To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Professor Ben Nathans — is the sharpest, richest, and funniest account of the Soviet dissident movement ever written. Today, we’ll interview Nathans alongside the legendary Ian Johnson, whose recent book Sparks explores the Chinese dissident ecosystem.

We discuss…

• The central enigma of the Soviet dissident movement — their boldness in the face of hopeless odds,

• How cybernetics, Wittgenstein, and one absent-minded professor shaped the intellectual backbone of post-Stalinist dissent,

• Why the Soviet Union was such fertile ground for dark humor, and why humor played a vital role for Soviet resistance movements,

• How the architect of Stalin's show trials laid the groundwork for, ironically, a more professional legal system known as “socialist legality,”

• Similarities and differences between post-Stalinist and post-Maoist systems in dealing with opposition,

• Plus: Why Brezhnev read The Baltimore Sun, how onion-skin paper became a tool of rebellion, and why China’s leaders study the Soviet collapse more seriously than anyone else.

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The Dissident’s Playbook

Jordan Schneider: I want to start with the title. It’s pretty much the best title I’ve ever come across because Soviet jokes are the best things that exist in the twentieth century. Where did it come from and how did you choose it?

Ben Nathans: Long after all the physical remnants of Soviet civilization have deteriorated into dust and no physical traces are left of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Soviet anecdotes — or anekdoty (анекдоты) — will remain as the single best, most compact and pungent guide to what that place and time was about. I couldn’t agree with you more about Soviet humor.

I deserve no credit for the title of the book, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause.” It’s literally borrowed from a toast that dissidents would make, typically sitting around kitchen tables in cramped apartments in Moscow, Kyiv, Leningrad, and other cities. For me, besides the sonic resonance of that phrase, it captures with amazing efficiency the central enigma of that movement and these people — their ability to be bold and despairing at the same time.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s take it back to the death of Stalin. None of what happens in this book — the court cases, personal dramas, and legal maneuvering — happens in a Stalinist Soviet Union because if anyone plays around with this stuff, you’ll get shot or go to the Gulag and no one, much less Amnesty International, ever hears from you again.

Let’s talk about that transition and why those who came after Stalin decided to take a different approach than Stalin to political dissent.

Ben Nathans: Whenever you have a system where power is highly concentrated at the apex of society and where the personality and predilections of the ruler are so decisive — and this applies in many ways to modern China as much as it does to the Soviet Union — “biological transition events” (fancy language for the death of the leader), are fraught with uncertainty.

It’s worth remembering that the Soviet system really was formed under Stalin. During his twenty-five years in power from roughly 1928 to 1953, the fundamental characteristics of the system came into focus and were fixed, not in the sense of made better, but anchored and became more or less stable.

To speak to your question directly — the reason why things changed so fundamentally after Stalin’s death in March of 1953 is that the system of state-sponsored political terror, the use of state resources to go after real or perceived enemies, was incredibly damaging to the political elite itself. The riskiest position you could occupy under Stalin was to be a high-ranking member of the Communist Party. What was really dangerous was to be a member of the security apparatus, because many of the people who were carrying out political terror fell into the vortex of this enormous punitive machine themselves, or they committed suicide because of the psychic stress of having to sign death warrants for thousands of people.

If only as a matter of self-preservation, Stalin’s successors decided that this system could not continue and it needed to somehow stabilize itself. When you look back at the twentieth century and ask what leaders or what systems were most effective at killing communists, it wasn’t Hitler’s Germany — it was Stalin. Stalin killed way more communists than Hitler did. It’s also possible that Mao killed more communists than Stalin did. Ian would have to weigh in on that. It’s worth keeping in mind what kind of autocannibalism this system was capable of exercising.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, can you draw a parallel to how the post-Mao leadership began thinking about ways to prevent the political system from becoming a complete blood sport?

Ian Johnson: The parallels and the differences are quite striking. While I was reading the book, I kept thinking how it was similar but also different to China. In China, everything was delayed until Mao died in ’76. There was no real de-Maoification in the way there was under Khrushchev with de-Stalinization. People say the main reason for this is that for the CCP, Mao was Lenin and Stalin rolled into one. You couldn’t get rid of Mao without calling into question the entire revolution, whereas that could happen in the Soviet Union.

There was a push for a bit of de-Maoification in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but it wasn’t sustained. The structure of the system may have changed in the ’80s and ’90s, but the guts of the repressive system was still there. You end up with something quite different in China than what happened in the Soviet era under Brezhnev.

Jordan Schneider: Now is maybe a nice point to introduce Volpin, perhaps the century’s most impactful autist. What a character this guy was.

Ben Nathans: Alexander Volpin was a Moscow-based mathematician, who ended up becoming what I describe as the intellectual godfather of the dissident movement. He was the absent-minded professor to end all absent-minded professors, someone who was famous for walking around Moscow in his house slippers, who had an extreme interest and ambition for what cybernetics could do for the world. Cybernetics was the movement unleashed by the MIT professor Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and ’50s that attempted to translate every known phenomenon into the language of algorithms. It’s a clear predecessor of computer science and software engineering.

Jordan Schneider: Which also has an afterlife in China and is famously the intellectual superstructure for the one-child policy.

Ben Nathans: It also has an afterlife in the United States, where algorithmic attempts to refashion society, human life and human beings themselves — that impulse is very much alive in certain pockets of the United States today.

Volpin was not just a mathematician, but a mathematical logician, which is to say he was interested in the nature of truth statements in mathematics and how we know that this or that given proof is rigorous or not. He also was a keen student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein’s quest for what he called “an ideal language.” This goes back to the analytic philosophy movement that was centered in Oxford in the interwar period. Wittgenstein was an Austrian Jew, but he made his way to Oxford and made his first mark in the United Kingdom.

Ideal language philosophy is based on the idea that many philosophical problems stem from the messiness and ambiguity of the language we use to think. Human languages like English, Russian, and Chinese are just inherently messy. They use one word to describe many different things, some of them having nothing to do with each other. For example, the word “patient” can mean the person who a doctor sees, but it can also be an adjective meaning someone who has the capacity to wait without getting agitated. There may be some deep Latin-based etymological connection between those two, but for all intents and purposes in English, that one word performs multiple, essentially unrelated functions. This is an example of how human languages are just really bad for thinking clearly.

Volpin’s quest was to develop a language that would be free of those ambiguities and lack of clarity. He obviously looked at mathematics as the gold standard for clarity and rigor when pursuing truth or trying to make statements about reality. But he, like everybody else in this movement, including Wittgenstein himself, ultimately failed to come up with an ideal language that could fulfill those criteria of clarity and rigor.

Over the course of his life in the Soviet Union under Stalin, he, like tens of millions of others, had a number of nasty encounters with the police, the secret police, the broader punitive apparatus, and, in his case, with the practice of sending certain inconvenient people to psychiatric institutions against their will. These run-ins with the Soviet legal system were deeply traumatic and difficult for him to process.

But he had a lot of time on his hands, while in prison and in exile in Central Asia, in Karaganda in Kazakhstan. One of the things he spent time doing was reading the Soviet Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure. To his surprise, he found a parallel attempt at an ideal language — something most legal systems strive for. The goal is to clearly map out what you are allowed to do, what you are required to do, and what is forbidden: the three fundamental moral categories

Having failed, along with everybody else, to produce an actual algorithmic ideal language, he realized that Soviet law was a plan B for this quest. He gradually developed this approach that if the Soviet government could be held to its own laws, which he thought were actually pretty good, the civil liberties that were enshrined in the Soviet Constitution and the various procedural norms that were encoded in the code of criminal procedure — things would be a lot better.

This became the disarmingly simple grand strategy of this movement, which was: make the government honor its own laws. We’re not out to change the government, we’re not out to topple the government, we’re certainly not out to seize power ourselves. It’s impossible for me to imagine someone like Volpin running anything because of how abstract and literal his thinking was. He was not a social creature. But this quest for the rule of law in a society that had gone through some of the worst episodes of lawlessness and state-sponsored terror. This became the master plan for the movement.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, from a personality perspective and strategic perspective, what echoes did you see in the Volpin story to what you covered in China?

Ian Johnson: Interestingly, Ben mentioned in his book that this was picked up by other Soviet satellite states, especially in Eastern Europe. Notably, it was also adopted in the ’90s by the Chinese rights defense movement, the Weiquan movement (维权运动). This core idea — if activists hold the government to its laws, they can’t be easily labeled as subversive or counter-revolutionary. They’re not trying to overthrow anything, to subvert the state. This approach was largely successful for the movement and its lawyers for about fifteen years, roughly from the late ’90s to the early 2010s. While the dynamic shifted later, we can see clear parallels between the Chinese movement and its Soviet counterparts.

Significant foreign funding and NGO support were channeled into this movement, creating a small industry focused on rule of law dialogues, judicial training, and legal workshops. This strategy was partly inspired by the perceived success of similar initiatives during the Soviet era, leading many to believe a comparable development could occur in China.

For a period, it did. A flowering of civil society emerged, for about a twenty-year-period, if you want to be optimistic, from the 1990s into the early 2010s. However, the party abruptly decided this was ridiculous, and they cracked down on the movement in a notably more severe way than the Soviet authorities had done.

Ben Nathans: I’m interested in whether what you described is a function of Soviet-style regimes producing a specific kind of opposition movement. One that favors the rule of law, one that is essentially conservative and minimalist rather than revolutionary and innovative. Or were there actual lines of influence? Were people reading texts produced by the Soviet dissident movement or coverage of it, where we could really talk about cause and effect rather than just typological repetition?

Ian Johnson: Well, they were very influenced by the Czech movement. For example, a very well-known public intellectual in China named Cui Weiping (崔卫平) — she’s a film critic and activist – translated many things by Václav Havel which were widely read. They weren’t published in China, but they circulated in a Chinese version of samizdat (самиздат).

In the Soviet Union, you had the old-style samizdat where somebody hammered through multiple pieces of carbon paper to copy it, and then others made more copies. In China, the movement took place during the digital revolution, so they simply made books or magazines into PDFs and emailed them.

While they were influenced by the Soviet movement, I don’t know whether the construction of the rule of law was influenced by the Soviets. I wonder if any authoritarian states, Soviet-style or not, have to rely on laws to some degree because society is too complex otherwise. Not everything can be decided by the party secretary. You have to have some kind of legal system for disputes among companies or minor issues between people.

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Jordan Schneider: Ben, could you talk a little bit about going from revolutionary justice to more boring justice with laws and statutes?

Ben Nathans: That transition happens, at least aspirationally, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. This transition was overseen by an unlikely figure — Andrei Vyshinsky, who was Stalin’s Minister of Justice. He was the architect of the infamous show trials in Moscow, in which some of the most prominent Old Bolsheviks – people like Nikolai Bukharin who had been close to Lenin and had been members of the party long before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – appeared on witness stands and confessed to the most outlandish crimes. They confessed to spying for Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Japan, often simultaneously.

These confessions were entirely scripted and detached from reality; nearly all defendants were subjected to torture or threats against their families. These tactics are the hallmarks of show trials.

But the irony is that Vyshinsky, who oversaw these trials, was also the person who essentially oversaw the transition away from revolutionary justice toward a more professional legal system, which he called “socialist legality."

Revolutionary justice is the idea that you don’t need professionally trained lawyers the way bourgeois societies do, societies that place much of the legal decision-making process in the hands of people who have degrees, pedigrees and credentials from elite, usually conservative, educational institutions. Revolutionary justice holds that real Justice — capital-J Justice — flows most profoundly and reliably from the instincts of people who are on the right side of history: members of the working class. You don’t need professional jurists. What you need are workers whose gut instincts about right and wrong are the most reliable (some have said infallible) means to decide guilt or innocence.

In the 1920s, the most revolutionary period of Soviet history, all kinds of experiments were being carried out — some breathtaking, others absolutely horrifying. During this time, revolutionary justice was seen as the highest form of adjudicating issues in courts, applied in everything from divorce cases to questions of political justice, high, low, and everything in between.

But the Bolsheviks soon learned that revolutionary justice was really unpredictable. Workers did not always produce the results that the party leadership wanted or expected. As in many other arenas, by the 1930s, Soviet leaders began to retrench. They decided it would actually be a good idea to have professionally trained judges — people who could retain certain standards of legal procedure, including precedence, the proper use of evidence and what a confession should look like.

The actual practice of justice was nothing like what we would call professional. These show trials were travesties of justice according to Western standards. But we have to bear in mind — and Ian will be able to speak to this in the Chinese case — that the term show trial itself is often used condescendingly, like this is all just pretend, this is a bullshit trial, this is not real justice being meted out, this is all scripted in advance. The Soviets called it pokazatel’nyy protsess (показательный процесс), which translates more accurately to “demonstrative trial.” A demonstrative trial had a pedagogical goal: to teach the population about right and wrong and, above all, about the state’s power to punish the guilty.

Once we move away from the condescension that the term “show trial” conjures up, we’re in much more complicated terrain. Western legal systems are also engaged in the business of teaching. That’s why trials are public. It’s not just that the actions of the prosecution, defense, judges, and to some extent the jury can be subject to scrutiny. It’s because trials are also classrooms where certain lessons about right and wrong are broadcast and where state power is on display.

It’s much more complicated when you realize that Vyshinsky was presiding over a transition away from revolutionary justice. It wasn’t just about these farcical show trials — it was also about a Soviet version of a professional judiciary.

Jordan Schneider: The Chinese echoes of this are fascinating. On one hand, you have revolutionary justice meted out in land reform and Cultural Revolution struggle sessions. Then sometimes you’re dealing with malfeasance like the Gao Gang case in the mid-1950s behind the scenes. But most famously with the Gang of Four, where Deng said, “No, we’ve got to put these guys on TV and show everyone that we’re never going back to the Cultural Revolution.” More recently, Xi put Bo Xilai (薄熙来) on trial. I don’t think it was live-streamed, but there were definitely clips of that trial that circulated for instructive effect.

I’d like to ask Ian for any other thoughts.

Ben Nathans: Ian, how successful do you think these overtly pedagogical, spectacular trials were in China? In the Soviet case in the 1930s, most people seemed to believe the defendants were guilty of the insane crimes to which they confessed.

Ian Johnson: That’s a good question. I’m not sure exactly how much people in China believed what they were seeing, but the government certainly used similar tactics — holding trials in football stadiums, staging mass trials and public executions, and forcing people to attend.

But for those who attended — I think it’s a universal human tendency to believe that there must be some truth to a statement someone makes. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe it’s exaggerated a bit, but it’s got to be somewhat true. It can’t be all made up.

That mindset likely held during cases like Gao Gang’s in the 1950s and others from that era. But sometimes these trials elicited a different reaction — solidarity. I remember an example from 1960 involving one of the students who published the underground magazine Spark (星火). She attended a show trial in Lanzhou, in Gansu Province in China’s far west.

The famous filmmaker Hu Jie (胡杰) later interviewed her for a documentary. She recalled being deeply moved by the defendants — by the way they held themselves, by their refusal to concede to making any mistakes. She found their dignity inspiring. So I wonder whether, at least in some cases, the spectacle backfired — eliciting sympathy rather than submission.

Ben Nathans: The trials of the dissidents in the ’60s backfired to a great degree. Ironically, the government was actually much more responsible about the kinds of evidence that it introduced in these trials, and they didn’t torture any of the defendants. They didn’t even beat them. It’s weird to think that the procedurally more respectable trials were less convincing than the stage-managed show trials of the ’30s.

A Hysterical Day in Court

Jordan Schneider: The split screen of 1960s Chinese Cultural Revolution stadium denunciations and executions, and then what we’re about to talk about with Sinyavsky and Daniel — this kind of absurdist comedy of two writers — is something to keep in mind. Ben, why don’t you transition us from Volpin to this literary scene, which has its completely hysterical day in court?

Ben Nathans: Yes, in both senses of the meaning of hysterical, very funny and also nuts. Volpin has this strategy that he’s developing privately, and you can find the evolution of his thinking about the legal strategy in his diaries, which are housed in the archive of the Memorial Society in Moscow. I worked with them when one could still do that, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Volpin loved to write a long entry on New Year’s Eve every year. He was big into taking stock and taking account, not only reviewing what had happened the previous year, but setting out goals for the next one. In one entry, I think it was 1958 or ’59, New Year’s Eve, and having arrived at this legal strategy, he says in essence, “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to put this into practice.”

That opportunity arrived in the fall of 1965. This is one year after Khrushchev had been yanked from the top position as General Secretary of the Communist Party, allegedly for mental health reasons, but the real reason was that the rest of the party elite couldn’t stand how unpredictable and erratic his policies were. Khrushchev had been out of power for a year and everyone was wondering: What comes next? Are we going back to Stalinism? What kind of future can we imagine for this country that has just gone through this epochal transition away from mass terror?

When these two figures — Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel — were arrested in September of 1965, it sent shockwaves through the intelligentsia because this seemed very ominous. Many people had not heard of these guys and were unaware that they had been publishing short stories, novellas, and essays under pseudonyms outside the Soviet Union — all completely hush-hush. When it came to light that they had been arrested and were going to be charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, there was a kind of panic: “This is the first sign of a return to the kind of repressive state that we knew in the 1930s and ’40s under Stalin.”

Volpin decides this is an occasion not to demand the innocence of these writers, not to insist that they be released from custody, but simply to apply the demand of the rule of law to this particular case. They were arrested in conjunction with each other because they had been operating together. They used the same person to smuggle their works abroad.

He came up with something that had never before happened in Soviet history, or anywhere else. That was organizing a meeting in the name of transparency — a meeting for glasnost (митинг гласности). The word itself is not new. It goes back at least to the 19th century, maybe even the 18th century. It means transparency, publicity, or openness. People of a certain generation are very familiar with this word because it was one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s key words during the glasnost era — the era of transparency and reformation, perestroika. But Volpin was the one who mobilized the word in a new way, as a way of responding to the arrest of these two writers.

The demand of the meeting that he was going to call was very simple: an open trial for these two writers and everything in accordance with the Soviet Constitution and the code of criminal procedure. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

In the book, I detail how, in fits and starts, the planning for this glasnost meeting — this transparency meeting — came into focus. It’s an absolutely fascinating story, and in some ways it was, for me, parallel to the histories that have been written about the coming into existence of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a slightly grandiose analogy because the Declaration was the launching pad for not just a new country, but a new kind of political system. But people have done fantastic work on the various drafts of the Declaration of Independence, not only by Thomas Jefferson but by other authors. And I tried, in my own small way, to do something similar for the opening salvo in what would become the Dissident Movement — namely, this appeal to Muscovites and others to meet on December 5th 1965, which is the anniversary of the ratification of the Soviet Constitution, to make this very minimalist demand: open trial.

You can watch Volpin’s thinking evolve in real time over the course of the fall of 1965. Even more interesting, you can watch other people enter what was originally a kind of monologue on his part, entering the conversation about this new rule-of-law strategy. There was enormous skepticism, not to mention just derision of this idea. Most people’s initial response to Volpin’s approach was: “Are you nuts? Have you lost your mind? This government doesn’t care about law. Why are you being naive, thinking you can use Soviet law against the Soviet state?” It’s counterintuitive to take Soviet law seriously because everyone grew up thinking that it was just window dressing.

Volpin’s response to those criticisms was always: “You’re part of the problem. There are too many people like you who don’t take law seriously and who aren’t ready to hold the government accountable when it breaks the law. If there were more people like me who insisted on the literal application of the law — not only to the behavior of Soviet citizens but to the behavior of the Soviet state — we’d all be much better off.”

Ian Johnson: Let me ask you: Why did the government agree? Why didn’t they just make these people disappear? Why did they feel this need to conform? Was it because they were concerned how it would come across in the West, or was there something else going on internally?

Ben Nathans: I think it’s both. First of all, this was a government, not only under Khrushchev, but also under his successors (principally Leonid Brezhnev, who governed for the next 20 years), in which all of these leaders shared Khrushchev’s sense that they couldn’t go back to Stalinism. It was just too lethal, and above all, too lethal to the party elites themselves. Everybody wanted stability and predictability, and the new benchmark of success and power was no longer, “How are we doing compared to tsarist Russia, say in 1913 on the eve of the First World War?” That’s a fixed benchmark — it’s not changing over time. But under the conditions of the Cold War, the comparative framework was always, “How are we doing in our competition with the United States?”

The United States was not set in amber. The United States was probably the most, or at least one of the most, dynamic societies on the planet. To be able to claim that the Soviet Union was getting closer and closer to generating the kind of wealth that the United States could generate and was superior to the United States in the way it distributed that wealth required certain forms of predictability, of stability at the top of the system, and of the ability to satisfy the needs of the Soviet population. That’s why you have creeping consumerism in the Soviet Union starting in the 1960s.

Part of why the Soviet government didn’t just execute Sinyavsky and Daniel is that it wanted to showcase itself now on a global stage — that it could compete and essentially outcompete its rival. But there were also internal reasons that have often been overlooked.

