doing.

So they do have territorial designs to that extent. They also occupy a part of Kashmir which was gifted to them by Pakistan. They're not talking about returning that. So they do have designs in that sense. Now, to what extent? one has to sort of wait and see that will only be settled

In conflict or through negotiation. In negotiation, what we know is that the Chinese have refrained from sharing maps of claims. So until we have maps of claims, it's very difficult to say to what extent are they claiming.

But there's so much more powerful than us. So this might be a naive question, but there's so much more powerful than us. What stops them from just coming in and taking what they want? It's not easy to hold on to some of that terrain, right? It's a very difficult terrain. It's not very easy to hold on to terrain. You know that... taking territory from India, which is a significant military power, is not going to be easy. There's going to be blood.

The campaign might not end good for you. You might not actually occupy the territory. Holding that territory with supply lines and all will be very, very difficult. And finally, if India perceives it as an existential issue, it can be a broader war. And you're both nuclear powers. And, you know, so even if you don't go to that far, what does it do to the balance of power in the region? Is that territory worth you potentially hurting, like I said, a 200 million?

market in the future, right? So on the balance, I think that territory is probably not worth it. Also, a lot of that territory, you know, I mean, just like with India and Pakistan, Pakistan evokes a certain visceral feeling for us, you know, in our polity.

From a Chinese perspective, it's Taiwan and the South China Sea and those regions in the Diyu Islands, you know, the Senkaku Islands of Japan, which invoke some of those visceral feelings. It's not so much the territory with India. That's changing. You're seeing some of that sentiment grow, particularly after Galwan. After Galwan, it was not just in India that you saw this big nationalistic surge, also in China. And for the first time, you saw the Chinese media sort of play up.

the sort of survivor from Galwan from their side, Chief Abao, who was given the Olympic torch and who was given this, his heroic tales were published in papers and fairly, you know, he's their sort of hero. But you don't usually see that in the Chinese system.

So you can see that that is changing, that approach towards India is changing. But I still don't think it is visceral like, say, Japan or like, say, Taiwan. So I think that's the difference, right? So therefore, the cost of conflict will firstly be too high. What you will gain will not be commensurate to it. Holding onto the territory will be a bigger problem. And then I don't think it's, you know, the costs beyond that of economic costs that may come apart from that might just not be worth it.

I had a recent episode with my friend, the ex-army officer Prabhal Dasgupta. He wrote a book called Watershed 1967, where he argues that our last conflict against China was actually one that we won, where, you know, the battles in Sikkim in 1967, where we pushed them. So it is actually really hard to take territory even against a much weaker opponent. So that point is well taken.

Earlier, you mentioned like the future leaders, the fact that Xi Jinping is not just alone at the top as being at the top makes you alone by default, but also he's in his 70s. You know, most of his contemporaries would have been retired or purged or whatever.

the younger generation of leaders are all in their 50s etc etc do you have a sense of what kind of leaders they are because they've grown up in a very different time they've seen a different world what do they want they might be driven by a different set of incentives or imperatives they might have

a different idea of what kind of China they want to build or what kind of legacy they want to leave? See, if they are smart leaders, I will know very little about them. Because like I said, in that system, you rise by doing enough while keeping your head low. charismatic impersonalism is what matters, right? So you will rarely know about people, but you can see younger people at provincial levels. They are currently at provincial levels. It's hard to say.

what happens as they get promoted, what we can see currently in the standing committee. So let's keep ourselves till 2027, where the next party Congress will happen. I think it's only one person in the system. I think the premier will be 67 by the time the Congress happens, if I'm correct. So he can stay on Lee Chang.

or maybe 67 or 68. So he's on the border. But Ding Shishang is the only guy and he's got a close relationship with Xi Jinping. He's worked with him throughout. So he's somebody who's likely to sustain. Will he be... somebody who becomes a sort of heir apparent that's difficult right he's in his early 60s but he's never governed like I said you know when Xi Jinping rose he governed a big province and things like that he's never done that he's always run sort of

office posts rather than governance posts. So it's going to be very difficult to have him in that position. But that could also make him a candidate, you know, somebody like Hua Gofeng who stays there and says whatever the chairman says. The rest of the lot, I think it's very difficult to pick at present right now who...

would be the next sort of set of people who would come. It's likely people from provinces where Xi Jinping has a deeper relationship, Shanxi, Fujian, usually some of the bigger areas, Zhejiang, Shanghai, are places where you get some of the next set of leaders from.

