Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…otice things that felt like, I’m surprised that that happens. That there just felt… People felt less worried about what they were saying, and what they were doing. That trend line up until about 2008. But from the Olympics and then the financial crisis after that, the Chinese Communist Party felt I guess more… It’s still insecure, but it felt cockier in some ways. And you had like, okay, maybe we can start asserting more control over things. So I think that’s been stronger under Xi Jinping’s time and power. And Xi was already the designated successor. By 2008, he was in charge of security for the Olympics. And the Olympics was supposed to be a moment, possibly of more opening up, because when Seoul hosted the Olympics, South Korea became a less tightly controlled right wing dictatorship and moved toward democracy. And some people were hoping the Olympics might move China that way, and it went quite the opposite. You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus. And that question going back to Confucius of hierarchy and how does the power within this very strict one state work, what can we say, what do we know about the structure of this Communist party apparatus? How much internal power struggle is there? How much power does Xi Jinping actually have? Is there any insight we have into the system? James Palmer, who worked in Beijing as a journalist, and now is an editor at Foreign Policy, wrote an important piece a few years ago about just, we should really be straight about what a black box of the Chinese elite politics are. And really not try to pretend we know more than we do. We did used to have more of a sense of these ideological factions, but also partly about different views of how much tinkering there should be with the economy, and things like that. And they were also basic, partly based on personalities and personal ties, but we did have a sense you could map out these kinds of rival power bases and things. And we just have much less of a sense of that under Xi Jinping. It’s very hard to know other than this small group around him, how it works. We don’t have a major defector who says, yeah, this is how Xi Jinping… We have Xi Jinping self-presentation, and a lot of things that are then said about him. There were some false expectations about him that some people thought, he’s going to be a reformer, because his father was a liberalizing figure. That doesn’t work that way. And he does seem to care about orderliness. He does seem to care about certain things. He wants to present himself as a kind of scholarly figure in touch with China’s deep past. We know he’s a strong nationalist and a cultural nationalist as well as political nationalists. But beyond that, we don’t have that much of a sense of what makes him tick. We get little hints. There was a secret speech, that leaked out, that he talked about how the Soviet Union had collapsed, because the leadership didn’t pay enough attention to ideology. And he also said that none of them were manly enough to keep control. So I imagine if he and Putin never have a heart-to-heart conversation, one thing they’d find to agree on is this distaste for Gorbachev. This feeling that Gorbachev was… That was the wrong way to do things.…

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