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In Stalin’s time, the name of the security apparatus was the NKVD. This is the predecessor to the KGB, the name that everybody is familiar with, if only because Vladimir Putin himself was a KGB agent. KGB stands for the Committee for State Security (kомитет государственной безопасности).

This is the crux of what you’re getting at, I think. The KGB itself wanted to become more professional, more modern. It wanted an image of a professional kind of intelligence service that didn’t keep dungeons and torture chambers for its victims, but was fully consistent with modern governance. That’s why the dissident trials of the 1960s and to a lesser extent in the 70s demonstrate how the Soviet system was really trying to have modern professional trials, not show trials. They don’t torture the defendants in advance. They don’t hand them a script and say, “This is what you’re going to say.”

Now it’s true that the judges and the prosecution are always working together, but that’s not specifically Soviet. That’s the way most continental judicial systems work. It’s the United States and the Anglo-American world with an adversarial system that’s the outlier historically.

The Soviet Union was trying to have a professional judicial system. It wanted to broadcast an image of itself around the world, not just to the West, but to the newly decolonizing states in the developing world that faced this kind of choice. There’s a fork in the road: Are we going to go the American route — capitalist, multi-party systems — or are we going to go the Soviet route — socialist economy, a planned economy, single-party rule? One of the ways of competing is to show that you have a modern judiciary with procedures that everyone can respect.

So there are performative elements, but there are also internal elements that have to do with the attempted self-professionalization by the KGB.

Jordan Schneider: It’s hard to do. You have this great closing metaphor in the book of stage and actors playing their parts, with some people who don’t want to play their parts. This dance between what’s real and what isn’t, and how much you want to commit to the bit, creates a lot of tension throughout the book.

Volpin picked a great test case. Sinyavsky and Daniel played their role to the T and were on a very different script than what the prosecutors and judge had any idea they were going to go up against. Granted, if you pick some absurdist, creative fiction writers pushing the bounds of form to put on trial, then maybe you should be ready for the unexpected.

This trial was my favorite of the ones you profile. What were they called in for? What were the facts?

Ben Nathans: The facts are that for the course of nearly 10 years, these two were publishing works abroad using pseudonyms, and the KGB took a decade before it could figure out who the actual authors were. It’s an amazing detective story. The initial thought was, “These are émigrés who harbor this lifelong, biographically driven grudge against the Soviet Union because it destroyed tsarist Russia, the country they grew up in and loved.” So they hunted for émigrés. As you know from current events, when the Soviet intelligence services decide an émigré is acting against the interests of Moscow, they’re not shy about going after them no matter where they live.

But they couldn’t find émigrés. They also started to think, “Whoever these guys are, they write about Soviet reality with such incredible specificity and tactile familiarity. Maybe they’re living inside the country because they seem to know this system from the inside out.” Their humor and satire was on target. It was hard to believe someone who doesn’t live here and know the system intimately could produce this kind of fiction.

They’re looking all over, and it literally takes them 10 years before they crack this case. Meanwhile, Andrei Sinyavsky had been working as a literary critic and an instructor at the Gorky Institute for World Literature. One of the most delicious ironies in this story is that in its attempt to ferret out who the real authors were, the KGB actually shared some of its classified material with the faculty of the Gorky Institute. The thinking was that these guys really know literature, and maybe their stylistic analyses of these pseudonymous publications abroad can help with this investigation. Sinyavsky was literally being consulted about his own case at one point. I can’t imagine what was going through his mind when this happened.

Yuli Daniel was less well known professionally. He worked mostly as a translator in his day job and produced satirical stories, which are amazing. If I may be permitted a brief detour, one of Daniel’s stories is called “Murder Day.” It’s a counterfactual science fiction story about an experiment that the Bolshevik leadership runs in the early 1960s.

The idea is that the Bolshevik revolution is not just about creating a more just society. It’s not just about abolishing private property and greed and selfishness and cultivating collectivism and solidarity. Ultimately, it’s all for the creation of a new kind of human being — Humanity 2.0. People who will have been born and grown up under this new system will have different characters from people who grow up under capitalism. That’s the most radical agenda of the Bolshevik Revolution: to create new kinds of human beings, not just a new kind of society.

Daniel’s story runs with this idea and imagines a day in the early 1960s when the government declares that murder is now legal because it wants to find out: What do these new human beings do when there are no institutional constraints on their behavior, there’s no sword hanging over their head saying, “If you kill someone, you’re toast”? They’re going to remove that entire incentive and disincentive structure and see how people behave. Will the new Soviet person refrain from this most heinous of crimes if left to their own devices without the threat of punishment? The story plays that out. It’s just this amazing, not just thought experiment, but a way of thinking through the Bolshevik experiment and wondering if it actually succeeded in creating new kinds of human beings?

Needless to say, the Soviet government didn’t like this. It didn’t like anybody saying anything satirical or funny about it.

Sinyavsky and Daniel are eventually found out. It’s like a whodunit detective story that involves analysis of the typewriters that were used to disseminate their stories. It turns out the conduit to the West for their stories was none other than the daughter of the French naval attaché at the embassy in Moscow — a woman who’d formed very close friendships with both Sinyavsky and Daniel and others, named Hélène Peltier. She went on to become a professor of Slavic literature in France. She eventually married someone and took on a different last name, Zamoyska. But this is an amazing story of a kind of platonic smuggling love triangle, and then the whole thing unravels and these two writers are arrested.

You mentioned the trial itself. Thanks to the wives of the two defendants, particularly the wife of Yuli Daniel — a woman who had a PhD in linguistics, Larisa Bogoraz, who went on to become, I would say, a more important dissident than Daniel himself (and we can talk about her later, and also why it’s the men who became famous rather than the women in general) — she and the wife of Sinyavsky, a woman named Maria Rozanova, as spouses were permitted to enter the courtroom. That was a small form of transparency that the state allowed.

They were able to create verbatim transcripts of the trial, and those transcripts were eventually reproduced under the technique known as samizdat, which is just a Russian neologism that means “published it myself.” What it means in reality is people with typewriters, carbon paper, and onion skin paper just multiplying — like a chain letter — a text of anywhere from 1 to 500 pages. The transcripts of these trials started to spread around the Soviet Union. They were also smuggled abroad and published in all of the major European languages as well as Japanese, I believe.

These trial transcripts were dynamite. Like a lot of historians, we all want to bring our protagonists to life. We want to create, within the realm of the factually verifiable, stories that bring the past to life. We want to do what the great historian Bill Cronon described as carving stories out of what is true. At some point it hit me when I was working on this book: I have dialogue that I can reproduce in my book. I don’t have to make up people talking to each other. I actually have dialogue that was captured in two forms — trials (the back and forth between the prosecution and the defendants or the witnesses) and interrogation transcripts (the dialogue between the interrogator and the victim or the witness in any given case). It’s a dream come true for a historian to be able to say, “And then he said, and then he said, and then she said,” and it’s literally something you can document.

To make it even better, I discovered something when I was working at the archive of the Hoover Institution in California at Stanford. For all these years we’ve known that the two wives created this transcript of the trial, and that transcript has been read very widely — people have written about it. But always in the back of my mind was: How accurate is that transcript? Larisa Bogoraz was a linguist, she was very skilled at shorthand note-taking, but we have no way of knowing whether that is a full and accurate record.

Then I found the KGB dossier on Andrei Sinyavsky at the Hoover Archive. During the early post-Soviet period, any dissident or the descendant or spouse of a dissident had the right to request a copy of their KGB dossier. Andrei Sinyavsky did this for himself, and after he died, his widow, Maria Rozanova, sold that dossier to the Hoover Institution.

There is — talk about a Eureka moment — amazing material in that archive. Interrogation records from before and during the trial. But among other things, I found that the government produced its own transcript of the trial. If you look carefully at photographs during the trial, you’ll see that on the defendant’s dock where Sinyavsky and Daniel are sitting are two things that look a lot like microphones. I’m pretty sure that the KGB was making a recording of the trial. The plan was that they would release the transcript in an attempt to damn the defendants.

But they were kind of rookies at trials that weren’t scripted. They were rookies at trials where the defendants hadn’t been tortured in advance. What they got with this recording was: “Oops, this is a transcript that really doesn’t make us look good. It makes the defendants look good."

The key point is that I compared the official transcript, which had never been released, with the one that was created by the wives of the defendants. Lo and behold, the transcript that circulated in samizdat and eventually in the West was about 95% accurate. It was extremely close to a transcript that was made from what I am convinced was a tape recording. In some cases, the unofficial transcript was more accurate because it recorded the audience reaction — there are moments where it says “stormy applause” or “grumbling in the audience.”

Jordan Schneider: It’s like stage direction.

Ben Nathans: Exactly. It’s just like “you are there” text. I can’t make up anything better than this transcript. It’s like the interrogation transcripts — I can’t do better than that. This was a dream.

Jordan Schneider: I think we owe it to them to do a little reading session. Here are my two favorite excerpts from this. This is the interrogator speaking — “The majority of your works contain slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet state and socialist system. Explain what led you to write such words and illegally send them abroad.”

The defendant responds, “I don’t consider my works to be slanderous or anti-Soviet. What led me to write them were artistic challenges and interests, as well as certain literary problems that troubled me. In my works, I resorted to the supernatural and the fantastic. I portrayed people who were experiencing various maniacal conditions and sometimes people with ill psyches. I made broad use of devices such as the grotesque, comic absurdities, illogic, bold experiments of language.”

The interrogator continues, “In the court session and in the collection published under the title ’Fantastic Stories,’ the Soviet Union is described as a society based on force, as an artificial system imposed on the people in which spiritual freedom is impossible. Is it really possible to call such works fantastic?”

The defendant replies, “I don’t agree with this evaluation of my works.”

It’s brilliant because he’s getting the interrogator to essentially admit that what he’s saying is true — that the Soviet Union is a crappy place to live.

Ben Nathans: Yes, there are many layers going on here. But I want to push back a little against what you said earlier. The purpose of Sinyavsky’s and Daniel’s self-defense — and they’re amazingly eloquent when they’re on the stand — was to make the case for the autonomy of the literary imagination. They were trying to say that literature is outside the sphere of ideology, politics, and also the law. That’s very different from what Volpin wanted to make out of this trial.

The two writers in the dock were trying to assert the freedom of the literary imagination — in other words, to defend the vocation of the writer of fiction. What Volpin wanted to show was how the government couldn’t put together a consistent legal case and how important it was for the details of this trial to be made known to the public.

Even though Volpin wasn’t the one who arranged for the codification and dissemination of the unofficial transcript, the people who did came up with a very clever strategy. The trial lasted roughly three days. What they did was punctuate the unofficial transcript with coverage in the Soviet press. You’d have day one of the trial — here’s what was said verbatim by the judge, witness, defendants, prosecutor, whatever. Then here’s what the Soviet press said about the trial for all the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who couldn’t be there.

When you saw this juxtaposition and how warped and skewed and tendentious the Soviet media coverage was, the effect was devastating. Anybody who read this could only conclude that the Soviet media was a completely unreliable reporter on what had actually happened in this trial. It was a devastating document in its time.

Jordan Schneider: One more excerpt on the literary aspect. This is the judge speaking to Daniel — “You wrote directly about the Soviet government, not about ancient Babylon, but about a specific government, complaining that it announced a public murder day. You even named the date, August 10, 1969, right? Is that a device or outright slander?”

Daniel responds, “I’ll take your example. If Ivanova were to write that Sidorova flies around on a broomstick and turns herself into an animal, that would be a literary device, not slander. I chose a deliberately fantastic situation. This is a literary device.”

The judge asks, “Daniel, are you trying to deny that ‘public murder day’ supposedly announced by the Soviet government is in fact slander?”

Daniel replies, “I consider slander to be something that at least in theory, you could make other people believe.”

Ben Nathans: Yes! If you find it credible, you’re an enemy of the Soviet state. But if you recognize it as fantastical, like I do, then you’re not. Brilliant argument, absolutely brilliant.

Jordan Schneider: This tactic of making the system risible — are there parallels in the Chinese context that come to mind?

Ian Johnson: In some ways the avant-garde artists in the 1990s were trying to achieve that with some of their art, but I don’t think there’s anything quite the same as what happened here.

It made me very envious because I kept thinking, “These are such colorful characters and there’s such a richness of data that you have because of the archives being open, at least for a certain amount of time — enough time to get the stuff out in a way that hasn’t happened with China.” Perhaps we’ll see stuff like that happen in the future.

Ben Nathans: It’s actually, as always with humor, a seriously interesting subject — why things are funny, what makes them funny, what context allows these things to be perceived as funny. The question for me is: was it the absurdity of the Soviet system that generated so much dark humor?

Jordan, first of all, I’m delighted that you picked up on the funny parts of the book, because it would be tragic if that got missed. But I want to be clear: it’s not only dissidents that made jokes about the government and the Soviet system. Joking was pervasive. This was a very widespread coping mechanism and also a meaning-generating mechanism.

I could rattle off any number of Soviet anecdotes that have nothing to do with dissent per se, but are meant to capture the absurdity of some aspects of life in that system. My favorite one is: “First learn to swim, then we’ll fill the pool with water.” (“Учимся плавать…нам воды нальют.”) This captures the out-of-sync-ness of so much of the patterns of life in that country.

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When I tell these jokes to my students at Penn, the result is usually a sea of blank faces. The minute you explain a joke, you have executed that joke, and it loses its frisson or energy. These are culturally specific jokes, but what they capture is profound and deep.

I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to say, but there’s some combination of the predecessor to the Soviet Union — namely the Imperial Russian substratum — and the absurdities of the Soviet way of organizing society that produced this bottomless reservoir of dark humor. It really is the thing that I think will abide after all the other traces of that civilization are gone. The humor will still be there.

Jordan Schneider: There’s just this aspect of earnestness that you see in the Chinese post-imperial political tradition where... perhaps this is a ChatGPT query. I’ll try to find the funniest stuff written by Chinese people about Chinese politics. But none of the dissidents today are particularly funny in the Chinese context.

Ian Johnson: Chinese people, of course, are funny and they love to tell jokes, but there’s this phrase in Chinese, “you guo you min” (忧国忧民) — “worrying about the nation, worrying about people”. One is essentially a Confucian official, concerned about the country and concerned about people, and therefore it’s your duty to do this, as opposed to this scallywag, ne’er-do-well aspect that comes out a bit in the Soviet era.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, you have Taoist holy fools, but the Taoist holy fools aren’t there to make fun of the emperor. They’re just there to be drunk and have a good time.

Ben Nathans: It’s worth noting that when the Soviet dissident movement was covered in real time, above all by Western journalists, they almost never mentioned humor. People like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were not perceived as having any sense of humor. It’s only when you start digging below the surface, and especially into the memoirs and the diaries and the letters and other less well-known sources, that you realize there is this substratum of coping through humor and satire. It’s very deep.

Ian Johnson: That’s a good point because when journalists are trying to sell the story, they’re trying to sell it as a big serious story about people standing up to authority, and humor doesn’t fit into that narrative well.

Disseminating Defiance

Jordan Schneider: Ben, let’s take it back to this incredible trial of these authors. How does anyone end up hearing about it? How does this get disseminated?

Ben Nathans: Samizdat (Cамиздат) is a DIY technology where people create copies of restricted literature in their bedrooms. The two wives of the defendants produce their own unofficial transcripts. They do this day in and day out over the course of the trial. Eventually it becomes part of an anthology of documents — the transcript of the trial, coverage by the Soviet press, letters from various observers. It circulates through this technique known as samizdat, which is just a Russian neologism that means “I published it myself.” The implication is: I never could have published this in any of the state-sponsored publishing houses, where everything has to pass through the censor’s office.

The technique is almost unbelievably simple. All you need is a typewriter and very thin, preferably onion skin paper, and carbon paper. You create a stack of alternating onion skin and carbon paper. It could be three deep, five deep. Some people say it could be as many as 10 or 12 sheets deep. You wind it around the platen in your typewriter and you pound on the keys. When you’re typing, you’re actually making three, five or ten copies of the document. One of the typists said that by the time you finish typing a novel on samizdat, you’ve got shoulders like a lumberjack because you’re just pounding the keys.

Then it disseminates the way a chain letter disseminates. You give one copy of this text to someone and that’s essentially a gift. You’re saying to that person, “I’m allowing you to read this uncensored text which is technically illegal” — although that’s a gray zone — “and could get you into trouble.” In return for the favor of granting you access to this forbidden fruit, you yourself have to create multiple copies of it and distribute it again to people who you trust.

It seems very primitive, but a couple of things were happening around samizdat that made it much more efficient than it might first appear. One is that samizdat texts were often — not always, but often — smuggled abroad, and a certain proportion of those smuggled texts were taken up by publishing houses in the West. They were either translated and published for Western readers or translated by an émigré press in Russian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian or whatever indigenous Soviet language they’d been composed in. Typically they would be published in small pocket-sized editions and smuggled back into the Soviet Union in a technique known as tamizdat (tamиздат), which means “published over there."

I have an example that I purchased years ago of this little book. It’s a handbook for dissidents or anybody who thinks they might be called in for an interrogation by the KGB. It’s by another mathematician named Vladimir Albrecht, and it’s called How to Be a Witness (Как Быть Свидетелем). It’s literally a manual for: “What do you do? What do you say? What do you not say? How do you say it?,” if you get hauled in by the KGB in a trial. It’s a fantastic book, well worth reading now. In fact, it’s been reproduced on the internet in Russia now for protesters starting in 2011, who also were getting hauled in by the KGB’s successor, the FSB.

Tamizdat significantly amplified the reach of samizdat publications. The true power emerged when these smuggled samizdat texts reached the research divisions of shortwave radio stations broadcasting to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This included broadcasters like Voice of America (which Trump is in the process of obliterating), Radio Free Europe, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Kol Yisrael. Many foreign countries used shortwave radio to broadcast what we would now consider audiobooks.

Samizdat texts themselves were typically homemade books, crudely bound perhaps with a paperclip. The networks involved in producing and distributing samizdat encompassed tens of thousands of people. I can say that with some confidence because the KGB did my research for me in this case. As you can imagine, there was no institution in the world that was more interested in the dissident movement and in what it was doing and producing than the KGB.

The KGB conducted an incredibly thorough investigation of the most popular underground samizdat periodical, A Chronicle of Current Events. Their findings demonstrated that samizdat was available in every medium to large size Soviet city, from Moscow to Vladivostok, across all 11 time zones. They compiled lists of tens of thousands of individuals involved in these distribution networks — people who were creating, distributing, or just reading samizdat. That’s a significant number of people.

When considering “radizdat” (radio publishing through shortwave radio stations), then we’re talking about millions, probably tens of millions of listeners. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to calculate the number of Soviet listeners, but the anecdotal evidence from diaries and memoirs is overwhelming that this was a very widespread phenomenon all across the Soviet Union.

These distribution networks start looking a little less backward and inefficient than they might at first glance. Between 2000 and 2010, in the heyday of the internet when all kinds of utopian aspirations were being read into the internet and what it would do in terms of creating a globally transparent information society, people liked to say, “Oh, the internet is the samizdat of the 21st century. It leaves samizdat in the dust because now we’re talking about billions of people able to communicate below the radar screen with unmediated contact to each other. Isn’t that wonderful?"

Well, it turns out that in some ways samizdat was far superior to the internet. The most obvious way is that samizdat was an ownerless technology. Nobody owned it. There was no platform belonging to Meta, Google or to anybody else. That meant samizdat couldn’t be disrupted, controlled, or censored in the way internet platforms are — and trust me, the KGB tried many times. In that respect, while it may be technologically backward, it was far more effective as a medium for true freedom of expression.

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Jordan Schneider: I want to read my two favorite paragraphs of your writing in the book that describe the experience of what it was like to be a samizdat reader and creator:

“Samizdat provided not just new things to read, but new modes of reading. There was binge reading: staying up all night pouring through a sheath of onion-skin papers because you’d been given twenty-four hours to consume a novel that Volodia was expecting the next day, and because, quite apart from Volodia’s expectations, you didn’t want that particular novel in your apartment for any longer than necessary. There was slow-motion reading: for the privilege of access to a samizdat text, you might be obliged to return not just the original but multiple copies to the lender. This meant reading while simultaneously pounding out a fresh version of the text on a typewriter, as a thick raft of onion-skin sheets alternating with carbon paper slowly wound its way around the platen, line by line, three, six, or as many as twelve deep. “Your shoulders would hurt like a lumberjack’s,” recalled one typist. Experienced samizdat readers claimed to be able to tell how many layers had been between any given sheet and the typewriter’s ink ribbon. There was group reading: for texts whose supply could not keep up with demand, friends would gather and form an assembly line around the kitchen table, passing each successive page from reader to reader, something impossible to do with a book. And there was site-specific reading: certain texts were simply too valuable, too fragile, or too dangerous to be lent out. To read Trotsky, you went to this person’s apartment; to read Orwell, to that person’s.