But immediately, I think it's really hard to see, you know, over the next year, by the time we head towards early 2027, the picture becomes somewhat more clearer as to who... whom Xi Jinping is seen with much more with whom he's using what kind of language who is much more visible in the public domain all those kinds of things that you can start to pick up at present it's too early to have a sense of

who's likely to move up the ranks. But what you can probably estimate is that these are individuals who are growing up in a China which is where they have never seen the country. poor, destitute, struggling in that sense. They have seen a China which is always aspirational, which is always powerful. There are also people who are growing up in an era where, you know, we talked about the century of humiliation. In the 1990s,

In 1994, I think, the patriotic education campaign was launched, which ingrained people with this idea of foreign devils, century of humiliation, nationalism, and whatever. So these are people who have grown up in that era. So they are likely to be less, for the lack of a better phrase, globalist in their worldview, less sort of...

multilateralist, less sort of, they're likely to lesser have the sense of liberal internationalism if there was any of the Chinese variety. They're likely to have a much more sort of deeper nationalistic. sense of a world. They're likely to have a sense of the world as much more driven by power rather than some degree of rules-based order. If they're likely to have a sense of rules-based orders, it's likely to be that...

China must set its own rules and China must create that order. It no longer will be the receiver of order. It will be the creator of order. So you're likely to therefore see people who are likely to be much more... active internationally, shaping the external environment much more actively, which is a trend that China is currently on. So you're likely to see much more of the same rather than... any sort of reversion to the idea of where we were probably once in the 90s or something like that.

Let's talk about the people of China, in particular, the young people of China, though there are less of them than there are in India, of course. You know, when I think of India, I think the default ideology of India is statism, right, that the state is my baab, which is why we tend to be left.

of center in economics and right of center in social issues where the state basically controls everything in both domains is such a default ideology that if you can generalize widely as i just did for indians is there such a default outlook or you know ideological leaning for young Chinese people because one would have imagined that on the one hand they've grown up with in markets and they've seen the power of economic freedom and you know they've been exposed to the world you know

potentially they could be globalists as well. But on the other hand, it is China, like you pointed out, the indoctrination campaign of the 90s onwards, etc, etc. So, you know, what's your take? I would assume that the role of the state... I think statism would also be a default position. I don't think...

I don't think in China I've encountered, and again, I've encountered not as many people. I mean, I've lived there briefly five, six years. But my sense is that I don't think you will see people who believe in minimum government and things like that. I don't think you will see. I mean, there were obviously people who were free marketeers and things like that who've now vanished, you know.

Like literally vanished, been vanished. Literally vanished. And, you know, think tanks which had sort of a more liberal sort of economic view and things on freedom and things like that have shut down. But I don't think across society you would have a view of... minimum government of the state's intervention being limited I think it's just about the state is omnipresent the party is omnipresent and I think

that has in some ways shaped thinking and so the view is that yes the state must do lots of things the state must be much more active in every sense of the way should it do everything no you know in some cases should it back down yes but I think there is a recognition I mean again I find Chinese people to be generally very again pragmatic in some ways right it's a very you look at the world and you take it as it is rather than

living with wishful thinking in some ways. And you say, okay, this is what my reality is. How do I make the best of my reality? And I think some of that... Now, within that, there is ambition, of course. Jack Ma, for example, is an example of ambition, right? And the sort of new technology guys who are doing tremendous work are examples of ambition. But that ambition is within a guided environment.

Within an environment in which the party state has set boundaries. Why do today you have Chinese companies which are making breakthroughs in things like robotics and all of these domains? Because the state wants you to make breakthroughs in those domains. Ten years ago, there was freedom.

