Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. Not manly enough?…

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