However and wherever it was read, samizdat delivered the added frisson of the forbidden. Its shabby appearance—frayed edges, wrinkles, ink smudges, and traces of human sweat—only accentuated its authenticity.75 Samizdat turned reading into an act of transgression. Having liberated themselves from the Aesopian language of writers who continued to struggle with internal and external censors, samizdat readers could imagine themselves belonging to the world’s edgiest and most secretive book club. Who were the other members, and who had held the very same onion-skin sheets that you were now holding? How many retypings separated you from the author?”

Ian Johnson: That really demonstrates a fact of civil movements or civic movements — that it’s smaller groups that are bound together in some way that have a much more lasting impact. The problem with social media is it’s good at creating a straw fire. Let’s all go out to protest, to “take down Wall Street” or whatever it is, but two months later, how many people are still with you? After somebody gets arrested, who’s with you? Immediately people drop away. But people who are bound in this collective act are much more likely to have some impact.

Jordan Schneider: It was scary, but also fun, exciting, and cool. They’re all hanging out together, drinking till five o’clock in the morning. It was a lifestyle in a way that just being on Twitter and posting is not. Because there was this thrill of the chase and excitement.

Ben Nathans: To the list of qualities that you just mentioned, I would add something essential to this movement from start to finish: the intense adult friendships that kept these face-to-face communities together and the kinds of trust and loyalty that those friendships entailed. These are meaningful things in any setting, but they are especially meaningful in a setting like the post-Stalinist Soviet Union where the level of public or social trust was really catastrophically low.

People were afraid of informers and people who might denounce them, whether they were neighbors or co-workers. The counterpart of these little islands of trust and friendship among men and women in these groups was a high degree of suspicion and cynicism about society as a whole. Those are legacies that are still at play in Russia today. They were certainly enabling for the dissident movement, because to engage in these kinds of activities — which could get you arrested, could prevent your children from ever getting into a university — you really had to trust the people that you worked with, whether it was on drafting a document or taking part in a demonstration or simply housing and disseminating samizdat texts.

Those were really important qualities, and the intensity of friendship and trust within the movement had a dark side which made the movement rather elitist. It made the participants skeptical of people that they didn’t know. One of Volpin’s criteria for success for these demonstrations was always, “Did I see people there that I don’t know?” Because he wanted that. He recognized that to become an actual social movement, one needed to move beyond these circles defined by friendship and intimacy. But that was easier said than done. For many people, the suspicion of strangers never went away, and they preferred to work in small groups with a lot of mutual knowledge and the ability to work together creatively.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because on the one hand, unless you can have a chain reaction — real exponential growth — it’s hard to have real change. But on the other hand, for a lot of these people, what triggered them down this path was the KGB putting them into a position where they had to start incriminating their friends. That was the ethical fork in the road. Most people chose to comply, but for a handful of folks who became the core among the thousands who challenged the system, that was the thing that brought them to a moment of truth about how they were going to relate to the regime.

Ben Nathans: Yes. It’s what I call, and I borrow this from Andrei Sinyavsky himself, the “moral stumbling block.” It could take many different forms. For someone at the elite level of the system like Andrei Sakharov, this great physicist who was the architect of some of the Soviet Union’s most lethal nuclear weapons, the stumbling block was when he realized that he was going to have no say about how those weapons were used, including how they were tested and the environmental damage that resulted from the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.

But for many people it was more like what you described, where they’re brought in to the KGB in whatever city they live in and they’re told that they are going to become informants for the KGB and they’re going to have to tell the KGB in weekly or monthly meetings what their friends are up to. For some people that was such an ethical crisis that they couldn’t live with themselves if they adopted that role. Yet they were loyal citizens; they had been brought up to respect the KGB as the protector of the revolution. These created crisis moments. Most people ended up making their peace with the system, adjusting to it. But for certain very high-minded Soviet citizens, that was morally impossible. Those are the people who sometimes found their way to the movement.

Jordan Schneider: In the post-Stalinist context, you’re not getting shot, but this is not costless. There are lots of examples in your book of people losing their jobs, people being sent away from their kids, of not being able to care for elder relatives. It’s still a very aggressive step to take, even though the KGB is not going to take you behind the shed.

Ben Nathans: Yes. All of those things that you mentioned are terrible. They disrupt lives, they ruin lives. But to really assess their historic significance, you have to see them in comparison with the kind of punishments that were meted out under Stalin. Under Stalin, the people who populate my book would have been shot. These dissidents would have been shot in dungeons in the KGB headquarters in Moscow and in the various provincial headquarters, or they would have been sent to the gulag for hard labor for up to 25 years.

The last thing I want to do is whitewash the punitive system under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but it’s a sea change from what preceded it. That was noticed by the dissidents themselves. Sinyavsky writes about his interrogation based on his own father’s experience that he was expecting to be beaten and possibly tortured. Instead, he describes the KGB agents who interrogated him as astonishingly polite. They’re trying to get him to talk.

“Redder than Red” Dissidents

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about someone who had some gulag stripes, Grigorenko. There’s a really interesting parallel with the line he takes, because a fair number of folks in China also have this “redder than red” justification for their issues with the regime.

Ben Nathans: Early on in the history of both of these regimes, the typical worldview of someone who became a protester or a dissident was Marxism-Leninism. They held this idea that the regime had somehow jumped the tracks and was no longer living up to the ideals of the revolution. This, after all, was Mao’s great criticism of the Soviet Union after Stalin: that it had somehow slipped into a very pernicious form of revisionism, and that Khrushchev, under the guise of de-Stalinization, was actually turning the Soviet Union into a reactionary bourgeois country. Therefore it was incumbent upon Mao and China to take up the banner that Lenin had led and to become the vanguard of the world socialist revolution.

Similarly, domestic opposition in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 50s generally advocated a return to Marxism and Leninism. It’s when that ideological worldview starts to run out of gas, starts to lose its energy and its mobilizing capacity, that a space is opened up for a new approach. That new approach is the legalist philosophy, which is much more minimalist. It’s not about toppling the regime, it’s certainly not about any kind of revolution. Volpin and other rights defenders were fed up with revolutions and their accompanying violence. They wanted incremental, fully law-abiding change.

Someone like Grigorenko was a convinced Leninist. It’s only very late in life, after he has played out his part in the dissident movement and has been forced to leave the country and settle in New York, only then does he really adopt a new worldview of Christianity and give up the Leninism that he had advocated for most of his professional life, both in the army and as an important member of the dissident movement.

Ian Johnson: That’s really true for China as well. A lot of the people would always talk about reading or ransacking the collected works of Marx and Engels for the footnotes, because that was their way of finding out more about Western philosophy and outside ideas. It was inspiring to them as well, but in different ways.

Ben Nathans: Somebody should do a history of the various modes of reading Marx, Lenin, and Mao. It’s a particularly good group of authors to do such a study for because their works were produced in mass state-subsidized editions of tens of millions. That means that we have an unusually large readership. The work of the historian will be to recapture the nature of those readings and the receptions of those works.

Any work that has even a minimal level of complexity lends itself to different ways of reading and misreading or creative misreading. This would be a fantastic case study of texts that were read by millions, maybe billions of people. They’re a touchstone for how people read — what they make of a given text in any given time and place.

Jordan Schneider: It makes you feel for Xi Jinping printing all those books with no one reading them. I want to do a reading from some of the Grigorenko transcripts. This is the prosecutor saying: “We’re not here to lead a theoretical discussion. You created an underground organization whose goal was to topple the Soviet government. Fighting against that is the task of the organs of state security, not of party commissions.”

"That’s an exaggeration,” he responded. “I didn’t create an organization with the aim of violently overthrowing the existing order. I created an organization for the dissemination of undistorted Leninism, for the unmasking of its falsifiers.”

The prosecutor: “If it was only a matter of propagating Leninism, why were you hiding in the underground? Preach within the system of party political education and its meetings.”

His response: “You know better than I that that’s impossible. The fact that Leninism has to be preached from the underground demonstrates better than anything that the current party leadership has deviated from Leninist positions and thereby lost the right to leadership of the party and has given to communist Leninists the right to struggle against that leadership.”

Ben Nathans: Bravo. This is Grigorenko who is a major general in the Soviet army. When people talk about dissidence as coming from the fringes of society, I always bring up Grigorenko because he is as embedded in that society and as much a product of its educational system as anybody you can imagine. I hope this is one of the deep themes of the book that emerges over time: orthodoxies produce their own heresies.

It’s impossible to imagine a person like Grigorenko existing in any society other than that of the Soviet Union. He is a poster child for Soviet values. These people are the products of their own system. They’re very Soviet in a way, but they’re repurposing the cognitive categories and the moral ideals in directions that the state had not anticipated.

Jordan Schneider: Ian, in a lot of the more recent protests in China as well, you have this critique from the left as much as from a small-l liberal right. The contemporary Chinese government is not living up to the ideals of socialism as defined in a different way than Xi would.

Ian Johnson: When looking at these people also in the Chinese context, similarly, it’s a mistake to think of them as just coming from the fringes. There are people firmly embedded inside the system — as they say in Chinese, tizhinei (体制内), inside the system — who are critics and who write these things. Certainly in the Mao era, but even now, these are people who often have access to more information and have a better idea of the way the system works. They become that much stronger and more effective critics.

PR with Chinese Characteristics

Ian Johnson: Something else I noticed in reading the book is that the Soviet leadership seemed more sensitive to the West than I would expect in a Chinese context. In the Chinese context, maybe in the 90s when they were trying to get into the World Trade Organization, people paid attention to what Western governments said. But the Soviet leadership seemed much more concerned about how they were perceived in Western countries. Is that accurate? How much of a role did that play in the leeway that these people got in your book?

Ben Nathans: It’s accurate, and it was an extremely significant fact — this sensitivity to Western opinion. This came home to me in a moment during my research that I didn’t include in the book, but I’ll share it with you now.

Among the many genres of documents that I drew on are transcripts of Politburo conversations. During the time when the post-Soviet Russian Federation was more open to researchers, you could get your hands on quite a few transcripts of Politburo conversations, including conversations about human rights, dissidents and Western criticism.

There’s one moment where Leonid Brezhnev is on a rant about Western coverage of Soviet policy, and he starts to cite a critical article from the The Baltimore Sun. Now, I’m a native of Baltimore. I was born there and grew up there and The Baltimore Sun’s a great newspaper. It’s probably a second or third tier newspaper in the American hierarchy of papers, clearly less important and influential than The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Miami Herald or The LA Times.

So I’m thinking, “Okay, just take a deep breath here and realize that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one of two superpowers in the world, is getting upset by an article that was published in The Baltimore Sun.” Has there ever been an American president who could even name a Soviet newspaper other than Pravda and Izvestia? I seriously doubt it. This brought home to me the extraordinary prickliness of Soviet leaders when it came to Western criticism.

Why is that? Why does Brezhnev even care what The Baltimore Sun is saying about him or his government? It’s a clue to the idea that the Soviet Union saw itself as coming out of the same enlightenment modernizing tradition as Western countries. It didn’t see itself as civilizationally different or superior. Marxism-Leninism and socialism was seen as civilizationally superior to capitalism. But the point is that the story they were operating within is a succession story. It’s like Christianity emerging from Judaism or any of the other religious stories of religious evolution over time.

To Soviet leaders, it really did matter what people in the West thought, not just because they were competing with Western societies and attempting to outdo them, but they saw themselves as essentially genetically emerging from those societies. Therefore it was just unacceptable to be described as inferior or having lost their way in this historical trajectory that begins with the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848 and all the things that formed the traditions of socialism and social democracy.

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Ian would know much more about this than I do, but having read a little bit in the debates about Asian particularism when it came to defending Asian countries against charges of human rights violations, and the idea that human rights are a Western cultural code, and they’re not really — the individualism that is embedded in human rights thinking is not appropriate for societies in which the family and the collective is the preeminent unit. The Soviet leaders never took that defense the way the leaders of, say, Singapore or China have been known to do. They saw themselves as having a superior set of human rights norms than that of the West. They had outdone the West at its own game.

This is a really crucial difference and remains true today, although the contrast is not as sharp because Putin and his entourage are fed up with criticism from the West that they just don’t care anymore. They no longer defend their values on a continuum that includes the West. Now the talk is of the Russian world, of Russia as a civilization unto itself. That way of thinking is much older and much more familiar to the Chinese.

Ian Johnson: The Chinese government's response to human rights criticisms is purely tactical. They might issue white papers highlighting human rights issues in the United States, for example, but this is often a way of “thumbing their nose” at the U.S., essentially saying, “You think we have problems? You've got equally big ones.” Unlike countries that signed agreements such as the Helsinki Accords, committing to specific benchmarks, China has never truly agreed to external human rights standards. Fundamentally, they don't value Western opinions on these matters as much.

This highlights significant differences between the two systems. In the Soviet Union, deep-seated economic problems fueled a groundswell of support for dissidents. In China, however, economic conditions improved relatively quickly after the Mao era, which meant less grassroots support for dissident movements. This echoes something you write in the conclusion about the German historian Mommsen’s observation about the Nazi era — “resistance without a people.”

China's success with economic reforms, something Gorbachev couldn't replicate, effectively undercut much of the potential dissident support in China compared to what existed in the Soviet Union.

Ben Nathans: Yeah, that’s super important. If you ask yourself what was the single greatest, most resonant achievement of the Soviet state across its entire history, everyone from that country will tell you the defeat of Nazism in World War II. That was the shining moment. If you listen to Putin talk, he just reinforces that point — that it’s the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, this epic struggle that cost the Soviet Union roughly 25 million lives.

The problem with having a peak performance like that is that it’s fixed in time and it’s constantly receding in time from the current generation. The Chinese government’s greatest achievement is having lifted 700 million people out of poverty. It continues to provide a form of material well-being — it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s not stuck in time. It’s not an event that ended in 1945, the way the so-called Great Patriotic War ended. As a source of not just legitimacy, but prestige, the Chinese government has a product that is much more effective than the Soviet government or today’s Russian government has.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, the theme of prestige is something that has come up on past episodes of ChinaTalk. We did a four-hour two-part series on the new book, To Run the World. Ben, the sheer level of embarrassment among Soviet leaders is remarkable. You frequently mention how the Politburo would hold 30 or 40 meetings just to discuss handling someone like Sakharov. It's remarkable how worried they were about individuals making funny jokes at their expense and pointing out to the rest of the world that they’re a society where the emperor doesn’t have any clothes.

Ben Nathans: Yes, it’s something that I continue to struggle to understand. On the one hand, there was a tremendous degree of self-confidence. The Soviet Union won the war, they launched the first human into space, they were the largest country on earth, feared and respected by everyone, they were no longer alone in the socialist camp, it had a series of allies in Eastern Europe and was gaining more in Asia and in Africa, it even had Cuba in the Western Hemisphere. There were many markers of success and achievement.

This isn't even considering their performance in elite pursuits like chess, physics, math, ballet, poetry, and literature. In terms of high culture, all the benchmarks were met. Yet, as you point out, these apparent symptoms of insecurity were completely out of proportion to the actual threat. One gets the feeling there was a deep, subterranean anxiety they simply couldn't shake.

Henry Kissinger famously stated during détente that if a kiosk in Moscow could sell The New York Times or The Washington Post — effectively breaking the Soviet state's information monopoly — it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't make any difference. Evidently, the Politburo thought otherwise. They believed they couldn't afford any disruption to their control over what information Soviet citizens could access. That's why they tried to jam Western shortwave radio broadcasts, punished dissidents, and conducted thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of apartment searches in a completely quixotic attempt to literally destroy all samizdat. This was impossible because it was an entirely decentralized system of textual production; you simply can't control it, and the KGB failed miserably.

It's challenging to fully grasp the mindset of figures like Yuri Andropov, who led the KGB and briefly the Communist Party. How did he balance the Soviet Union's perceived security with its underlying insecurities? Did he genuinely view individuals like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and other dissidents, as potentially fatal threats to the Soviet system? The sheer number of man-hours and the level of anxiety dedicated to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago are mind-boggling. The regime truly perceived these texts and individuals as potentially lethal adversaries, despite the fact that, as mentioned earlier, the core activist group likely never exceeded a thousand people in a population of 250 million.

I had to ask myself, how did this tiny band of dissidents come to appear so threatening to the regime? Part of the answer is there was this underlying, unacknowledged current of anxiety about the Soviet Union’s sustainability. But there was also this belief that these dissidents were puppets of Western intelligence services. While they might look like a tiny band of intellectuals and misfits, they had the backing of the CIA, MI6, and other security services, and therefore they were worth taking seriously as a threat to the Soviet system. But there’s some mystery here that I have not been able to solve.

A Cautionary Tale 前车之鉴

Ian Johnson: There’s a corollary to that. If they took it all seriously, Xi Jinping in a speech bemoaned the fall of the Soviet Union. He said, “At the end of the day, no one was man enough to stand up and save it.” Essentially, why didn’t somebody send in the tanks? Why did they just let the whole thing collapse? On the one hand, they take all this so seriously, but at the end of the day, they seem also paralyzed by the same fear or the anxiety that you’re talking about, and they just can’t do anything about it.

Ben Nathans: It remains one of the greatest enigmas of the Soviet collapse: How could a superpower, armed to the teeth and having survived the most lethal attack in human history — Hitler's Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 — ultimately collapse like a house of cards?

I’m inclined to think that the explanation doesn’t lie in fear and anxiety. The truly surprising aspect, which you precisely identified, is the lack of resistance from those with the most to lose: the political elites. Why weren't the stakeholders in the Soviet system more aggressive, proactive and willing to use violence in its defense?

Here there are two parts to the answer. One is Gorbachev, who had orchestrated the reforms that ended up unintentionally unraveling the system. Gorbachev was such a perfect Leninist and had mastered and internalized the language of restoring the ideals of the Bolshevik and of Leninism to such a great extent that his conservative rivals inside the party bureaucracy and the state apparatus couldn’t find a distinct discourse to oppose him. He essentially co-opted the language of Leninism and of socialist idealism in a way that made it very hard for Soviet conservatives and system defenders to outmaneuver him. It took them a relatively a long time, relatively speaking, to understand that Gorbachev, while he sounded like the ultimate poster child for Soviet values and the Soviet system, was actually going to undermine it by trying to fix it and reform it. There’s that famous phrase from Alexis de Tocqueville: the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian regime is when it embarks on a campaign of reform. That’s when everything can go haywire.

There are two main parts to this answer.

1. Gorbachev himself — Gorbachev orchestrated reforms that, unintentionally, led to the system's unraveling. Gorbachev was such a devout Leninist, so adept at mastering and internalizing the language of restoring Bolshevik and Leninist ideals, that his conservative rivals within the party bureaucracy and state apparatus couldn't find a distinct discourse to oppose him. He essentially co-opted the very language of Leninism and socialist idealism, making it incredibly difficult for Soviet conservatives and system defenders to outmaneuver him. It took them a relatively long time to understand that while Gorbachev sounded like the ideal proponent of Soviet values, his attempts to "fix" and reform the system would actually undermine it. This aligns with Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observation: the most dangerous moment for an authoritarian regime is when it embarks on a campaign of reform, as that's when everything can go haywire.

2. Lack of systemic legitimacy — the other reason why Soviet elites did not, to use Xi’s words, stand up like a man and defend their interests and the system that had raised them and that they allegedly stood for, is that the dissidents had helped hollow out the legitimacy of that system. That was not really the dissidents’ goal. Remember, their goal was to disseminate legal consciousness among their fellow citizens and to get the Soviet state to be more law-abiding. They failed on both of those fronts. If anything, the KGB became less law-abiding as it grew more frustrated with the fallout from these various dissident trials. They always got the guilty verdict. Everybody was sentenced to five or six or seven years, and that’s because the KGB got on the phone with the lawyer before the trial began and dictated the outcome. But the political fallout of these trials was a disaster. The government looked clumsy, ham-fisted, authoritarian and secretive.

The unintended effect, but possibly the most important effect, historically speaking, of the dissident movement was that it hollowed out the legitimacy of the regime. Time and again, it demonstrated that the Soviet state, which 24/7 proclaimed itself the avant-garde of human history, the most modern and forward-looking society on Earth, couldn't even abide by its own laws. It was perpetually improvising and subverting its own legal system. Reconciling these two realities—an image as the vanguard of human history versus an essentially lawless government—was impossible. This contradiction undermined people's inherent loyalty to the system and led them to question its own self-promoting rhetoric.

Furthermore, by the time you get to the 1980s, this is a system that’s been around for 70-some years. Revolutionary energy, like all energy, is subject to entropy. It dissipates over time. What we’re dealing with by the 1960s and 70s is what I call “second-generation socialism.” It lacked the fervor, the “bloodlust” and the convictions that go along with revolutionary fervor of the original generation of Bolsheviks.