So you had Tencent doing tremendous gaming and this and that. And now all of that has been clamped down upon. And the state is saying, no, this is what we wanted to do. Did we see protests? Did we see pushback? We saw grumbling. But everybody fell in line. So I think there's a default of the state being omnipresent. The mybap sort of environment exists even there. So my, not my penultimate, what, is there a word for before penultimate, third last? Is it penultimate?

Whatever. My third last question is that, tell me one mistake that people outside China make about China when they think about China. I think the one mistake that, I mean, the most obvious mistake is firstly, think assuming that everything functions on the whims of one man that the system is efficient and it functions on the whims of one person or somebody at the top you know in party state literature they talk about this right that

things must function. You know, the central committee is the brain and the nervous system. The rest, the other organs are the sort of arms and the grassroots entities are like the fingers. So as the brain works, the fingers must eventually move and then messages must be passed.

That's how I think sometimes even people sitting outside think of China, which I think is completely wrong, right? That's what they would want you to believe. But it's much more complicated. It's much more messy. And I think understanding that messiness is very, very useful. To me, that's the sort of...

The biggest mistake, the second thing that I think what people don't realize is, and again, I'm referencing Jude again, but Jude Blanchett says this very well. They put on their pants one leg at a time, just like anybody else. The same... problems that you encounter, that bureaucracies encounter elsewhere, so do theirs. The same economic problems that you are grappling with, others are also grappling with. There might be some differences in some, you know, but to completely other...

the entity is to your own detriment. Right. And I think that should not be done, whether it is in terms of framing the country or the system as a threat or whether it is framing it as this giant, deeply, you know, 10 feet tall. can do no wrong, those kinds of things. I think both of those are problematic. Looking at it, appreciating the successes and acknowledging the costs and understanding the messiness of the system is useful.

Looking ahead, my penultimate question, looking ahead if I ask you to, if I take you to the year 2050 and I say that. what is the best case scenario, the realistic best case scenario for China in that year? And what is a realistic worst case scenario? Like I say realistic, because obviously the best case scenario would be wildly prosperous, extremely free. But

And inshallah, that can happen. But apart from that, you know, what is your realistic best case scenario and what's your realistic worst case scenario? I think my realistic best case scenario from a perspective of... The Chinese leadership has a goal which ends in 2049, which is a centenary of the PRC, right? Their view is of China becoming a great power with global influence and so on and so forth. So to me...

In terms of their view, that's the best case scenario, that you have global influence, you have become the hegemon across Asia. You have been able to settle some of your core issues of territory and other things in your favor. And balance of power today suits you. And you are integrated with the world economy.

while being able to be the dominant actor and shape rules and things like that internationally. To me, that would be the party's best case scenario. For society, will that mean greater freedom in China? No. Will that mean somewhere greater freedom in terms of sense of national pride or whatever, however abstract or however real that may be? Yes, but not in terms of your personal. Personal lives are generally free, but not in terms of...

economic freedom, political freedom, those will be worse. So for society, that might not be the sort of best case scenario. But from the state's perspective, I think that's the best case scenario. From society's perspective, I think the best case scenario would be realistically some sort of a return to collective leadership.

in a different format, but some sort of an accommodation and some sort of opening socially, you know, some sort of accommodation of social voices to become much more representative, although it may remain a one party state system, but some sort of a... reversion to the Deng Xiaoping model of collective leadership, some sort of autonomy of judicial action.

some sort of accountability when it comes to policing, some sort of accountability when it comes to government spending, all of those kinds of things. To me, that could be a realistic best case scenario, depending on how the next 25 years go.

The worst case scenario from the Chinese people's point of view, and even probably from the state's point of view, is that the transition from Xi Jinping to the next guy is so badly bungled because of internal contradictions and conflict and whatever, that you actually end up seeing state collapse.

