Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao | Lex Fridman Podcast #466

- The following is a conversation

with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China.

This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast."

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And now, dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past.

What are the parallels between the two leaders

and where do they differ?

Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China

for the past 12 years,

and Mao Zedong was the Communist leader of China

from 1949 to 1976.

So what are the commonalities, what are the differences?

- So the biggest commonality of them

is that they're both the subject of personality cults,

and that Mao is the center

of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976.

And when he died, you know,

there was tremendous outpouring of grief,

even among people who had objectively suffered enormously

because of his policies.

Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him,

who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind,

where if you walk into a bookstore in China,

the first thing you see are books by him,

collections of his speeches.

And when Mao was alive,

you might've thought that's sort of what happened

with Communist Party leaders in China.

But after Mao's death,

there was such an effort to not have

that kind of personality cult,

that there was a tendency to not publish

the speeches of a leader

until they were done being in power.

I was first in China in 1986,

and you could go for days

without being intensely aware

of who was in charge of the party, you would know,

but his face wasn't everywhere,

the newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him,

and quotations from his words and things like that.

So with Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period

in Communist Party rule,

which seemed as though it might be a part of the past.

So that's a key commonality,

and a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos,

in turning things upside down in a sense that,

you know, he talked about class struggle,

which came out of Marxism,

but he also really, his favorite work

of Chinese popular fiction was the Monkey King

about this legendary figure

who is this Monkey King

who could turn the heavens upside down.

So he reveled in disorder

and thought disorder was a way to improve things.

Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned

with kind of stability and predictability.

So you can see them as very, very different that way.

And Mao also liked to stir things up

like that people on the streets clamoring.

So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult,

it's not manifesting itself.

He doesn't like the idea

of people on the streets

in anything that can't be controlled.

So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways

that they're similar, a lot of ways they're different.

They're also different,

and this fits with this orderliness,

that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius

and Confucian traditions in China.

And Confucian traditions are based

on kind of stable hierarchies, for the most part,

and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior,

whereas Mao like things to be turned upside down.

He thought of Confucianism as a futile way of thought

that it hold held China back.

So you can come up with things that they're similar

and you can come up with things

where they're really opposites.

But they both clearly did wanna see China under rule

by the Communist Party.

And that's been a continuity

and that connects them to the leaders

in between them two as well.

- So there's some degree, as you said,

that Xi Jinping has pauses the ideas of communism

and the ideas of Confucianism.

So let's go all the way back.

You wrote that in order to understand the China of today,

we have to study its past.

So the China of today celebrates ideas of Confucius,

a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago.

Can you tell me about the ideas of Confucius?

- First of all, we don't know that much

about the historic Confucius.

He's around the same time as,

you know, figures like Socrates,

and like with Socrates,

we get a lot of what we know about him

or think we know about him from what his followers said,

and things that were attributed to him

and dialogues that were written afterwards.

So, you know, you can have a lot of fun

with these sort of axial age thinkers

and what they had in common.

Another thing that connects these axial age thinkers

is they were trying to kind of make a case

for why they should be able to educate the next generation,

the elite, and sort of had a way of promising

that they had philosophical ideas

that helped decide how you should run a polity.

Confucius lived in a time

when there were these warring kingdoms

in a territory that later became China.

But what he said was that there had been this period

of great order in the past,

that the lines between inferior and superior were clear,

and there was a kind of synergy

between superior and inferior

that kept everything ticking along really nicely.

He thought that hierarchical relationships

were a good thing, and that the trick was

that both sides in a hierarchical relationship

owed something to the other.

So the father and son relationship was a key one.

The father deserved respect from the son,

but owed the son care and benevolence.

And things would be fine

as long as both sides in a relationship held up their end.

And he had a whole series of these relationships.

The husband to the wife was again an unequal one,

of the husband being superior to the wife,

but him owing the wife care and her owing him deference.

And he had the same notion that then the emperor

to the ministers were...

These were all parallels,

and there were no egalitarian relationships in Confucianism.

Even something that in the West,

we often think of as a kind of

quintessentially egalitarian relationship between brothers,

in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism,

there was only older brother and younger brother.

Brotherhood was not an egalitarian relationship.

It was one where the older brother

took care of the younger brother

and the younger brother showed respect

for the older brother.

- So stable hierarchy

was at the core of everything in society,

it permeated everything including politics?

- Yeah, and there was even a sense

that it connected the natural world

to the supernatural world.

So the emperor was, to heaven,

this kind of non personified deity

like the emperor was to the ministers.

So all of this had these relationships.

So the emperor was the son of heaven.

And you know, for Confucius, he said,

so we should study the text,

we should study how the sages of old behaved

that society was becoming corrupted

and was going away from that sort of purity

of the sages when the relationships were all in order.

So Confucianism was a kind of conservative

or even backward-looking thing.

It wasn't arguing for progress,

it was arguing for reclaiming a pure golden age in the past.

So it was also a kind of conserv.

So in all kinds of ways, you know,

it's irreconcilable to many things

about Marxism and communism,

which is all about struggle

and all about actually a progressive view of history

moving from one stage to the next.

- So that's the interesting thing

about Xi Jinping and the China today

is there is that tension of Confucianism and communism

where communism Marxism is supposed to,

you know, let go of history,

and Confucianism, there's a real veneration of history

that's happening in China of today.

So they're able to wear both hats and balance it.

- Yeah, you could say that in many points

in the 20th century, there was a kind of struggle

between different competing political groups

over which part of the Chinese past to connect with.

Was it to the Confucian tradition

or to the kind of rebellious Monkey King tradition,

which was what Mao connected to.

Xi Jinping, and before him, to some extent,

you know, hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit, the Olympics,

it was more this kind of mix it all together view.

Anything that suggested greatness in the past

could be something that could be fused together.

So Xi Jinping says that, you know,