Among the many excellent reasons why one should learn Chinese if you’re a historian of the Soviet Union, it’s that the Chinese have studied the Soviet collapse more closely than anybody, because they perceive it as being the most important historical episode for them to master. God forbid that China should fall apart the way the Soviet Union did. I would love to be able to read what Chinese historians have written about the Soviet collapse, because the lessons that they draw are really important for the way the current Chinese government understands what it is, what it must avoid, and what it must do.

My understanding from secondhand accounts is that the dominant Chinese interpretation of the Soviet collapse interprets the collapse as a function of a loss of ideological vigor and of ideological commitment. That is why Xi is absolutely determined to constantly buttress ideological commitment to the party, to the nation, to the state. This is a hugely important example of the way countries extract historical lessons from other countries’ experience.

Jordan Schneider: It's interesting to consider this in the context of the era you're describing, Ben. The abundance of content and the ability to live a life largely removed from direct state interference in China today is fundamentally different from the Soviet experience. This holds true not just for the 1930s and 40s, but also through the 60s, 70s, and 80s in the USSR. You’re not stuck listening to state media all the time. You can read pretty much whatever book you want. You can even get on the Western internet for the most part and watch MrBeast. Actually, MrBeast is even on Bilibili. The extent to which the Soviet state’s hypocrisies have a detrimental impact on daily life in the latter half of the USSR creates a fundamentally different experience.

On one hand, the contemporary Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) survival strategy seems to be: “We'll make people richer and richer over time, ensuring they never have to think about politics.” However, this approach can be somewhat disappointing for someone like Xi Jinping, who was shaped by the Cultural Revolution and deeply believes in the Party and its mission. Having everyone simply tune out politically isn’t ideal; it’s neither particularly satisfying nor a reliable long-term strategy.

You also have this attempt, sometimes clumsy, sometimes more effective, to integrate Party ideology into college classes and other spheres. Ian, what are your thoughts on this tension between encouraging people to “tune out” politically while simultaneously trying to “tune them in” to bolster the party?

Ben Nathans: Is it truly the case that you can access virtually anything you want on the Chinese internet without fear of repercussions?

Ian Johnson: Well, a lot of things are blocked, but you can live a very full life — if you don’t ask too many questions about society around you. Often, people feel they’re getting almost everything they need. If you’ve studied abroad, you might want to access Facebook, but for most, there’s a parallel universe of perfectly adequate Chinese social media apps. People are generally prosperous and can travel.

While some might desire a bit more knowledge, even if you want to know about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, a government account is available. If you’ve heard about it, you can go online to Baidu, China’s equivalent of Wikipedia, and find an entry. It hasn’t been erased. It says that there were some chaotic people in China who caused an uproar and the government had to come in. They have accurate photos of government tanks that were burned out. If you see the picture of Tank Man, they’ll say, “Yeah, Tank Man, it shows the government didn’t run over people. There’s a guy standing in front of a bunch of tanks. The tanks are trying to get around him.”

They employ a lot of people to construct this matrix-like alternative universe. If you’re really hell-bent to dig deeper, you can get a VPN and jump over the firewall and see what’s going on. But most people, like in any country, are not that political. For 90% of the population, if tomorrow’s a better day, that’s pretty much okay.

Ben Nathans: Yeah. That description isn’t far off from how I’d describe life for many Soviet citizens in the 1970s, minus the economic prosperity. But there was still a sense that you could carve out a life for yourself outside the state’s constant ideological mobilization. People felt they had access to a lot — through shortwave radio, for instance — and while there was no internet, plenty of foreign literature circulated. As you said, most people in any society don’t particularly want to be politically engaged. That was definitely true during the Soviet period. I think it’s still true in Russia today, where for the vast majority, politics is seen as dirty. It’s something morally contaminating and therefore most people don’t want anything to do with it.

“Many Lives”

Ian Johnson: We talked earlier about how Soviet dissidence was primarily a male-dominated area, but there were very important women involved as well, including many of the famous people who put together the samizdat publications. But what was their role? The earlier dissident movement in China, especially after Tiananmen, is often criticized for being very male-dominated with big male egos clashing and creating organizations that fight more against each other than against the state. Whereas in more recent years, perhaps the only enduring civil society structures against the state now in China are feminist movements, and women working together seem to be able to get more things done than men. I don’t mean to essentialize or idealize things, but I wonder what it was like in the Soviet era, because it seems like we have these big names and they’re all men. Why was that?

Ben Nathans: It’s an interesting question. There’s the question of who actually did what and were there unspoken gender roles in a movement that, at least on the surface, resisted any kind of formal division of labor and formal hierarchy or leadership. In that sense, there was a strong anarchistic strain within the movement, the idea being that people should protest according to what their conscience has told them to do. But if you look at the history of who made the big programmatic statements, who articulated the legalist philosophy, and who started coming up with policy recommendations for the Soviet government when that started happening in the 1970s, that activity skews heavily towards males. We could talk at length about the actual roles that people played. A vast majority of people who typed samizdat and retyped it, were women.

But there’s a different layer on which you have to pose this question because the movement was partly shaped by the way it was covered by the Western media. The Western media was such a powerful bridge to a truly receptive audience — namely Western publics and governments — in contrast to the absence of any kind of dialogue with the Soviet state and with most of the Soviet population. Since the Western media was crucial to that, the way the media covered the dissident movement and its individual figures ended up having an impact on the movement itself.

What the Western media did was what it almost always does, which was to pluck out a handful of individuals for an enormous amount of attention and a very bright spotlight. It made household names out of people like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Natan Sharansky. Now, I don’t mean to take away from those individuals at all. They were extremely impressive. Sakharov was a world-class physicist, Solzhenitsyn arguably one of the most important writers of the 20th century. I don’t mean to belittle the Western journalists. Let’s face it, in the 1960s and 70s, being the Moscow correspondent of your newspaper meant you were certainly at the top of the foreign corps because you were being stationed at the epicenter of the Cold War enemy. These were very talented people, but they were almost all male, almost without exception, whether it was from the Times, the Post, Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, you name it. They brought with them a certain set of unspoken expectations about who was a credible leader of a movement like this. They seem to have assumed from the outset, as did the KGB, that the only people who could possibly be credible leaders were men.

It’s interesting when you look at Western coverage, they’ll refer to someone called Mrs. Sakharov. Now, Mrs. Sakharov would have been known in her own country as Yelena Bonner. They refer to someone as Mrs. Sinyavsky. Mrs. Sinyavsky would have been known as Maria Rozanova, just like Mrs. Daniel was known as Larisa Bogoraz. I’m mentioning these examples because the naming practices are emblematic of certain assumptions about gender roles. Larisa Bogoraz was far more important to the dissident movement across its history than her husband and then ex-husband Yuly Daniel. I wouldn’t say Yelena Bonner was more important than Sakharov, but what she contributed to the movement was totally different and independent of what Sakharov was about. She was a different kind of human being entirely. He was shy and retiring and absorbed with physics problems and she was a firebrand and someone who would not take no for an answer.

Western coverage, which did much to put the movement on the map globally, was also a filtration system that highlighted the importance of some people, almost all male, and made invisible a whole bunch of other people. That’s why the subtitle of my book is The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Because, with all of the deserved respect for Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, both Nobel Laureates, they didn’t create the movement. They didn’t lead the movement. In many ways, while they were very important, they were not the people who really propelled it forward. I wanted to highlight those other lives that have been largely forgotten, both in the West and in today’s Russia.

Just as a footnote, the second meaning of the subtitle is a bit of a play on words there — the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement also refers to the fact that the movement went through several near-death experiences when it was almost crushed and annihilated by the KGB, and each time it had to reinvent itself and reformat itself in order to take up the banner of the rule of law in a new way and in a new mode, until the last time when it actually was crushed, really pretty much finally in 1982.

Jordan Schneider: Since publishing this book, has any unexpected information or contact emerged from readers?

Ben Nathans: There have been some readers who have contacted me to say either, “Oh, I knew so and so,” or “Why didn't you mention so and so?” But for me, the most unexpected response stems from the fact that I finished the book in the summer of 2023, it came out in the summer of 2024, and then Donald Trump won the election that November.

I came to this project wanting to understand how people who live in authoritarian societies construe their options for public engagement with the issues of the day. My background is in Russian and Soviet history, so that became my case study, obviously with the intention of it being relevant to those studying China, Iran, North Korea, and other authoritarian contexts. But then the election happened, and people began reading the book as a guide to being a dissident in the United States in 2025. They started asking themselves, “What would a rule-of-law platform look like under an administration that seems determined to, to put it mildly, repeatedly bend, abuse, or outright break the law?”

The American resonance of this story is something I absolutely did not anticipate. It has simply come up again and again and again.

Jordan Schneider: It's interesting because I almost read it the opposite way. Look, I am nominally a public person. I have a podcast and a newsletter that a lot of people read. I can say whatever the hell I want and pretty much nothing's gonna happen. I'm reflecting on the characters in Ian's book and in your book, and the challenge and the risk that they're going up against, and just the levels of seriousness of a decision to go up against the regime.

Look, 60 million Americans who voted for an opposition figure to Trump, right? We have elections that happen every few months, these special elections, mayoral elections. I mean, I’m sorry, guys, you are not Soviet dissidents out there. We still very much have a system and rule of law. My takeaway was that this is really apples and oranges here.

From a strategic lessons perspective, as well as a “look, don't get too high on your own supply and thinking you're really lying on the cross when you get to challenge these people in courts and elections and win it,” it almost comes off to me as offensive to the memory and the efforts that these people have made and are making in Russia and China today.

Ben Nathans: Sure, that's totally fair. As you say, the level of risk and what's on the line in engaging in dissenting activities is completely different in the two settings. But when you think about it, if you believe that the courts and the free press are the most important sources of institutional — call it what you want — resistance, balance, containment of this very aggressive executive branch, that resonates with the dissident story, right?

Samizdat is their version of a free press, and the various trials are their forms of testing the Soviet judiciary. But yes, obviously the differences are more striking and greater than the similarities, but who would have thought that the similarities would even be as striking as they are?

Jordan Schneider: Well, the biggest difference is it's not just the courts and the press, it's power. There is no universe in which Volpin gets elected to the Politburo. You have a Senate, and there's 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. The Republicans, by the way, can barely pass any laws. There’s gonna be an election 18 months from now. That’s not not going to happen.

It's a stark contrast: for dissidents facing an incomprehensible, monolithic regime, their struggle is often perceived as hopeless. It demands a profound, almost holy conviction in truth and freedom just to imagine a world where change is possible. This level of existential commitment is what these dissidents embody.

In America, all one has to do is to start campaigning for an election 14 months from now. It simply doesn't equate. The impulse to draw parallels between contemporary American political action and the sacrifices of genuine dissidents in authoritarian states feels less about accurate comparison and more about a desire for self-heroization.

Ben Nathans: Yeah, that could be. What I had hoped would be the takeaway for American readers who were inclining in that direction would be that if the Soviet dissidents could operate under a system and a set of circumstances that was many orders of magnitude more hopeless than ours, then no one in this country has the right to give up hope. Because we have so many more grounds for optimism and confidence that the system will withstand a stress test. That would be a very healthy takeaway from this story. But as you know, people read things the way they want to read them.

Jordan Schneider: Is there a movie or a miniseries or some dramatization that you would really like to come out of this? Just picking one or two of these trials and turning that into a feature film would be something really special.

Ben Nathans: Various documentaries have been made about the dissident movement by Russians, including Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the guys who was exchanged in the prisoner exchange last summer, who is very knowledgeable about the dissident movement and has interviewed many of the former dissidents. I don't know of a dramatization. There is a director who's toying with the idea of doing a biopic about Andrei Sakharov.

I think it's easier to organize a script around an individual than around my book, which has dozens and dozens of individuals. But if someone were to undertake that, I would, of course, be delighted. I just hope that it would be someone who can really capture the texture of life in the Soviet Union and not Hollywood-ize it.

Jordan Schneider: I think you can set it around one of these trials. The two novelists — it's gold. We didn't talk a lot about Amalrik, but what a character! I mean, you have the dialogue there already. It's just waiting for you.

Ben Nathans: Yes. Sometimes when I was writing, I just felt like I needed to do justice to my sources because they're already so fantastic.

Jordan Schneider: Well, if any Hollywood agents are reading this, feel free to reach out! Maybe once the AI tools get good enough, I'll use them to produce this movie, Ben. How about two quotes for us to close on to focus on these people and their experiences? We haven’t even talked about the international Soviet foreign policy dimensions and how to kept providing impetus to this movement.Vadim Delaunay said in a court hearing — he participated in the August 1968 public demonstration after the Czech invasion — “All my conscious life, I have wanted to be a citizen, a person who proudly and calmly speaks his mind. For 10 minutes, I was a citizen.”

Here’s a line from Sakharov saying, “It is essential that we get to know ourselves better. Soviet society had started out on a path of self-cleansing from the foulness of Stalinism. Drop by drop, we are squeezing the slave out of ourselves.”

The self-purification and the ennoblement of these people that they brought both to themselves, to their peers, and then to the world is one of the things that’s going to stick with me for a long time.

Ben Nathans: It’s going to stick with me, too.

Jordan Schneider: This is really one of them where, look, we just did a two-hour podcast and I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. The details and drama and overall narrative arc of this book is really special. Every time I get something of this quality in the subject matter that fits right in ChinaTalk’s lane of Leninist history, communist history, it just brings a big smile to my face. I could not recommend this book more. Ben, thank you much.

For more Chinese context, check out Ian’s awesome book Sparks and all his other ones, Souls of China, one of my personal favorites as well. We close on a song. Ben, is there a song or two that you feel inspired by or captures the essence of the Samizdat movement?

Ben Nathans: Yes. Fortunately, the dissident movement had a kind of soundtrack, and that was the music that was being produced by the so-called bards. These were singers, men and women, who would sing just accompanied by their own guitar, often not well tuned. But that was deliberate, like samizdat, rough around the edges, lots of sweat and dirt. They were really poets who wrote poems set to music.

One of my favorites of these singers and songwriters, who was also an actor, was a guy named Vladimir Vysotsky, sometimes called the Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union. He has a song called “Hunting After Wolves” (“Охота на волков”), where he talks about the instinct of wolves to face up to the people who are trying to kill them. It’s been read, among other things, as a metaphor of the dissident movement that wolves cannot do other than their nature dictates. Dissidents were people who simply couldn’t live with a version of themselves that did not stand up and speak out against the injustice that they saw.

由于篇幅限制，本文为第五十一封来信的第三部分。前两部分参见：我的女权主义十要、十不要（一）、我的女权主义十要、十不要（二）

4. 要鼓励女性不畏男凝，选择舒适、健康、适合自己的生活方式，但反对用“媚男”、“自由驴”等词实施荡妇羞辱，亦反对全盘否定/贬低传统女性气质。

女权主义者当然应该剖析「女性更爱美、女演员布料更少」等现象背后的原因，鼓励女性探索自己真实的需求、选择舒适的穿衣风格和生活方式、不要因为外貌内卷和身材焦虑消耗自己......这都没错（见《美丽魔咒何时休：我们为什么要停止打扮？》、《化妆是艺术创作吗？》、《我们为什么不该嘲讽小美人鱼？》）。

但是，我们坚决反对因为男凝的存在而审判女人“穿着暴露/媚男”。男性凝视的源头在于女男之间的权力差，而不在于女性的穿着。的确，性骚扰和性暴力的常态化导致女性的生存环境远比男人恶劣，所以善意提醒女性多穿一点保护自己并没有什么太大的问题。然而，我发现正有越来越多的人（其中不乏女性）打着女权的旗号审判、羞辱女人“媚男”、“擦边”，其嘴脸和那些“看到胳膊就想到性交”的男人如出一辙。

「穿衣自由」早就应该是无需再辩的共识，审判女性的穿着不仅是在加深对女性的规训，更是主动让出自己的生存空间。而且，这种强迫“受害者”改变的斗争策略真的能帮女性夺取利益吗？

事实上，如果不击碎压迫女性的权力结构，即使女人穿罩袍裹紧全身、只穿T恤短裤，甚至全部练成“白幼瘦”的反面，也无法就此高枕无忧。唐山夜里吃烧烤的女人，并没有因为身着T恤牛仔裤就逃脱搭讪和殴打；漫画里的女浩克即使一身肌肉，也会被做成色图在男人间传播。换言之，在性别系统性不平等的当下，没有任何女性能够因为“穿得多/有肌肉”而逃脱性化。

（当然了，强身健体确实能让女性有能力反抗，男权社会也一向打压和贬低身强力壮的女人，但这就是另一个话题了。另外确实也有女性非常刻意地迎合男权结构为自己牟利，我对这种行为的态度是指出其代价但不审判具体的个人，因为审判实在太容易被扩大化了，而且在父权社会谁又能纯洁无暇呢？）

此外，对美役的过度批判还可能滑坡成对传统女性气质的贬低和否定，从而助长性别歧视。例如我记得前两年有官媒发视频批判女性在高铁上化妆。在化妆和女性气质强绑定的当下，这种针对性极强的嘲讽就是毫无疑问的厌女。因此，我们虽然应该不遗余力地挑战社会对女性外貌的高要求，却不应该拿着放大镜审视每位女性的审美选择。

对性别刻板印象的挑战不应该变成对传统女性气质的否定和对男性气质的推崇。后者会导致很多真心认同和喜欢女性气质的女人不敢拥抱真实的自己，还会加固femininity低masculinity一等的社会认知。换言之，在反思性别规训的同时，我们也应该有权进行自由的性别认同和表达。

5. 要改变“浪漫至上”的社会文化、探索新的连结方式，让女性有不婚不恋的自由；但反对——忽视情欲/爱欲的革命性力量、以“性缘脑”为由棒打女同，以及传播“自然女没有性欲”的卫道士言论。

层出不穷的庆祝爱情的节日、铺天盖地的浪漫营销、无孔不入的催婚、无处不在的CP粉......这些都是社会文化“唯浪漫独尊”的证明。虽然网上也有不少人在反对催婚催恋、抵抗单身女性污名化，可现实中婚育恋毕竟还是主流。

以前我也会忍不住埋怨其她女性太“恋爱脑”，但现在则更多是思考为什么女人更容易被婚姻家庭绑定，为什么人们（尤其是女性）普遍认为爱情高于友情。某种观念会变成「社会共识」一定是因为有某种制度为其“撑腰”，所以指责个体“性缘脑”、“恋爱脑”是没有意义的。专偶制下，一对一伴侣关系就是要高于朋友关系。因此不论异性恋家庭中有多少陷阱存在，人们都还是会被“牵引”着更看重自己的“小家”。

然而，很多人依然忽视制度设计的力量，转而攻击女人“性缘脑”、甚至直接否定性欲的存在、打着女权旗号散播保守主义。我坚决反对使用“性缘”这个词，因为它的语义极其模糊、容易导致滑坡，且是一个典型的以异性恋体验为中心的概念。

事实上，父权社会并不鼓励情欲、爱欲，也不支持所有以性为核心的关系——它真正推崇的，其实是「生育」。作为此地唯一合法的家庭组织模式，异性恋婚姻的本质并不是为了让人享受“性”，而是为了使人口（“牛马”😃）数量最大化。

正因如此，男权社会贬抑甚至禁止所有「不以婚姻为基础、不以生育为目的、不能导向再生产」的“享乐型”性行为和性关系，包括婚前性行为、同性性行为、自慰、老年人性生活等。

说到同性恋，如果说女性友情在男权社会是被污名化、边缘化，那么女性爱情就是被否认、消解，甚至彻底掩盖。在这里，女同情侣只能以“闺蜜”/“室友”的名义存在，可以说几乎完全不可见。所以，声称我们社会“性缘”至上的人，大概并没有考虑过人数多达7000万的性少数群体。

此外，婚外情、乱伦、多角关系等会威胁异性恋专偶制，因此亦不容于资产阶级的性道德。而这些禁忌又主要用于管控女性，荡妇羞辱、“打小三”就是典型表现。

总之，父权对情欲/性的态度并非鼓励，而是管制——允许并暗暗鼓励（指向生育的）一小部分，压抑大多数。反过来思考，如果性完全等于父权，那我们就应该看到色情制品出现在大街小巷，电视循环播放色情片。但现实却是人人谈性色变、性教育极度匮乏。电视剧尺度更是越来越小，不然我小时候也不会以为亲嘴就能生孩子了...