And that would be, I think, the worst case scenario even for the rest of the world. Because a collapse of the Chinese economy would be deeply damaging to everybody. So to me, how they manage that transition from Xi Jinping to the next guy? And again, guy, it's not going to be a woman, will be very, very important. And I think state collapse would be the worst case scenario. And it is a realistic scenario. You could end up seeing that. You could end up seeing...

Tremendous uncertainty over the next 10 years. Chinese leaders live long. They don't pass away early. We just had one senior Chinese official pass away. He was 100. Jiang Zemin lived in his 90s. 90s. So it's not, they don't pass away early. Xi Jinping is 72. He has technically, he's a young man in that system. So he can live much longer. And from what we understand, he used to be a smoker, but I'm not sure if he's still.

And clearly when he's talking about organ transplants, he wants to live longer. So who knows? But my sense is that that is the worst case scenario. Yeah, well, as I say, paradigms change a funeral at a time. But what if the funerals take a long time to come around? Isn't that the problem? So my final question for you is obviously going to be about recommendations to learn about China. But before that, very quickly, tell me about your China.

related courses at Takshashila. So if anyone is interested, they can sign up. Yeah, I mean, we have a bunch of things that we're doing. Firstly, let me just begin with the newsletters, right? We have two... We have three newsletters that are focused on different aspects of China. I do one, which is called Tracking People's Daily, which does a daily brief on what's in the people's daily. Clearly, my naming etiquette is not creative.

My colleague Anushka does the weekly Eye on China, which looks at more from the military's perspective in terms of what's happening in China. Then a couple of my colleagues work on technology ecosystem in China. So my colleague Bhumika and Shobankita, they write a sub-newsletter for our technology newsletter, which focuses on China's technology ecosystem. So we do a bunch of different things from just from a daily writing and publication point of view. In terms of the courses,

We have three different courses that we are now running. One, we just completed a course on Chinese defense and security policies, which is led by Anushka, who works in the PLA. Early next year, in early 2026, we have a course on Chinese economy and geoeconomics, which my colleague Amit, who works on Chinese economy,

is put in together. So it should start by the end of, I think 31st January is the start date. So that will be announced soon. I teach a course on open source research on China, which we should, I mean, I've done it twice already. I think the third time will be sometime in the autumn.

next year in 2026. So these are at least three courses that we do. We're also thinking about a long-term sort of three-month course on China which can bring all of this stuff together and more. So hopefully still in the works but should be sometime next year. should be able to put that together too.

Amazed, I haven't done any of these, but I will tell my listeners that I recommend them all because I know these guys so well. So now recommendations. All right, people have heard this episode and they're like, huh, Manoj, he's quite wise, but we want to go dig a little deeper and find out more about China. So just give me the...

comprehensive list you can manage? Sure. One of the best books to begin with for somebody who's not done any reading on that, I think Wealth and Power by Orwell Schell and John Delory is great. It's the first book that I would recommend to anybody. Then depending and that, you know, it's a good book because it gives you a history of China through personalities and through biographies. So I think it's really and it's very well written on Chinese politics.

the late Joseph Fusmith's books, his recent book was Rethinking Chinese Politics before he passed away earlier this year, actually just a couple of weeks ago. But one of the best people whom you can read on understanding just how the Leninist party state system works. Joseph Terygian, his recent book is a biography of Xi Jinping's father. I think his work on...

The engagement of the Communist Party with the Soviet Union and obviously now on Xi Jinping's father is great. Jude Blanchett, his book, The New Red Guards is... extremely important if you're trying to understand the 1980s in particular and why China has got to where it has got today. On Chinese history, there's lots, you know, on the Cultural Revolution. That is, if you're interested, you can go back to John Fairbank's books on China again.

extremely good, great primers into the history, into politics, into how the system has evolved. If you're interested in Chinese religion and religion and the evolution of that in China, Alistair Ian Johnston, his work on that, I think that's probably one of the...

best things that you could read if you're interested in India and China and the India-China relationship I would recommend going through the writings of Vijay Gokhale not just for the India-China relationship but also his books on China in general are fantastic thin, they are very well written, they are extremely good reads and they challenge sometimes the conventional sort of thinking that we may have. His book on

you know, how China negotiates called the long game is a must read for anybody who's interested in Chinese diplomacy and the style of Chinese diplomacy. I think beyond books, if I could look at... You know, I think there's, again, it's a very crowded space of China podcasts. I would recommend China Talk by Jordan Schneider. It's excellent. It's, I find Jordan funny.