所以，反抗父权 ≠ 反对和污名化性行为、压抑甚至否定性欲、回归保守主义乃至禁欲主义。恰恰相反，女性主义的目标是将性欲、性行为从父权的管控中「解放」出来，能够不被等级式管理、不再为再生产服务——这包括破除“纳入式性行为”的神话、反对恐同、自慰去污名化、Sex Positivity行动（反对性羞耻、性压抑、性的污名化）、反对荡妇羞辱、反对歧视性工作、重新想象和实践女本位的情欲等等。

更重要的是，情欲与爱欲其实可以成为反父权的重要力量。在Audre Lorde笔下，爱欲（the erotic）是一种根植于女性情绪、感受、欲望的情感体验。它不是以男性为中心的色情，也不完全等同于性。在一个只讲掌控/占有、只看利益/权势的世界里，爱欲乘诗而来，并将唤醒失落已久的快乐、亲密、激情以及女性间最纯粹的情感联结。

说到底，女性主义不是要禁欲、更不是要抛弃爱。而是要解析父权如何规定「谁能爱、怎样欲、欲向何方」的问题；更是要让每个人都能在没有羞耻和规训的前提下，自由地选择自己的爱与欲。

由于篇幅限制，我在这封信中只阐述了《十要十不要》的前五条，余下内容及结语会在下封信里和大家分享。感谢姐妹们的关注！☺️

陌生女人1号 兔姐

二〇二五年七月三十一日

亲爱的媎妹：

见字不如面。。要不咱真的见个面？？

我们两个东北i人突然好想认识大家啊！！当了这么长时间陌生女人，如果不陌生了会怎样？？

见面会初步定在香港，但为了避免0人到场的尴尬，我们决定先来个前期意向调查😏

点击图片或链接就可以跳转到问卷啦！！

坚信“填问卷就是上帝”的，

陌生女人1号和2号

With private tutoring banned for core subjects, parents in China are looking for new ways to help their children get ahead. Today, we’ll explore the rollout of AI-enabled educational tools in China, from government initiatives encouraging teachers to adopt AI tools, to the standout startups making waves in classrooms across China.

The Need for Change

To understand the adoption of disruptive new technologies into education in China, you need to start with the recognition that there are two Chinas. There is the China that looks like this:

And then there is the majority of Chinese schools, where students won’t work on computers at all until they obtain that elusive university admissions letter and buy a laptop with their first financial aid deposit.

Chinese schooling is exam-oriented. Students spend vast amounts of time taking pen-and-paper exams in preparation for major entrance exams that determine admissions for middle school, high school, and university. While their Western counterparts’ after-school homework often involves self-driven projects, question sheets, and essays that count partially toward final grades, Chinese students usually practice past-paper questions and compilations of exam problems. This form of pedagogy does not incentivize the experimental adoption of disruptive technologies, whether in well-resourced urban schools or remote rural institutions. Of course, high-resource families recognize the importance of technology, and wealthy Chinese kids have laptops and coding classes just like their Western counterparts. But technology-driven learning largely takes a backseat compared to traditional preparations for entrance exams.

Chinese teachers rarely need to revise syllabi based on new technologies. Chinese schools award teachers bonuses based on their students’ exam performances; therefore, teachers aren’t motivated to plan activities not directly aligned with boosting exam performance. In poorer-performing schools, teachers might just “lie flat” 躺平 instead. For a more vivid illustration of the problem, take this excerpt from Peking University professor Lin Xiaoying 林小英’s well-reviewed 2023 book, Children of the County High School 《县中的孩子》:

Let us now take Provincial Demonstration High School “P High” — a school with nearly a century of history but now in decline — as an example to understand the working attitudes of teachers and their perceptions of school management. … In economically underdeveloped counties, stable high school jobs are generally considered good employment. But the infrastructure and logistics departments easily become breeding grounds for corrupt interests. At P High, encroachment by various factions has led to underfunding and outdated equipment, falling far short of national model school standards. In the eyes of students and parents, this gap is justification for demanding that teachers act not just as instructors, but also as managers, protectors, and scapegoats.

Once this cause-and-effect chain is established, teachers become increasingly distracted from teaching, channeling their energy into complaints against the school and the education bureau. This emotional drain contributes to career stagnation.

… In this environment, teachers competed not in teaching effectiveness but in laziness. Procrastination, complacency, and hedonism formed a toxic subculture among the faculty.

China’s education system is also highly unequal between localities. Students in Tibet spend, on average, about half as many years in school as students in Beijing:

As explained in a study by Zhang Yiwen and Liang Boren1 in 2021:

Urban schools usually have indoor gymnasiums, more formal stadiums, swimming pools, basketball courts, and other venues, while rural schools rarely have these advanced education facilities. Moreover, the rural school buildings accounted for 86% of China’s nearly 20 million square meters of dangerous school buildings. Therefore, teachers across the country will prioritize urban schools with better conditions when choosing jobs. Thus rural schools have to reduce the requirements for the recruitment of teachers, resulting in the low overall quality of teachers in rural education.

China also has fewer teachers per capita than the United States. In 2023, there was one primary school teacher in China per 16 students. For the United States in 2022 (the most recent year available), the figure is one primary school teacher per 13.26 students. (If this seems high, it’s because this number includes part-time/substitute teachers and instructors for art, music, gym, etc. This data comes from the World Bank.)

Even in primary school, Chinese class sizes are often quite large — the central government has declared that the standard primary school class size is 45 students, but there are still some regions where “large” and “super-size” (“大班” and “超大班”) classrooms of 56+ students persist.

China’s Ministry of Education is betting that technology is the key to remedying the rural-urban divide.

In April 2025, the Ministry of Education and nine other ministries released a document titled “Opinions on Accelerating Education Digitization” 关于加快推进教育数字化的意见, which argued for setting up preferential investment systems to digitize rural schools:

Establish a diversified investment mechanism. Adhere to the principle of public welfare, give play to the leading role of the government, and establish a diversified investment mechanism with the participation of the government, society, and enterprises. Ensure funding for the construction of new educational infrastructure, the purchase of high-quality digital resources and services, and give preferential support to rural and remote areas as appropriate. Basic telecommunications companies will provide preferential network usage charges for schools of all levels and types. Coordinate the use of various channels, such as market financing, to guide social capital to support the development of digital education. Schools will strengthen funding coordination to ensure digital education expenditures. Build a unified national digital education resource supply market, guide enterprises to develop digital education products and solutions that meet application needs, and protect the intellectual property rights of resource contributors.

While these recommendations don’t yet have the force of law, there are signs that the central government is preparing formal plans to integrate AI into the education system. While these moves don’t change the fundamental incentive misalignment preventing the adoption of technology-enabled tools in Chinese education institutions, they are a sign that the government is increasingly interested in digital education — and such measures could meaningfully shape demand for AI-enabled ed-tech products.

Government AI Education Directives

Long before DeepSeek mania, China’s Minister of Education Huai Jinpeng 怀进鹏 was advocating for AI educational tools. During the March 2024 National People’s Congress, he said:

In the future, we must cultivate a large number of teachers with digital literacy, strengthen the development of our teaching workforce, and deeply integrate AI technology into every aspect and stage of education, teaching, and administration. We must study its effectiveness and adaptability, so that the younger generation of students can learn more proactively, and teachers can teach more creatively.

More recently, Huai has argued for AI-enabled “smart campuses” and the need to create a national LLM for education. He also announced his intent to release a white paper on AI for education this year.

Perhaps taking the cue from Huai, the city of Beijing launched two municipal-level platforms for AI+education products — one for primary and secondary schools, and one for colleges and universities. The former is called the “AI App Supermarket” 基础教育AI应用超市, and features 23 AI products for teachers and administrators, with functions ranging from essay grading to mental-health support.

In January 2025, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council announced “China’s Education Modernization 2035” 中国教育现代化2035, a plan to build a world-class education system in China by 2035. To this end, the plan includes provisions aimed at uplifting rural schools, as well as a strategy to digitize education by “using modern technology to accelerate the reform of talent training models and achieve an organic combination of large-scale education and personalized training.” While this plan doesn’t explicitly mention artificial intelligence, Huai Jinpeng’s stance and parallel AI education initiatives at the local level could mean that AI integration will eventually be part of national education reform. If that happens, the following Chinese companies are most likely to lead the charge:

No Silver Bullets

China leads the world in popular positive AI sentiment, but the Chinese education system is still dominated by pencil and paper assignments and chalk blackboards. Meanwhile, most schools in the United States have spent the last decade issuing laptops to students, polarizing teachers and parents in the process, and perhaps fueling skepticism about using new digital technologies like AI in the classroom.

China’s push to digitize education reflects both a technological ambition and a social imperative to close the gap between rural and urban students. From smart tablets to multimodal LLMs, private companies are happy to capitalize on government initiatives like “Education Modernization 2035.” But without central government guidance on AI specifically, these new educational tools could just end up furthering inequality. While the ban on private tutoring was supposed to equalize the playing field, wealthy families largely ended up circumventing the ban by hiring one-on-one private tutors.

For AI to be a true equalizer in China’s education system, it must be paired with sustained public investment and access to digital infrastructure. Regardless of the path Beijing takes on AI, the rapid rollout of digital education tools ensures that other countries will study China’s experience going forward.

The next article in this series will cover Chinese homework-solving apps in the Chinese and American markets (looking at you, Gauth!).

Great, you want to be a policy analyst in a topic vaguely adjacent to ChinaTalk. How to get started?

The following is my attempt to put my best advice in one place, supplemented with input from people I admire. What follows is biased towards my personal experience, namely working in China-adjacent policy research outside of academia in the US and building the ChinaTalk newsletter and podcast, though much of what I say likely applies more broadly outside the US and to other policy areas.

Start a Substack

Writing online is the most surefire way to get your first job in policy. There is more supply than demand for these jobs, so just having coursework and good grades in a given topic will not get you a position. A strong writing portfolio is the best way to break into a field where early career jobs are mostly filled through connections and unpaid internships. Employers want to know how you think and write, and that you care enough about these topics to do more than just assigned papers. Sole-authored internet writing is the most legible way to communicate your skill and value as a potential policy hire. And by doing it on a consistent basis, you’ll be improving in the research and writing skills necessary for any of these gigs, better setting yourself up for success once you do land a job.

This should be the fun part! Unlike, say, fabbing chips, you don’t need to work at Intel or TSMC to get experience of doing the job. Researching and writing Substack posts on whatever you want is pretty much the best part of what any entry-level job at a think tank or policy research firm would consist of. If you don’t find yourself enjoying it and carving out time for this work while you’re in school, policy research and analysis roles are probably not the best fit.

Read this post below. If you want to maximize your impact in DC, you need to embody this energy. If it sounds like fun, you should know that you can do this sort of work even while you’re still in college or grad school.

Green Tape

One Year in DC

I graduated college a year ago today and moved down to DC…

Read more

2 months ago · 119 likes · 12 comments · Thomas Hochman

For some more inspiration, see the conversation I had with Divyansh Kaushik on how he got active on immigration policy while a PhD student (Spotify, iTunes).

I also talk with on this show in the last 10 minutes about how sole-authored writing earns you portable credibility in your field.

Nathan: Internal company work is how you get promoted, but external mindshare is how you always have a job available to you. That kind of power means I can do what I want. I’ll just go get a different job if I want a different job.

Jordan: If you’re at a consulting firm and you do good work, maybe five people will know about it. If you write something online and you do good work, your entire career cohort and all the hundreds of other future people who could hire you will know about it.

It’s important to do a good job in your work, especially when you’re junior — actually, at any time. But people forget that the number of people in your field and the opportunities out there that are beyond the direct thing you could be promoted for in your company are orders of magnitude larger. Particularly now that we live in the age of the Internet, you can write things even anonymously and people can read them.

Having some sort of public profile or portfolio that you can gain credibility points from is something that everyone should be taught by their career counselor when they’re 21 years old looking for a job.

has also written a great career guide of sorts on the intellectual journeys you’ll do if you want to contribute to the frontier of knowledge in these spaces.

Common objections I hear:

What if I get stuff wrong and people disagree with me?

Of course you’ll get stuff wrong! Policy research and analysis isn’t an exact science and if you’re not making conclusions with less than 100% confidence you won’t be interesting or relevant. If you’re worried about this, I’d explicitly highlight in your writing what you’re more and less confident about.

Responses to your work, both positive and critical, are an opportunity to learn things, get feedback and meet people interested in the same topics you are. And for what it’s worth for the first few times you publish online it is highly unlikely that it will garner much attention, giving you a bit of a breather before the really-not-all-that-bright lights of the internet start to shine on your work. To make it a little less intimidating, take ChinaTalk. Even today with 50k free subscribers on substack, we get less than a dozen substantive responses from our audience each time we publish.

What if someone digs up something I write and then I’ll never get confirmed as Assistant Secretary of X?

I would encourage you to highly discount this possibility, particularly relative to the opportunity cost of opting out of Twitter or writing publicly while a student or junior think tanker. If you’re the sort of person who is even worried in the first place about embarrassing themselves in front of future employers, as long as you don’t have a closet mean streak and let yourself get baited into attacking people personally, I can almost guarantee you it will not happen. It’s really not that hard to stop yourself from going full Neera Tanden. The chances of something you say going viral, particularly before you’ve spent enough time on the platform to know what might go viral, are infinitesimal. I have to expect that ChinaTalk readers are sharp enough not to say racist, misogynist or homophobic things on social media. And don’t forget, in 2016, Vance wondered whether Trump was America’s Hitler. Now he’s one heartbeat away!

With that all said, if you’re still nervous you can always write and tweet anonymously at first. It’s very easy to transition anonymous internet social capital to your real self later on.

Shouldn’t I just try to write an article for Foreign Affairs instead?

No.

1. The staffers who write laws and execute policy are mostly in their twenties and early thirties, probably don’t pay for a ton of paywalls, and like reading stuff they find engaging and useful at work. Mainstream policy outlets won’t let you be fun, develop a voice that people will remember as yours, and go into the requisite technical or legal depth necessary to really be useful for policymakers in the trenches. You can’t even use charts!

2. Foreign Affairs probably won’t take your pitch (which does not mean it’s a bad idea…honestly might be a positive signal). If they will do, they will flatten your prose, and you don’t gain as much professionally from having a byline that no-one will notice as opposed to someone subscribing to your substack and signing up for more of you in their life.

Does any of this actually change the world?

Yes. The showcase for publishing a think tank report (many of which get under fifty PDF downloads…) is often an event with a hundred people attending while scrolling twitter and a webinar that a few dozen tune into. After a month of weekly posting in a defined policy niche, you will have 100 subscribers on your substack in your field who will look to your takes. That’s holding a think tank event on demand! Your “eyeball minutes per effort” vs a DC happy hour is also far stronger on Substack even with a tiny audience.

Writing in public is how you will meet people interested in you in your field. It will generate interview requests from mainstream press and inbound from decisionmakers who are curious about your takes. Insofar as ideas matter, which they do (politicians and their staff do things not because a randomizer tells them to…), substack posts are the most efficient venue for early career folks to make a name for themselves and make an impact.

Don’t trust me that ideas matter, trust all the dictators who knew they had to kill the intellectuals! See ’s excellent piece:

Examples of folks who have had their careers and influence dramatically accelerated thanks to substacking include High Capacity, Cogitations, Interconnected Green Tape and SemiPractice. Folks with jobs in the current administration who used to substack regularly include (who started anonymously, mind you!) and . Sriram Krishnan at OSTP now had a popular podcast and David Sacks of course the All-In pod. I would be shocked if the posting to policy pipeline does not continue through whoever’s in the White House come 2029 (see all the Dem 2028 contenders who now have pods and substacks).

For a few examples close to home, I’d like to think our posting about TikTok helped raised the firm’s salience in DC and ChinaTalk’s work around export controls helped build momentum for smarter and sharper policy. Dylan Patel’s ‘Why America Will Lose Semiconductors’ helped get the Chips and Science Act across the finish line.

To help jump-start you, after you write three posts you’re proud of, email me and I’ll give you some feedback. You’re also welcome to write for ChinaTalk (pitch us here!) and do some posts with us you can cross-post on your own channel to get started.

You can also start a podcast!

Here are my generic tips for starting an interview-based show, which is the easiest format to get off the ground. In brief, interviews benefit from you not having to come up with original ideas to make the content as you can just riff off of your guests’ research and insight, plus you get to meet and (as long as you prepare by actually reading their work) impress people who could otherwise only maybe guilt into a not particularly insightful short career talk.

Thanks to 80,000 Hours for sponsoring this post. 80,000 Hours — named for the average length of a career — has been doing in-depth research on AI issues for over a decade, producing reports on how the US and China can manage existential risk, scenarios for potential AI catastrophe, and examining the concrete steps you can take to help ensure AI development goes well.

Their research suggests that working to reduce risks from advanced AI could be one of the most impactful ways to make a positive difference in the world. They provide free resources to help you contribute, including:

• A job board with hundreds of high-impact opportunities,

• A podcast featuring deep conversations with experts like Carl Shulman and Ajeya Cotra.

• Free, one-on-one career advising to help you find your path.

To learn more and access their research-backed career guides, visit 80000hours.org/ChinaTalk.

To read their report about AI coordination between the US and China, visit http://80000hours.org/chinatalkcoord.

Read

Your particular information diet is going to be what allows you to bring unique value as an analyst and thinker, so as you start to get caught up on what “everyone” is reading, aim to spend half your time reading stuff “no one” else is.

Give your assignments a chance. And the supplementary reading. And the papers of footnoted things that seem interesting. Get cheap used versions of your coursework on Amazon so you can read with a pen and write in the margins. If you’re struggling to focus while reading PDFs on your computer, get an old iPad, and take notes there.

If your assigned classwork reading isn’t grabbing you, don’t be scared to ditch boring stuff and hunt for what keeps you up at night wanting to finish. As the wise Tyler Cowen once said, “don’t read stuff you don’t love reading”.

Where to start? For China, The China Project’s best 100 China books list, the fantastic FiveBooks website which has a very well-developed China section, and Tanner Greer’s attempts to introduce folks to Chinese history or his favorite books. Don’t read books about China without citations from Chinese sources (much more common than you’d expect).

On AI policy, has put together a fresh new syllabus.

I’m biased against spending too much time reading the news vs developing a foundation of knowledge, though for interviews for policy-relevant internships and jobs you will have to demonstrate a strong level of fluency in current developments. To start on that path, subscribe to Sinocism (he offers a student discount), follow his links and get engaged in some storylines, and read what people are talking about on Twitter.

Yes, You Should Still Learn Chinese and Spend Real Time (not just a semester…) in Taiwan/China

Everyone you will talk to, people who can’t speak Chinese included, will say that the amount of Chinese they have is the bare minimum required to write credibly about China.

As AI-assisted translation is really good and will only get better, the marginal value of getting to HSK 4-5 from a pure analyst perspective has diminished. But fluency in the language and deep context gives you what you need to know where to look, a nose for what is and isn’t real, the ability to have conversations and consume media directly in Chinese. No one is writing something like this about Xi and the emerging succession crisis without having devoted years to understanding China and Party dynamics.

The best way to get good at Chinese is to live in China, which is much harder than it was in pre-COVID times. I wrote about my experience at Yenching Academy here, even though I finished the program in 2019 I’ve kept up with newer students who have been able to have similar experiences post-COVID. Taiwan still seems reasonably accessible for study abroad programs and has a boatload of scholarship programs to help ease the financial burden.

My collection of beginner to intermediate tips I made into a youtube lecture. In brief, don’t learn how to handwrite, don’t waste time in group classes, and spend the $10/hr on 1-1 classes with someone you vibe with on iTalki. For advanced learners, check out the app 小宇宙 for podcasts and troll Douban for contemporary TV and movie recommendations (here are my favorite recent Chinese tv shows). Learn Chinese with Rita is a fantastic youtube channel and I highly recommend her pronunciation course (which you should take the earlier the better so you don’t learn bad speaking habits).

My main mandarin grinding years were 2017-2020, so I’m a little out of date on the tooling—the best recent essay I’ve come across you can read here.

If you’re looking for things to write on the new substack you’ll make after you finish this post, there is still a huge amount of informational ‘alpha’ left in taking Chinese language sources and putting out summaries or annotated translations. Just posting random interesting things you see on Weibo or WeChat plus a tiny bit of context can earn you tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

Advanced language ability is not a golden ticket to a career working in and around China policy, just like having technical skills doesn’t necessarily give you a tech policy career. But it makes the experience so much richer. Try to frontload investments in language, as the older you get the harder it will be to find time.

Get on Twitter, I Think

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente @ArtirKel

@m_ashcroft @nickcammarata Not being on twitter is a form of self harm due to deprivation of personal and work-related opportunities

5:50 PM ∙ May 28, 2021

I’m pretty sure Jose’s right.

My time on ‘China Twitter’ has been a profoundly intellectual and empowering experience. It’s degraded from where it used to be, but it is still where a ton of people spend a ton of time. For starters, you get to:

• Ask smart people questions. It’s one thing to go to Zoom office hours from 2:30-3:15 and ask your frazzled professor something about a topic they’re probably not that deeply read in. It’s quite another to be able to directly reach out to the leading expert in a said topic, who if they’re on Twitter is probably up for random conversation, and, if you ask politely, you can likely start a conversation with that person who may bring his or her other expert friends into the discussion. Twitter, if used correctly, can be office hours 3.0.

• See how people in the field think and read. ‘Meta-reading,’ or developing deep media literacy around news stories and policy discussion is one of the most useful skills you won’t get just through books. Spending time on Twitter watching how professionals discuss whatever in particular it is you’re interested in will give you a baseline that you can then engage with and contribute to.

• Short-circuit credentialism…to a point. Fancy degrees, recommendation letters and personal references from prestigious people don’t hurt. But personal connections are the way to get around not having the standardized test scores or the money to go to lots of expensive schools. You can develop these sorts of relationships through what may start as a random Twitter back and forth, just like you will with your readers once you start a Substack.

• Meet and develop genuine relationships with peers. 95% of the people you meet in “real life”, your high school and college friends, don’t care about China as much as or in the same way as you do. You may make a handful in a policy graduate school, and some more living in Beijing or Shanghai or DC, but you don’t have to do either of those things to find your crew. Perhaps the most affirming thing about the time I’ve spent on Twitter is that I now have maybe two dozen folks in the field, some of whom I’ve never met in person, with whom I feel “in this together” navigating research and career questions.

• Realize you’re just as smart as the ‘experts.’ On twitter you’ll see people who have fancy think tank jobs, once served in senior levels of government, and have tenured academic positions have terrible takes that you know are wrong. It’s fine to feel depressed at the amount of mediocrity that exists out there, but also let this inspire you that you’re less far from contributing to the knowledge frontier than you might think!

If Twitter is just too chaotic and Elon-y for you, Substack Notes is a slower, wholesome place where you will also find a ton of policy folks who are more likely to respond substantively than even on Twitter. Apparently there are people on bluesky too but I am not one of them.

Who should you follow? If you like ChinaTalk, seeing who I follow and interact with on Twitter is a decent place to start. Some other pointers from friends:

• Quality over quantity (by Pradyumna): As you tweet more and see posts going viral it may seem as if the most important thing is building a large audience. But that is harmful for the reason that you should not write or tweet for most people. It is worth having a high quality of things you tweet to attract the right quality of people. Or in other words, do things you are proud of. 

• Quote Tweets as an Onramp (by Emily Weinstein): Get started by tweeting quotes from and links to articles, reports, or speeches you find of particular interest or significance. You don’t have to hop on Twitter tomorrow and immediately have the hottest takes in town. Think of your profile as a curated newsfeed to start, and once you feel more comfortable, then start engaging with more of your personal view.

See ’s post featuring lots of really smart people saying how important Twitter was to them. Also, Guzey’s Best of Twitter substack is an powerful advertisement for the platform.

Get off Twitter too

It is addictive and you can overdose on it. Check out the OneSec app or just don’t install Twitter on your phone. Consider using the free StayFocused chrome add-on to limit the amount of time you can spend on social media. It also helps to mute Twitter notifications on your devices.

Scattered thoughts

Don’t spend too much time writing for college or grad-school outlets unless they let you repost on your Substack.

As you’re networking, discount heavily any advice you receive (including mine) as basically everyone will either tell you to do what they did, or if they’re miserable to not do what they did.

China generalists are a dying breed. See if you can pair your interest in China with another skillset (data science, energy policy, climate science, tech policy, transportation policy….) to set you apart from the crowd. Even if you don’t end up getting a job that lines up 1:1 with your interest, having developed a specialization will signal to potential employers your ability to bone up on topics that aren’t just ‘China.’

Living in DC, going to a DC-based school for an MA, and interning in-semester as much as possible is the dominant strategy for getting a DC blob job. That said, taking this route will by no means guarantee a position, and you very well may have to intern for $15-20hr with no benefits/health care for a considerable amount of time even after graduating before finding yourself a fulltime position. What’s more, this path is not really going to help you differentiate your thinking and analysis or support your language progress.

FAQ

Should I even get into the China-adjacent policy game in the first place?

I buy the 80,000 Hours-y argument that China analysts have a uniquely important role to play in helping the 21st century not go off the rails, and I’ve made about a decade of life choices around this contention. But from a lifestyle perspective, if you can find other things to do with your life that will fulfil you, you honestly probably should. Supply exceeds demand for policy analysis, and even people who have demonstrable expertise in very hot topics like China tech will not have the easiest time finding gainful employment (unless you wrote a popular substack while in undergrad/grad school I promise!).

Even if you do get on a track, pay is poor relative to what your brainpower could earn if you applied it in a different direction. Undergrads with the intellectual capacity to succeed in policy-land can make 3x+ straight out of the gate in tech, finance or consulting, and that gap only widens over time. If everything broke right for you over the past two decades, you today might be sitting in a brand name Mass Ave think tank making 150-250k as a senior fellow, with, if you’re lucky, some consulting work on the side. Here’s a ChatGPT query with specific salaries for think tank leadership you can find through IRS documents nonprofits have to file and some job posting salary bands to get a sense of what you’re getting into.

On the plus side, it mostly feels like work with a purpose and that helps ward off existential dread. Because of the labor market challenges, people are generally only getting into this game because they care, so your colleagues are likely to be passionate and enthusiastic (and/or have a financial cushion). Because supply outstrips demand, they’ll most likely be pretty competent as well. I’ve found it to be, with a very small handful of exceptions, a supportive community I enjoy engaging and spending time with. Also, very few positions in this field will have you consistently working 100-hour weeks like the highest paying white collar jobs out there.

How scared should I be that whatever things I do in China/interactions I have with Chinese people will stop me from getting a security clearance in my home country?

It’s impossible to know, but I find it hard to even get on a path to “know China” without going to China and living in the PRC for an extended period of time. That said, you should be wary of out-of-the-blue DMs on LinkedIn, ostensible Chinese think tank employees offering you money in exchange for research, and, for that matter, anyone offering you money in China.

Your odds of getting a clearance are probably a tad higher if your time in China was under a recognized program (probably academic) and not spent freelancing.

How should I network?

I’d highly recommend doing it organically via Twitter. The people you meet who are active on Twitter are self-selecting for being open to engaging with random people on the internet. Plus, you can first off get a sense of whether they are interesting and not jerks from how they tweet.

When reaching out to folks, I’d recommend carefully reading something they write, and in your email make it clear you did–reference specific things they wrote and say “oh X was really interesting”, and have follow-ups.

Lead with wanting to have a conversation about the content, maybe tack on a few career questions you may have in the end, and don’t ask for more than 20-30 minutes of someone’s time. More than any advice you can get from the person you’re talking to, having a conversation about the content that impresses the person will be of higher long-term value to you because you’ll stick out from the 95% of people who ask them questions you can get pretty good answers from in this post.

Should I get an MA?

Some few factors to consider: do you have a scholarship or money to burn? Do you know how to read by yourself? Reading a lot, writing publicly, soliciting feedback, and making friends on the internet can substitute for much of what an MA offers. That said, there is serious credential creep that makes it difficult with a BA to outcompete folks with MAs for entry-level jobs, and lots pathways into the US government and getting paid decently in government like the [now on indefinite hiatus…] PMF program and McCain Fellows have graduate degree requirements.

Q: Should I go to law school?

I have no idea, but try to talk to at least three lawyers whose careers seem really cool and who are happy in their jobs before you do. My two cents is that it’s very expensive and if you’re dead set on doing China-adjacent policy work, a JD really isn’t a prerequisite. Don’t forget about opportunity cost when considering the years and money you’ll end up pouring into advanced education!

Q: Should I get a PhD?

I’m not the right person to ask. I decided not to because I realized I was a little too ADHD to focus that long on one question. I have also found myself happier scratching my ‘teaching’ itch through making ChinaTalk content for the masses as opposed to teaching classes in person. That said, people do cool stuff in academia too!

Do not base a decision to get a PhD only on your GPA and professors’ advice. Find current PhD students and in particular PhD dropouts to get a different view of the path.

Q: I’m not a US national and want to work in DC, what should I do?

Be advised that it will be near impossible to find someone in the policy space to sponsor your visa. Only having one year of OPT to offer potential employers will be a difficult sell. STEM-y programs that offer three years of OPT seem to be a much better value proposition, but even then, three years of an American entry-level think tank salary are unlikely to make you whole from what an MA without a scholarship would cost.

Q: So Jordan, you do tech + China: any thoughts on working in that space?

Never a dull day on the China tech beat! That said, even with all the attention this space gets there seem to be maybe only thirty analysts outside of government who work in think tanks and research firms so for as hot a topic as it is, it’s still a very niche field.

A serious technical background isn’t necessary to do good work, but a technical degree coupled with an understanding of policy and political debates is a hack that can very quickly get you to a knowledge frontier where you can be adding to the broader discussion. Justin Sherman, for instance, was writing articles galore for major publications while a college junior because he brought a technical analytical mindset to the table that the vast majority of think tankers writing about technology-adjacent issues don’t have. The same with taking Chinese content and putting it in a format digestible for English speakers, taking basic technical knowledge in CS, EE, bio or what have you and applying it to a policy setting can be very valuable.

Thoughts from other young analysts I respect

of

Book reviews remain an underrated way to start generating your own ideas and figure out how you actually want to share them with the world. Ditto book threads on Twitter. Far more people want to hear about the book you’re reading than have actually read it. That’s especially true if you’re pulling something niche/from a back catalog/in another language/orthogonally related to the field you’re in.

Think in terms of arbitrage. Ideas that may be table stakes in one field may be incredibly underrepresented in another field. The grand strategy lens on X, or the technical lens on Y, or the political theory lens on Z.

Relatedly, don’t be scared to sound the same notes repeatedly. Most people who encounter your stuff aren’t religious readers of yours. They haven’t gotten tired of your three bits yet. Don’t abuse that privilege, and try to deepen your thinking on the topics you regularly discuss. But it’s okay to be a bit dogged about attacking the same intellectual interest from slightly different angles.

Jake Eberts on creating BadChinaTake

As an early-career professional or student, you unfortunately have to respect the pecking order to some extent, which is why anonymous accounts can get away with being more aggressive as long as they know what they're talking about. Regardless, do not mistake any sort of argument or contention for fighting; it's perfectly okay to use Twitter as a forum to challenge others' ideas. Your name will pop up in people's feeds, which is a good thing.

Do keep in mind that even the most esteemed figures in the field can be functionally just large children, so de-escalation will usually be your responsibility if it ever gets to that, unfortunately.

Emily Jin: Ask yourself what is your “northern star” for being in the China policy space? 

Synonymous with this question: What gets you out of bed in the morning? What is your raison d’etre? How central is “understanding China” to your purpose, since not everyone’s full focus would be China? For example, you could be coming from a functional background in political economy, and you really want to understand how China may prove or disprove frameworks you picked up in your undergraduate/graduate classes. Your “northern star” in this case may be to understand whether autocratic political-economic systems may prevail in the next century. In that case, China is then by default a polity of focus, though you may still retain your primary analytical lens of political economy.

Test your answer out (recommend stream of consciousness style word doc typing or go old school with a pen) and see if what’s on the page compels you.

Emily Weinstein on humility and being a woman in policy/national security

As in most industries, there are egos galore in DC, and learning how to navigate these is unfortunately part of the experience. This can be even more daunting as a young woman (or minority in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, etc.), as the space has traditionally been dominated by white men. Look at how Erik Larson described the State Department in In the Garden of Beasts as “an elite realm to which only men of a certain pedigree could expect ready admission.” We’ve certainly come a long way since the 1930s, but we still have a long way to go.

Starting out, I felt a strong urge to write on every topic on China – I wanted to be at the forefront of every think tank event, every diplomatic call, every Xinhua article, and more. I stayed up late watching events streamed in Beijing overnight to make sure I was the first person (to my knowledge) to tweet something catchy or notable. I tried to soak up every piece of analysis and have a take on everything. I was exhausted. I felt like I had to do more to stand out, partly thanks to my gender, but also thanks to my own unrelenting competitive spirit, which I see in many of the younger folks making their way to Washington. 

This was not sustainable. Instead of continuing down that competitive route, I found myself wanting to lean on others more. Where I previously sought to compete with colleagues to have the best assessment or strongest prediction, I instead wanted to hear their thoughts–not only on their impressions of my takes but also on their takes as well. In doing so, I stopped the relentless doing and started listening. Once I started listening, I stopped thinking that I had “discovered” the next hot topic in China studies, and instead started listening to others in the community–not just the ones who had been around for decades, but also my peers. This was such a humbling practice, and I truly believe it has helped get me to where I am today.

In my experience, humility is such a crucial part of navigating not only the China policy world but also the broader professional environment. It has helped me find a diverse set of allies (and friends!) in my community as well as invaluable teachers and mentors. DC is exhausting and lonely without these resources. Find people to lean on, and don’t let the rat race get to you. Take your time to do honest and thoughtful work, and you will grow your brand organically from there.

David Fishman on unknown unknowns

When you get started in China studies, and especially learning Chinese, you get a lot of praise and attention in China. The expectations for a non-Chinese person are pretty low in terms of language achievement, grasp of Chinese cultural, political, or historical features, etc. It’s too easy to learn a little bit and then get mountains of praise and fool yourself into thinking you know a lot. You’re even more in danger of overestimating your own knowledge after you’ve legitimately learned a fair amount (e.g. a specialized higher degree).

In a world where quality China credentials are still rare (relative to the importance of the subject anyway), even partial knowledge is enough to score you a respectable career. But just like anything else in life, knowing some can end up being worse than knowing nothing, especially if you only learned the 皮毛.

The deeper you get into learning specialized things in China, the more you appreciate just how large the body of knowledge is that you didn’t know. About history, political trends, cultural sentiments, prevailing attitudes, everything. Whatever it is, there’s definitely an angle you missed. Having healthy respect and appreciation for the potential existence of all the stuff you don’t even know you don’t know will make you a much better analyst.

After a while, you want to use hedging language for everything, which might sound like a lack of surety to a layperson’s ear, (or maybe a turnoff to certain kinds of bosses, who want a black or white answer) but probably will sound like wisdom to your most experienced peers, who know true black and white answers are as rare as pandas. No matter how much “China stuff” you know, there’s still more stuff you don’t know, and even more stuff you don’t know that you don’t know. That stuff will lead you to bad assumptions and false conclusions if you don’t make an effort to account for it.

Kelsey Broderick - try out different jobs, find your niche

Being a China analyst seems relatively straightforward: learn the “truth” about China or US-China and give your take on it. However, your take will vary based on the sector you’re in and the job you take. At a think tank, you will probably be closest to a straightforward analysis job (primary source research, writing, etc.) but you might find that you need a PhD.

At a gov job (in this case a USG job) politics unsurprisingly and definitely matter. Your analysis will be used to fit into the administration’s overarching China policy and you will work toward that end (currently competitive/antagonistic). If you decide to work in the private sector (political risk, in-house analyst at MNC) your analysis will be leveraged more for cooperation or finding the space to continue or expand commercial activity with China.

You will need to decide how you want to use your knowledge and what you feel comfortable using it for. Who you want to inform about China? Do you want to prevent China from rewriting the international system? Do you want to promote commercial ties/try to prevent WWIII? Etc. etc. If you can, try internships in various industries to see what you like - this is where it’s important to reach out to people with China jobs you’re interested in because they can point you in the direction of good/paid experiences.

Gerard DiPippo, former CIA analyst, on how to get into the CIA

Getting a job at CIA requires planning, patience, and luck, but it can be rewarding, especially for those interested in China. The CIA website lists programs, vacancies, and hiring needs and only U.S. citizens should apply. My impression is that functional expertise—economics, technology, cyber, programming, etc.—are in higher demand relative to regional expertise, in part because you’re more likely to be able to acquire the latter on the job. Priority language skills, including Mandarin, are a plus. CIA does not require a master’s degree (or PhD) to join, though if of interest there are programs for officers to continue their studies after they join. I recommend you work through a recruiter, which is easiest if you are enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program. Online applications without recruiter support or referrals are a long shot. If you do not get an interview, reapply in a year or two, as sometimes hiring is subject to budgetary cycles. CIA offers internships for analysts, which are a path to a full-time position.

Everyone must undergo the security clearance process. Even if you receive a “conditional offer of employment,” your clearance could take up to a year, sometimes longer, and is not guaranteed. You should have a personal sense of whether this is a real risk or a drawn-out formality, but at a minimum I recommend not using illegal drugs, be honest and forthright, and don’t try to overthink or game the process. Have a backup plan while you wait. If you manage to navigate the process, you’ll have wonderful opportunities, especially for someone early career. 

I hope for this to be a living document and for more folks to contribute their two cents, particularly as there are plenty of aspects of the China analyst experience I either gave short shrift to (JD, PhDs) or didn’t feel qualified to comment on (navigating this world as a Chinese-American or PRC national). If you’d like to add your two cents please drop them in the comments and I can incorporate into the main body as appropriate.

What does it take to make a living betting on politics? Can prediction markets offer insights about the future that other analyses cannot?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Domer, a professional prediction markets bettor. Domer is the number one trader by volume on Polymarket, and he’s been trading since 2007. He initially entered this world through poker, but now makes bets about who will win foreign elections, whether wars will start, and which bills will become law.

We discuss…

• Why some issues — like Romanian elections, the NYC mayoral race, or Zelenskyy’s outfit choices — can attract hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume,

• Systematic biases in prediction markets, including why they overestimate the likelihood of a Taiwan contingency,

• What happens to prediction markets in the absence of insider trading regulations,

• Why prediction markets are still a solo endeavor, and what a profit-maximizing team of traders would look like,

• Bonus: How betting markets backfired on Romanian nationalists, what AI can teach you about betting, and other insights on winning from one of Domer’s contemporaries.

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

This episode is brought to you by ElevenLabs. I’ve been on the hunt for years for the perfect reader app that puts AI audio at the center of its design. Over the past few months, the ElevenReader app has earned a spot on my iPhone's home screen and now gets about 30 minutes of use every day. I plow through articles using Eleven Reader’s beautiful voices and love having Richard Feynman read me AI news stories — as well as, you know, Matilda every once in a while, too.

I’m also a power user of its bookmark feature, which the ElevenReader team added after I requested it on Twitter. ChinaTalk’s newsletter content even comes preloaded in the feed.

Check out the ElevenReader app if you’re looking for the best mobile reader on the market. Oh, and by the way — if you ever need to transcribe anything, ElevenLabs’ Scribe model has transformed our workflow for getting transcripts out to you on the newsletter. It’s crossed the threshold from “95% good” to “99.5% amazing,” saving our production team hours every week. Check it out the next time you need something transcribed.

The Rise of For-Profit Forecasting

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the basics. How do these markets work, and how are they different from buying Apple stock or betting on a sports game?

Domer: It’s somewhat similar to betting on a sports game. The most popular market by far is predicting who will win the US presidential election. This happens every four years, and it’s not just Americans who are interested — people around the world like to participate.

The system works on a 0 to 100 scale that assigns odds. For instance, in the 2016 Hillary versus Trump race, Trump had about 30% odds to win going into election day. If you wanted to bet on Trump, you might bet $3. If he loses, your bet goes to zero. If he wins, it goes up to 100, so you’d get $10 back.

It’s basically a binary outcome — you either win zero or you win 100, depending on whether your prediction comes to fruition.

Jordan Schneider: For context, we now have eight figures being bet on the outcome of the New York City mayoral election. We have $200 million of volume traded on whether Zelenskyy will wear a suit before July. These markets are extremely liquid, with millions or tens of millions of dollars in volume. We reached billions during the presidential election, but even niche topics like a Romanian mayoral election saw $6 million in total volume traded.

This is no longer a niche phenomenon. Dismissing these numbers as lacking proper price discovery compared to the trading volume of NVIDIA or Apple isn’t necessarily accurate. How have you seen the relative efficiency of these markets change as they’ve grown larger and more popular?

Domer: They’ve grown tremendously since I started. When I first began, a $10,000 bet made you a big whale. Now you’re just a small fish in the ocean. As they’ve gotten bigger, they’ve also expanded significantly in scope.

When I started, there were basically two major markets: who would win the presidential election, and who would win Best Picture at the Oscars. Now it’s become this widespread phenomenon that encompasses many countries, numerous races, economic predictions — like what the Fed will do. The breadth of topics and the level of participant interest have exploded.

Jordan Schneider: I’m curious about the professional approach to this. How would you describe your process? Let’s pick something more esoteric than a presidential election — maybe you could walk through the Pope example or another market you’ve been analyzing. What does it take to develop an edge in these topics?

Domer: At the basic level, succeeding in these markets requires two things. First, you need to be a curious person who’s eager to learn. Second, you need to enjoy following the news and staying current with daily developments in various stories.