His approach of questioning is also extremely open-ended. And he gets some of the best people who are working on China across domains, technology, whatever. Sinica, you know, which is run by Kaiser Co. I think when I started my time looking at China seriously as a subject of study, Sinica was...

extremely useful. It was a foundational thing for me to just try and grasp the complexity of the country. And I think Kaiser has done a fantastic job building that as a brand. So Cynica is a great place to go. If you're again looking at books on recent Chinese politics and policies, I mean, I would recommend if you're looking at...

China's engagement during COVID. I have a book which looked at that. You can look at that on the China-India relationship. I have a book which is coming out early next year. So that should be fun. But yeah, it depends on what you're interested in.

If you're starting with history, Fairbank, you can't go wrong with that. But if you're looking at different periods and different eras, there's lots that you can pick up. There's specific stuff on the cultural revolution that one can pick up. There's specific stuff on Xi Jinping, Elizabeth economy on Xi Jinping. Karl Minsner on Xi Jinping. I think some of those are really good books to try and understand the thinking within the system. So yeah, I mean, I look at this entire gamut of books.

Amazing. Manoj, to end this off, though I promised that would be my last question, but to end this off, what is the most fun thing you did recently that has nothing to do with China? Oh, I went and watched Durandar. What did you think? I thought...

if I was to, you know, I thought Hrithik Roshan's review of the movie was not bad. It made sense where he said that, look, you know, I may disagree with some of the politics and how that is shown, but I thought it was three and a half hours of, three and a half hours went bad. fairly quickly it was gripping it was entertaining

I thought the disclaimer at the beginning was really important because there was a line in the disclaimer which said, use your own intelligence. So if you use your own intelligence, treat it like a movie.

It was entertaining. It was fun. You know, whatever you may, whatever issues one may have. Or maybe it's just the case that because I have a small child at home, I watch two movies a year. So just the idea of sitting in the theater was fun for me. But no, I enjoyed the movie and it had nothing to do with China. It had a lot to do with Pakistan.

I should inform my listeners that, you know, you should listen to my Life in Times episode with Manoj, where he reveals that he once came to Bombay, or rather, when he was in Bombay, he wanted to be a Bollywood actor. So who knows, you could have actually, you know, in a parallel universe, you are acting in Dhurander.

Of course. Which role would you have liked to do? Which role? Which role would I have liked to have done? I don't know. None of them had a happy ending. Yeah, I don't know. I think that... Just from a pure performance point of view, I thought Akshay Khanna was really good. And I thought even Ranveer Singh was quite good, although I'm not necessarily a Ranveer Singh fan.

I thought he was I appreciate the fact that he's Sindhi but beyond that I'm not a fan but I think that he was good in the movie and I thought how he did what he did because you know in Indian movies in Bollywood leading men have a tendency to want to be bigger than the character he constrained that tendency and to me that is in the Indian context to me that is successful acting that if you are able to

just be that character for that period of time. And I can forget that you are you because personalities are so large. then you've done a reasonably good job. And I thought both him and Akshay Khanna were able to do that. This is actually an episode about leading men, isn't it? From Confucius to Mao to Deng to Shi to Ranveer Singh. I don't think Ranveer would want to be in that category, but fair enough.

Others will be like, who the fuck is that? Manoj, thanks a lot for giving me so much of your time today. This was great fun. Thank you so much, Amit. Always a pleasure. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes at will. The show notes include links to Takshishila's newsletters on China as well as the courses they teach on the subject, so do check those out. You can follow Manoj on Twitter at TheChina.

Dude. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and every podcast app of your choice. Thank you for listening. And contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and Thank you.