Take the Pope example. Papal conclaves only happen every 10 to 15 years. These aren’t areas where people maintain expertise — you have to dig into archives to understand what happened last time and read stories from 15 years ago about how these events unfold. You need to train yourself to examine all the contours of an event.

When a pope passes away and they’re selecting a new one, everyone interested in betting starts at the same point. You’re competing against perhaps a thousand other people, all beginning from the same starting line. Success comes down to whether you can research faster, better, and more accurately than your competitors. That’s essentially what my job entails.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting, as you’ve mentioned in past podcasts, is that even with niche topics like a Romanian election or Israeli politics, the betting pool isn’t dominated by Romanians or Israelis reading local news sources. Even when there are locals involved, the center of gravity consists of international observers. The local knowledge advantage isn’t as pronounced as you might expect.

Domer: That’s mostly accurate. The center of any election market will be people who aren’t necessarily subject matter experts. However, it will attract a minority of people who live in the region or are directly impacted by the event. This brings in additional interest and new participants, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more informed.

Being closer to an event might actually create bias. If you have a personal interest, you might bet on someone you’re rooting for, whereas as an American, I’ve never heard of this candidate, so I don’t have a rooting interest. Various factors come into play regarding whether someone directly impacted by an event will participate and how that affects their judgment.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s discuss the social utility argument for these markets. Having accurate betting lines on the Knicks and whether they’ll win on any given Tuesday night — providing a price discovery function for that — doesn’t seem particularly beneficial for the world. But it’s very different when you’re talking about whether wars will start or end, elections, and similar events. As prediction markets have grown in prominence and sophistication, how has your thinking evolved about their broader utility?

Domer: That’s an excellent question. Consider a world where prediction markets don’t exist at all. If you’re trying to figure out whether there’s going to be a recession this year, you’ll typically rely on pundits to inform that decision. The world of punditry doesn’t reward you for being right, nor does it punish you for being wrong. It revolves around entertainment — is this pundit convincing? Is he entertaining? Is he saying interesting things? That’s the nature of punditry. It’s not necessarily punishing you for being wrong or rewarding you for being right.

Prediction markets are essentially the next level of punditry. They’re not a perfect solution — if Polymarket says the chance of a recession is 25%, that doesn’t mean we have the definitive answer. Nobody came down from heaven and declared it’s 25%. We have no idea. But it’s a more advanced form of punditry where you are punished if you’re wrong and rewarded if you’re right. It’s punditry with skin in the game.

Obviously, prediction markets encompass more important topics than sports games, though that’s not to say betting on sports isn’t fun or important for people who are interested in it. It’s just a different facet of predicting outcomes.

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Jordan Schneider: As you start to see news stories about prediction markets and politicians feeding off those stories — particularly with Vivek Ramaswamy over the past few months, as his number crept up from 1% to 5% to 10% — this became a tangible way for him to demonstrate his momentum. Are you seeing more of these feedback loops where prediction markets manifest in reality, which then manifest back in prediction markets?

Domer: It’s a fascinating question because it raises the possibility of the tail wagging the dog. If this happens, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy where someone with deep pockets goes onto one of these markets and bets themselves up. Then they can say, “I have momentum. Here’s proof. Someone’s betting on me. My price is going up."

There’s a perfect example from 2012 during the GOP nomination, which was essentially a clown car with multiple candidates going up and down — Herman Cain, Mitt Romney (who ultimately got the nomination), Rick Perry, and others. Every week brought a new frontrunner — Newt Gingrich, and so on. Interestingly, during the summer, someone on InTrade

was buying massive amounts of Donald Trump contracts — ridiculous amounts, way above where the market should have been. I was thinking to myself, “This might literally be Donald Trump or one of his associates.” Back then, the market wasn’t as liquid, so maybe the person was spending $50,000 on this, which is significant but essentially functions as a commercial. Was this guy preparing to run and trying to boost himself? I thought it was an interesting case study.

Going back to your question about whether the tail wags the dog — yes, I think there are interesting feedback loops. The other factor is market liquidity. Sometimes these markets have more liquidity than the event’s apparent importance would suggest, like the Zelensky wearing a suit market.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting is the story from the 2024 election about the “French whale” who was buying up Trump contracts, basically driving the price up five or six points for only $25 million. In the context of a presidential election, that’s equivalent to a handful of ads, which might win you a few votes. Instead, it created an entire news cycle about someone knowing something others don’t, and voters tend to vote for winners.

This dynamic seems very affordable, especially in something like a New York City Democratic primary, where it would cost only $50,000 to $100,000 to get Brad Lander’s name on the map as having momentum. I’m surprised it isn’t happening more frequently. I guess we’ll reach that world eventually. Maybe these markets just need to be liquid enough for someone to make enough money on the other side to buy it back down.

Domer: You mentioned the French whale — I was actually one of the people who helped break that story. One really interesting aspect was that people would DM me their guesses about who it was. The number one guess by far when the story first broke was that it was probably Elon Musk, because he had started a super PAC and has enormous wealth. To him, this would be a drop in the bucket. It made total sense that one of the benefactors would be the one doing this, rather than some true believer who had been investigating and conducting polling.

Jordan Schneider: What’s interesting is that the narrative reinforcement cycle seems most relevant for elections. But there are markets where it’s basically one person making a decision — will Trump bomb Iran? Will Netanyahu bomb Iran? Will Hamas and Israel make a peace deal? Will Zelensky wear a suit? The momentum behind these predictions is unlikely to influence outcomes, or maybe it does. Perhaps we’ll reach a point where these numbers become so prominent that a president will feel they’re letting people down if they don’t do what the markets expect, which could become self-reinforcing and factor into their calculations.

Domer: That’s a fascinating and relevant question, and I’m not sure I have a good answer. It’s something I grapple with — whether the markets could theoretically get too big for the actual events they’re trying to predict.

Jordan Schneider: The other issue is there’s no SEC oversight — no insider trading regulations. There are plenty of people who know whether many of these things will happen. No one knows who’s going to win a presidential election, but there are many markets involving specific decisions where insiders exist. If I’m some random person in Iran working in the IRGC and this is my one opportunity to make $10 million because I know whether we’re going to attack America back, why not? How do you think about the insider trading dynamic, and has it manifested at all?

Domer: What’s interesting is that I’ve been doing this for such a long time, and from the beginning, people’s first reaction to big swings is, “Oh, some insider is betting on this market.” 99.9% of the time it has nothing to do with an insider. It’s a true believer or somebody who clicked the button by accident or similar.

But lately, with the markets getting so big, I’m becoming more suspicious. There were a few markets recently asking what Israel would do, and these accounts that were newly created and funded with $100,000 or so came in. They only bet on this one market — Israel’s going to do XYZ. It happens, and then they withdraw. This behavior seems exactly like what an insider would do. As the markets become bigger, my initial assumption that 99.9% of the time it’s never an insider starts to break down given how much money is involved.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because specifically on international relations, there are DOJ indictments showing how much money people make when they’re caught spying. If you’re a really good spy selling secrets, you probably make a few million dollars. Once these markets are big enough where you can make $10 million in an afternoon through crypto with no one knowing, or you can convince yourself you won’t get caught, this creates a new dynamic.

Not many national security establishments or intelligence agencies have processed this yet: why sell my secrets to the Chinese when I can tell the world 24 hours or even three hours before something happens by making a bet on it, then retiring six months later and moving to Bermuda?

Domer: You’re exactly right. It’s untraceable. But I do think the arc of these markets is toward regulation. This might not be a 20-year problem, but it could be a problem over the next few years as we figure out regulations.

Jordan Schneider: What would that look like? Would you have to trade with a driver’s license? That would probably solve some of those issues, right?

Domer: It could. This is a fraud issue not only with crypto, but trading in general regarding the depth to which you examine your customers and their funds. If you’re going to put up markets sensitive to national security and trade in a country where those national security issues are very important, then the arc of these markets seems to be toward disclosure rather than obfuscating what’s actually happening.

Jordan Schneider: What’s your take on the broader ethics and where you would draw the line? We already have markets that are pretty close to death markets — asking when a leader will lose power. It’s not phrased literally that way for smart legal purposes, but where would you draw the line on what’s not acceptable to trade on?

Domer: It’s a hard question. If you think about a straight war market — will Russia and Ukraine get into a war — and you rewind four years, this was a really important question. People should know the answer to this. We should be trying to figure out what the answer is, and prediction markets are really good at figuring this stuff out.

I see both sides of the argument because it does feel distasteful. Obviously, it’s not just economic impacts or world impacts, but people on an individual level are going to be hugely impacted, possibly in negative ways. In that aspect, it feels unseemly. But to me, the importance of the event overtakes the unseemliness because we’re answering questions that need to be answered. We need to assign a probability to some of this stuff to an extent.

Jordan Schneider: One class of questions that makes me really uncomfortable — and it doesn’t really exist on Polymarket yet, but occasionally shows up on Manifold — are these very personal ones about people who aren’t celebrities. If you’re in high school and you can make a betting market on whether this couple will break up, that seems problematic. It’s similar to how no one’s allowed to bet on high school sports, and you can’t do prop bets on college athletes. You don’t need to expose anonymous individuals to this stuff.

Then you have this sci-fi arc where a lot of those Biden markets were kind of like Biden death markets. The assassination connection to some of these feels unseemly, but having some sense of the probability that Putin will succeed in assassinating Zelensky is useful. But then you have horrible incentives where someone bets on it and commits an assassination. There are enough crazy people out there, right?

Domer: It’s definitely something we need to grapple with. I’m not sure I have the answer. I do agree that not everything necessarily deserves a market, and where we draw the line between what gets a market and what doesn’t requires careful consideration.

Jordan Schneider: As you trade and see these markets move, I’m curious about the balance between slow versus fast thinking. On one hand, you mentioned the Pope earlier — how you want to understand how past conclaves played out and get the backgrounds of all the different players. But once news starts happening, these markets can move very quickly. It seems there’s a lot of money made and lost in responding to breaking news and processing it correctly. How do you think about that conceptual difference, and how has the speed of these markets changed over time?

Domer: It used to be that if you read some tweet and logged into the market, it might take minutes for that tweet to be fully incorporated. By tweet, I mean some breaking news event, which is usually encapsulated in a quick tweet. But if you look at what’s happening recently — in the past few months — if you take more than three seconds to react, you’re glacially slow. The speed of these markets adapting to news has become so much faster than it used to be.

You have to be very careful and quick in how you react to things. But then the second-order effect is that once the quick reaction has happened, you need to think slower about it. You need to figure out whether this actually makes sense, because sometimes the initial move isn’t necessarily correct.

A Rōnin’s Game

Jordan Schneider: Is there algorithmic trading like there is on public financial markets, or is it just more people who click faster?

Domer: Someone at a VC firm was actually asking me about this the other day because they’re looking into it. I know at least two people have tried it, and there wasn’t much success. I know in one instance — because I invested in this guy, and he now works for an AI company — it didn’t work out for us, but it worked out for him.

It hasn’t been successful yet that I know of. Who knows? Maybe there are people with secret Polymarket accounts using AI agents, but it’s coming.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because we’re now very much in a world where AI processes quarterly reports and listens to earnings conference calls in real time. It does it faster and probably better than the analyst sitting there. But the fact that this hasn’t come to Polymarket yet is partially a function of there being less money to be made. Maybe there’s also something about these markets being much more idiosyncratic than comparing this quarter’s Walmart returns to last quarter’s.

Domer: There’s a very strong qualitative element to it, not necessarily quantitative. Not that AI is amazing at quantitative analysis yet either, but there are idiosyncrasies, intricacies, and little things in the rules that may alter a market one way or another. AI isn’t quite at that level yet.

Jordan Schneider: Are there teams trading yet? Is it still mostly an individual game?

Domer: At the high level, yes, it’s individual. I know teams have been created around the presidential election because there’s a lot of information out there and you need to get it very quickly. Teams were created for the US presidential election. I was on a team for that in the previous two elections.

But most of the time, I describe it as being rōnin — we’re individual samurai going about our lives. We talk to a lot of the other rōnin, but we are not necessarily coordinating with them.

Jordan Schneider: This is the financial parallel of hedge funds, right? Now you have entire — almost all of the most successful hedge funds have dozens, if not hundreds, if not even a thousand-person research teams. Can you talk me through an example of a market you traded where you felt like if you could duplicate yourself and had more research, you could get more of an edge? Is it wider coverage where you think there’s more alpha? What could a 10-person outfit potentially do in this space?

Domer: People have approached me about forming a team, so I know a little about it. Where you would really want to focus is making sure everybody has different strengths. If I were building a 10-person team, I would want somebody really strong on politics, somebody really strong on foreign politics, somebody really strong on quantitative things and statistical modeling. Then I would probably want to duplicate each of those people so there are two people doing the same things.

The other thing about prediction markets that doesn’t get much focus compared to financial markets is that prediction markets are 24/7. The news doesn’t sleep. If you’re trading financial markets, you can safely get your eight hours of sleep. You could theoretically do that and not miss any news whatsoever, but in prediction markets, sleep is the enemy. It’s very dangerous to sleep. If you’re building a team, you would probably want redundancies and widespread expertise in many different areas.

Jordan Schneider: You said you talk to a lot of other people in this space. Give us a little anthropology — who are these folks who make up the majority of trading in the market?

Domer: I come from a poker background, and a poker player is probably a good benchmark to think about these players. It’s mostly young men who like taking risk, who are good at math, good at analyzing things, and interested in the world. That describes 95% of people using prediction markets.

Jordan Schneider: That’s interesting because poker is about getting better at this very closed system, right? There’s an aspect of reading human beings, but every new market you explore, you’re learning something novel — about a new country or situation or politician or something about the economy. There’s a different type of curiosity between someone who wants to memorize all the openings in chess or all the hands and ratios in poker versus someone willing to play in such an open-ended space as political prediction markets.

Domer: A poker player or chess player is very math-focused and very good at pattern recognition, which includes reading the opponent and reading patterns. That’s an element of prediction markets. But to your point, the other element is creative thinking and being able to pivot from one topic to another that may be very disparate and may not be related at all, but you can notice similarities and quickly come up to speed on a new topic. It’s not only the chess or poker element, but also creative thinking.

Jordan Schneider: Another thing is that there’s not a lot of emotional valence and connection that you have with any given poker hand, aside from your personal investment in it, as opposed to a war starting or a presidential election. I’m curious how you and other folks have trained — or maybe anesthetized is not the nicest word — but how you divorce yourself from the actual developments in order to be a more clinical analyst of this stuff.

Domer: I was nodding nonstop to that question because it absolutely applies. You have to divorce yourself because I’m a person who reads the news. I watch a lot of news. I follow the news. I’m well aware of the world. I talk with other people. I talk with my spouse, and I have very strong opinions. You have to leave those opinions at the door, which is very hard to do.

If you’re trying to predict something that you want to happen, maybe limit yourself to only a couple hundred bucks and not really try to make a living betting on things that you want to happen or betting against things that you don’t want to happen. You have to both put it at the door and self-limit yourself — not get too involved in something that you want or don’t want to happen.

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of a topic people have strong feelings about, a lot of politics in these markets involves modeling the thought process of Donald Trump. What are the mental models of his decision-making that you’ve found most helpful over the years?

Domer: The big-level view of Trump is that he’s very chaotic, and chaos is great for prediction markets. If you just have a president like Biden, Biden didn’t fire a single cabinet secretary. The only cabinet secretary that left was going to become the commissioner of the NHL. If you have this very boring presidency versus this very chaotic presidency, obviously the chaotic presidency is going to be much more conducive to predicting what’s going to happen next and people following what’s going to happen next.

But the interesting thing about Trump is he’s changed between his first presidency and his second presidency. In his first presidency, he was firing people all the time. He probably had three cabinet secretaries fired within six months. Left and right, there was controversy after controversy. This time, he’s weathering through it.

The interesting model of this presidency is he’s moved to an Elon Musk type of over-promise, under-deliver, especially on trade deals. He’s constantly threatening to “whack this country,” but when it comes down to it, he pulls back. It’s interesting not only trying to get into the mind of Trump, but also how Trump has changed from one presidency to the next. He’s gotten less chaotic in some ways, but more chaotic in others, particularly in how he’s dealing with economic policy. It’s very hard for a company to plan if they think there’s going to be tariffs one day and no tariffs the next day. It’s a very different type of chaos in this second Trump presidency.

Jordan Schneider: How have you applied the reality television framework in the past?

Domer: Somebody smarter than me said a long time ago that if you want to figure out who Trump is going to pick for something, print out pictures of everyone he’s considering. Go up to a random person and ask, “Who would you cast for a TV show if you were casting a Supreme Court justice?” The person they point to is probably who he’s going to pick because he’s casting his show.

That’s how I think about Trump — a lot of what he’s doing is focused on presentation. He’s the star of a TV show and that’s how he treats much of what he’s doing, not only personnel decisions (are they good on TV?), but also policy. Does this sound strong? Do I look strong? A lot of what he’s doing is entertainment-focused, and that’s obviously his background as well. He’s been a showman since the 80s when he took over from his father. I think that’s a very strong core tenet of Trump — the entertainer, somebody who’s trying to keep people engaged with what he’s doing, a marketer.

Jordan Schneider: What are your heuristics for separating fact from fiction — dealing with fake news?

Domer: What do you mean by that?

Jordan Schneider: What you have to do as someone who works in prediction markets is essentially high-stakes news literacy with money on the line. You have this mental model of what you think is happening, and then there are new data points that you have to process and react to. At the same time, you’re watching these markets move as other people react and process them. Are there news literacy heuristics that you think are broadly useful as a citizen? Or maybe category errors that you’ve seen these markets make over time, where they overread or underread into specific types of new data points?

Domer: That’s a really interesting question. There are two facets that come to mind. Number one is fake news. One of the markets recently is whether Elon Musk will form his own party. He’s made this big announcement with a lot of fanfare, but whether he actually does the paperwork is TBD — that’s what the market is about.

Recently there was this filing with the FEC pretending to be the American Party. It wasn’t actually true, but someone new to prediction markets might see this FEC filing, which looks very official. It’s on the FEC website. Somebody actually filled it out and put Elon Musk’s name on it. They’re going to see that and think, “Oh, the market’s over. He formed it. Yes. Easy money, free money.” But somebody who’s been doing this a long time knows that people make fake FEC filings all the time.

It comes from experience and being able to distill fact from fiction. If you’ve been doing it a long time, you’re definitely on the lookout for fake news because it happens all the time. Actually, it’s increased in frequency lately, especially with people trying to create fake news in order to profit from it, whether in financial markets or prediction markets.

The second part of your question that struck me was knowing which reporters to trust. This is very important, especially if you’re predicting American politics, because there are dozens of reporters covering Congress, the presidency, etc. A lot of the focus is on day-to-day drama: Is this bill going to pass? This person just said this, that’s happening. You have to be very careful about who you trust.

The longer you’re doing it, the more you learn. For instance, the Punchbowl guys — people in this space get tons of newsletters every single day. Punchbowl is one of the main ones, along with Politico. If you’re getting the Punchbowl newsletter and you see that the head of the Republican Party in Congress is saying this and that, and it looks like maybe the bill is in jeopardy — well, Punchbowl constantly slightly exaggerates whether a bill is in danger of passing or failing. They really play up the drama.

The longer you’re in this space, the more you realize the intricacies of reporters — who you can trust, who is reliable, who is constantly exaggerating what’s happening. It’s very important as a trader to be able to distill between what’s happening and what people are trying to pretend is happening.

Jordan Schneider: It is an ineffable thing that only really comes from following these stories in real time and seeing how people behave. It’s more nuanced and sophisticated than just giving any Punchbowl headline a 20% discount factor in your model.

As I’ve dabbled a little in the legal markets open to US citizens, it has been a remarkable and humbling learning experience. As someone who has been following news pretty closely and professionally since at least 2013, only trading in markets where I think I know something and being wrong a lot has taught me about probabilities and degrees of confidence. These markets are real now and liquid enough to have a lot of signal in them.

It’s a really useful exercise for people who work in and around politics to go from being a pundit to someone who’s forced to discipline their thinking and opinions about the future with a market. That didn’t really exist until relatively recently, whereas financial market participants were able to have that learning experience of taking views and seeing them play out correctly or incorrectly and gaining context and experience over time.

Don’t get addicted. Don’t spend a lot of money on this stuff. I don’t endorse gambling here on ChinaTalk, but as a learning tool to understand what the world is like, putting $10 in an account and trying to size markets and react to news is a worthy experiment to do for at least a month in a topic you’re interested in.

Domer: I would second that. It’s fun to do, even if you’re just doing five or ten bucks, because if you’re following it anyway, it gives you a little rooting interest, like watching a sports game. From that aspect, it’s really fun.

The other thing is that prediction markets are easy if you know what you’re doing, but it’s also very easy to lose a lot of money very quickly. For instance, if you rewind to last year during the Trump versus Biden debate, there were whole accounts that are just gone now because they didn’t think there was any chance that Biden would drop out even after the debate. I was thinking, “I don’t know, I’m not going to stake my account on this. It seems sketchy."

It’s not just about being able to predict things correctly, which isn’t that hard if you’re familiar with the space. The really hard thing is being able to avoid the pitfalls and not betting against things that are actually more likely than you think they are.

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Jordan Schneider: Domer, there were three lines in one big beautiful bill that got a lot of professional gamblers very worried. Why don’t you give the audience some context?

Domer: In the House version, it didn’t exist. In the Senate version, nobody noticed it until after it passed. It was three little lines saying that for people who are betting professionally or even non-professionally, you can only deduct 90% of your losses.

What does that mean? If somebody is gambling recreationally and they win $10,000 and lose $10,000 — so they’re an even recreational gambler who didn’t win any money — if you can only deduct 90% of your losses, you can only deduct $9,000 from that $10,000. All of a sudden, even though you didn’t make any income, you now have $1,000 of taxable income.

You can imagine some professional gamblers — if you multiply that times 100, all of a sudden they have phantom income that is very large and they go from maybe owing $20,000 to owing $120,000, depending on the circumstances of the specific gambler. It can have a very deleterious effect on not only sports bettors but also poker players.

It’s TBD whether it impacts prediction market traders because there is some leeway where you can count it as a capital gain, mark it as a future, or whatever. It really depends on how the IRS classifies prediction market winnings in the future. But anything that’s bad for poker players or sports players, I view as akin to prediction market trading. It’s very, very not good.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe your markets are about to get a whole lot more liquid, Domer. If all the unproductive, socially unproductive sports gambling gets shifted into more efficient trading on markets that are actually useful for the world to have numbers on.

Domer: More competition is coming, which is not necessarily a great thing, but we’ll see how it goes. One thing that’s interesting about prediction markets is that often there are rule fights over things that you cannot possibly see coming, like this Zelensky suit where he wore a suit, but he didn’t wear a suit, and then it devolves into a rule fight and you’re arguing over the judges.

It’s easy to imagine that happening with Taiwan if China says, “Okay, this little outlying island that nobody lives on, we’re going to take it over.” But Taiwan says, “Well, that’s our island.” Did they invade or did they not invade? It’s easy to see how these markets that are important — we should have a market on whether China invades Taiwan — could get railroaded by very minute details.

Jordan Schneider: Currently, “Will China invade Taiwan?” has three and a half million dollars of volume and an 8% chance of happening in 2025, according to Polymarket. It’s defined as resolving to yes if China commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Taiwan by the end of the year. What are the things you’ve seen move that market in the past? What does 8% even mean?

Domer: You have to look at things not only from the event itself, but also the risk-free rate. Markets that don’t expire for a long time are going to trade in the mid-single digits no matter what. You can factor that into your analysis. What it’s basically telling you is it’s a very, very low chance of happening.

But the other interesting thing about that market is that it’s correlated with what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. As Russia has more success, that market may start to push up — not necessarily this year, but if that market existed for 2030, maybe it’s trading at 25%. If Russia starts to have a lot more success, maybe it moves up to 30%, because these events are correlated and the US reaction to what’s happening in Russia-Ukraine also has a lot of impacts on that market as well. The interesting thing is how it correlates with other things happening in the world.

Jordan Schneider: The risk-free rate concept is important because when I see 8%, I think that’s insanely high. But you don’t earn the treasury rate for holding a position on Polymarket.

Domer: “Will aliens invade the US?” is probably trading at 4%. “Will Jesus return to Earth?” is trading at about 2.5%. There are markets where you can figure out what the risk-free rate on the site is. This is 0% chance of happening or a very, very small percent chance of happening. Everything pivots off of that. I would view the real odds [of a Taiwan invasion] as probably closer to 4 to 5%, which is still way too high in my opinion. But people disagree.

Jordan Schneider: You can earn about 3.9% by owning a treasury bill for a year. Getting to 2.5% for aliens or Jesus being resurrected — it’s like people will pay 2.5% to have a meme stock. Walk me through the logic of how we have these markets where you will not make any money and it sits for a long time.

Domer: I’m not sure what the logic is for the people who are buying yes, but bonding as a general concept is very popular in prediction markets where you’re betting on events that you think are impossible. For instance, aliens landing — that’s not impossible, but it’s so unlikely that it’s very close to zero. Plus, if you lose the bet anyway, I’m not sure you need to worry about money.

The risk-free rate on prediction markets usually sits in the mid-single digits for a year. It’s usually maybe 2 or 3% above the bond rate in the US.

Jordan Schneider: What would you say to policymakers or folks working on this stuff in Washington about how they should think about and interpret what they see on Polymarket?

Domer: First of all, I would focus on the liquidity. If it’s a liquid market with a lot of volume, then there’s been a lot of thought that went into this market and there’s a lot of money involved. It’s not just random people making bets and trying to move prices around for fun. People treat this very seriously. Number one, assuming that the volume is substantial and it’s pretty liquid, treat it seriously.

Number two, it’s advanced-level punditry. It’s not just people being paid to have opinions. It’s actually, “This is very important whether I get this right or wrong.” It’s the next level of people figuring out what’s going to happen in the future.

Number three, there can be some quirks on prediction markets that cause events to not necessarily be reflective of reality. For instance, “Will the US get an Air Force One jet from Qatar?” Looking at that from six months ago — actually taking possession of the jet may not happen for three years, but the big announcement may happen immediately. Sometimes there’s a little bit of lag between announcement and event happening, and that can cause prices to be a little askew from what you think they would be. It’s always important to pay attention to what the rules are in terms of what the event’s trying to predict.

Jordan Schneider: What’s been the most fun for you? Are there particular countries that you’ve really enjoyed getting to learn about, or questions that have — aside from the money-making aspect — what learning journeys have you gone on that you found most intrinsically rewarding?

Domer: I’m not sure I think about intrinsically rewarding versus monetarily rewarding. I have more fond memories of monetarily rewarding, I guess. But the countries I enjoy following the most are the most chaotic countries. If you look at Israeli politics or Italian politics or, a few years ago, South African politics — things are very chaotic.

It’s not like what’s happening in Canada, for instance, where they just rejected a populist and reelected the technocrat. They’ve had the same party in leadership for a very long time — it’s a very stable country. Whereas if you look at Israel, there’s elections every nine months maybe at this point, or in Italy where they’re switching parties from year to year.

The chaotic countries are far more fun because there are more events, they’re repeatable, and you know the ins and outs. People who joined the site a year ago don’t know about these six other Italian elections that you’ve predicted in the past seven years. I’m drawn to chaos in general — not necessarily in a negative way, but in a fun, dynamic way.

Jordan Schneider: It’s the oil trader energy when it comes to prediction markets. If everything’s too predictable, what’s the fun in that? It’s interesting how homework pays off. As an American who doesn’t speak Hebrew or Italian, what’s it like getting your handle on a foreign country’s politics? Or do you speak Italian?

Domer: No, I only speak English and un poquito de español. Number one, you’re subscribing to newspapers in foreign countries, which can be hard to sign up for because you’re not sure what to type in the sign-up fields. You’re also trying to get to a base of knowledge — you have to pretend that you’re a prediction market trader in Italy. Who are the top political people I need to follow? Who are the smart analysts? What accounts do I need to be following? You have to get up to speed.

The other facet is often I’ll be watching Israeli TV, and I have my phone out, literally holding my phone up to the TV and translating the chyrons in real time so I can understand what they’re saying. It can get ridiculous sometimes, but it’s fun. It’s funny. It’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding.

Jordan Schneider: If you were going to teach a college class on learning how to make money in prediction markets, what would you put on the syllabus?

Domer: That’s a really good question. In my Twitter profile, I have a list of books. Going back to what I was saying earlier, it’s easy to teach people how to read politics and learn about politics. If you immerse yourself enough, you can get caught up. If you get the Politico newsletters, if you’re following people on Twitter, if you watch Meet the Press, if you’re watching the nightly news, you can get into it pretty quickly.

The harder part is knowing how to react quickly and not making big mistakes. From that perspective, I would probably teach very quick reacting — more the poker element and managing your bankroll. There are a lot of intricacies that would go into it beyond just the knowledge element. It’s how you think and how you react and how to not make mistakes.

Jordan Schneider: The mental ability to be calm when you have those big market swings, especially because AI can’t do it for you yet, apparently.

Domer: Yeah, I don’t know.

Jordan Schneider: We’ll throw some meditation classes in there, too.

Domer: The number one mistake I see people making, especially when they first join these markets, is being afraid to take a loss. Loss aversion is such a strong thing. It’s like, “Oh, I put 100 bucks in. I’m gonna try my hardest to get 100 bucks out.” They’re averse to taking that $20 loss and being at $80, whereas me, who’s been doing it a long time — if I think I’m wrong on something, oh my God, I’ll gladly take that $80 and maybe put it on the other side and try to get my money back that way. Being averse to taking losses is probably the number one mistake that people make.

Market Manipulation in Sen. Collins Votes and a Reckoning in Romania

For another perspective on prediction markets, we interviewed Jonathan Zubkoff, otherwise known as ZubbyBadger, who is also a full-time prediction markets trader.

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Yenching Academy and the Schwarzman Scholars program comprise China’s attempt to set up a Rhodes/Marshall-style master’s degree. Both programs are fully-funded masters degrees comprised mostly of non-Chinese students. I was a Yenching Scholar in its third cohort from 2017-2019. What follows are some of my reflections on the experience and advice for applicants considering these programs.

Application process (from 2016…there have been two deans since I applied)

• There was a big emphasis on the essay on ‘why China,’ so be sure to explain what role you expect China to have in your future professional life and why Yenching will help you achieve those goals.

• Of late I hear more emphasis has gone on demonstrated interest in China through language study and past academic work. That said, there are generally a few people from each cohort who haven’t studied Mandarin (though this is easier to pull off if you’re from a region where Chinese instruction is less accessible like South Asia or Africa).

Academics

• My classes at Yenching were significantly less demanding than advanced undergrad courses at top schools in the US, with many not going much deeper than what you’d learn in a lecture or seminar aimed at Freshmen. Yenching suffers from a ‘principal contradiction’ of on the one hand wanting to have students that have diverse academic interests and having to teach in English at a Chinese university. There are only so many courses they can offer to a program with just 120 students (most of whom don’t have Chinese strong enough to take graduate school courses in PKU’s other schools), so the courses for any discipline have to remain accessible to students who didn’t take courses in that discipline in undergrad. For example, a Yenching class in economics needs to not assume enough background to leave a philosophy or international relations major overwhelmed. This means that while you’re unlikely to learn new methodologies in disciplines you’re familiar with outside of self-study. However, it was certainly a lot of fun as someone with a history and economics background to get to take courses in Chinese literature and art history.

• Your teachers will all be full-time PKU professors from other schools, 85% of them mainland Chinese and many with western PhD (there were a few white guys who teach at PKU’s business school that also taught Yenching courses). They vary in quality (some are quite good) but are limited in what they can teach by the central contradiction.

• Non-native English speakers who haven’t written long papers in English or had to manage 50+ page English reading assignments may find the coursework slightly more challenging, but squeezing out passing grades should not be challenging for anyone Yenching admits.

• Chinese language courses are still hidebound by many of the issues that plague Mandarin instruction more broadly, including dated material and an undue emphasis on reading. I eventually convinced my teachers to let me opt out of learning how to handwrite characters after finally convincing them that I didn’t care even if they gave me Ds. If you come to Yenching speaking no Chinese, and don’t do anything outside of the Yenching language requirements, you will maaaybe pass HSK3 after a year of instruction.

• You are required to write a thesis but you have an entire year of funding to do so. Any PKU professor can be your thesis advisor, and the level of attention

• In terms of academic freedom, I had no problem saying whatever I wanted on my class papers, but theses are another story as your advisor’s name will be forever attached to your paper so they’ll be somewhat responsible for your work. I had to make significant revisions to some pretty non-controversial stuff about tech regulations, and another classmate was forbidden entirely from writing a thesis relating to Islam in China.

Student Body and Campus Life

• Far and away the best part of Yenching was the diversity and quality of human being in the student body. For starters, it’s maybe 30% American, not a high enough percentage for the Yankees to set the rules of the road. Nearly every student went to undergrad in their country of origin. While Americans likely encountered international students in undergrad, the type of Russian who went to an international school in Moscow before studying in the US is very different than a kid who went to a public high school and studied at St Petersburg University. Then you’ve got 20% Chinese and that final 50% encompassed 50+ countries in a 120-person student body.

• In my year, every mainlander went to school in a Chinese university, meaning almost none of them went to international feeder high schools that lead their students to take the SAT and study abroad. While some foreigners complained that the Chinese students were too insular, my sense is that if you as a non-Chinese weren’t able to make friends with the Chinese students in Yenching, then it was your fault not theirs. The cohort of Chinese students who sign up to Yenching have fluent English and have opted into spending two years at a weird program without much of a domestic reputation whose entire draw is the exposure it provides to international classmates. If you can’t get chummy with these people, you probably weren’t ever going to make any Chinese friends anyways…

• I’ve worked at the UN and can say with confidence this was easily as diverse a pool as you see in NY. Everyone’s shared interest in China and English fluency gave folks a starting point to engage on

  • In my year there really wasn’t a lot of drinking and in particular binge drinking (it’s not part of campus culture in China and most students outside America just drink to excess a lot less) compared to what you’d see at an MBA program in the west.

• Yenching’s structure makes it much more straightforward to integrate with the broader campus. Two years allows you time to really invest in regular PKU campus clubs. The most fun I had was playing with the badminton club, painting with the landscape painting club, and spending every weekend for six months rehearsing for a production of Hamilton with the musical club. Yenching has no dedicated cafeteria so you’ll eat all your meals mixing broadly with the student body.

Yenching vs Schwarzman (Dorms, Career Services)

• Perhaps the important difference is the length of the program. Schwarzman is a one year program, which really only gives you nine months on campus, too short a period of time for many to make real progress on Mandarin or uncover a job offer required to stay in China after graduation.

• Schwarzman has a higher percentage of Americans (40% in 2021) and far more internationals who have exposure to the US, making its social culture much more westernized. For example, of the mainland Chinese students in the class of 2021, only five of twenty-four Chinese nationals did their undergrad on the mainland, with most of the others having gone to school in the US or the UK. This led many Schwarzman scholars in my era to lament (/celebrate) that school is just like home.

• The bar for ‘interest in China’ is much lower in Schwarzman (it’s more oriented to produce ‘leaders’ who ‘understand’ Asia), as a far higher percentage of students come into the program having never studied Chinese. Many of its faculty are flown in for a year or two from the west and don’t really have much of a China background (this may have changed by the looks of their faculty page it seems they now have more Tsinghua profs).

• Schwarzman in general keeps you much busier than Yenching, with more mandatory lectures, career development sessions etc. They also import western profs to stay for a few years, many of whom have zero China background.

• Schwarzman’s campus is the nicest building I ever visited in China, and even puts Yale’s residential colleges to shame. It has centrally filtered air and water, something even the nicest banks in China can’t boast of. Its gym is Equinox-level and their campus features its own cafeteria that’s mostly western food. It also is literally a castle, with some pretty professional security that checks everyone who enters. This whole setup leads Schwarzman students to spend a lot less time interacting with other Tsinghua students (at one point there was a contest for who could not leave campus for the longest period of time…) and breeds more low-level resentment in the broader campus that these westerners have way better amenities than their Chinese counterparts. Yenching’s dorm setup, in contrast, partially takes over some floors of a rough-around-the-edges campus hotel but we had to deal with random middle-aged Chinese folks who were often smoking in their rooms…

• In terms of career services, Schwarzman is on par with top western grad schools. They hired a senior career services professional with decades of experience at Booth and Yale’s SOM to stand up the program and that investment has paid off for students looking, in particular, to go into traditional corporate routes in the west. Schwarzman has structured on-campus recruiting for the big banks and consulting firms. Big backers of the institution like Ray Dalio (Bridgewater) and of course Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone) wregularly hire out of the program.

• Yenching’s career services, in contrast, is bare-bones. The only people in my year who ended up in bulge bracket banks or top consulting firms had offers going into the program. In general, Yenching’s student body has a more academic bent, with more students ending up in PhD programs or law school.

• Neither program is particularly good at finding placements for students in Chinese firms. Bytedance is far and away the most common domestic firm that picks up internationals from Schwarzman and Yenching.

Why Go To Yenching?

• If you want a way to get into China, not have to teach English, and have two years of funding where you can pretty much choose your own adventure

• If you want to make an incredible group of friends who share your interest in China

Why Not Go To Yenching?

• If you don’t really care about China (you’ll have to put up with a fair amount of BS that will be off-putting to anyone who doesn’t appreciate that it comes with the territory with anything official on the mainland)

• If you want to be taught things in grad school (which isn’t to say you can’t learn things, you just need to be more proactive than at a western program)

Other Notes

• From Wikipedia: “While Tsinghua Schwarzman expects to raise about US$550 million (originally 300 million) from mostly foreign donors for its endowment, it is understood that the Peking Yenching endowment is even better funded through significant donations from Chinese philanthropists and special grants from the Chinese Central Government.” Schwarzman College has lots of rooms named after westerners and a big plaque in front showcasing all of its major donors (a real who’s who of billionaires and multinationals). Aside from Robin Li (Baidu’s CEO), I don’t know of any other particular funders for Yenching and to be honest, would be pretty shocked if it had a larger endowment than Schwarzman. For both programs, the whole idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding mostly foreigners to spend a year or two in China when there’s so much that needs better funding in the broader Chinese educational system is more than a little off-putting…

Editor Lily is in Bishkek next week! Drop us a message if you’re in town.

What is going on in Japanese politics? What do the election results mean for Japan’s future? Did Trump’s tariff pressure play a role in Prime Minister Ishiba’s rumored resignation?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed Tobias Harris, creator of the Observing Japan substack. Tobias first appeared on ChinaTalk in 2022 to discuss his excellent biography of Shinzo Abe.

Our conversation today covers…

• The political mechanics behind Ishiba’s resignation and the trade deal with the US

• Why the LDP fell into crisis after the assassination of Shinzo Abe, and how the Japanese public responds to scandals

• What the latest results in the upper house election tell us about domestic Japanese politics

• The political parties trying to capitalize on the power vacuum left by LDP decline, including communists, far-right populists, and pro-labor TikTok conservatives

• How the US, China, and even Russia have influenced Japanese domestic politics in the post-Abe period

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Thanks to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this episode.

Japan Makes a Deal, Ishiba Resigning?

[This bit we recorded weds afternoon]

Tobias Harris: Well, the first thing that happened after we recorded was that a US-Japan trade deal was announced via a Truth Social post by the president. Everyone was wondering if we were going to get that deal, and then we did. At first, it looked like it was going to be an entirely one-sided deal, but then details started trickling out. It’s actually probably about as good a deal as Japan could have hoped for.

Then, a few hours later, I was getting ready to go to bed when my phone rang. It was Bloomberg in Hong Kong asking if I could be on TV in 20 minutes. They had just gotten news that Prime Minister Ishiba was going to resign. I looked at my phone and saw there was a scoop from the Mainichi Shimbun, a center-left daily newspaper. Technically, it wasn’t that he was resigning — it was that he had told sources he was planning to announce his resignation within the next few weeks. It wasn’t quite “I’m going to resign,” but it seemed pretty definitive.

It’s now been pretty much confirmed by other sources. Ishiba himself has not officially confirmed it, but it seems like it’s more or less a done deal that in a couple of weeks he will officially confirm that he’s leaving. The other thing that has happened in the interim is that his support in the party is collapsing. There are a lot of calls for him to quit, and they’ve become much more vocal after the story broke. He looks like he’s done, even if he doesn’t seem to entirely know it yet.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do a little Japanese media literacy lesson. If you’re saying people got more vocal after the story came out, it seems like there are a lot of folks who have some incentive for a story to come out if they want to see change happen. Do you buy it? Is there a way for the tail to wag the dog here, where a story comes out even if it’s not actually what he was meaning, and then that emboldens the LDP membership in such a way that it’s hard for him to keep everything together?

Tobias Harris: I’m not ruling that out entirely, although I wonder whether the trade deal announcement was actually the more important development. To some extent, the fact that there hadn’t been a trade deal and that you had this August 1st deadline looming over everything made some people reluctant to say Ishiba should go because they didn’t want to jeopardize those talks while they were ongoing. There was hope that you’d get some deal done that would spare Japan from 25% tariffs on August 1.

But once that deal was announced, essentially Ishiba made himself obsolete. All the people who were holding back because they didn’t want to hurt the trade negotiations — well, now that those are done, you can focus on Ishiba’s shortcomings as a leader of the LDP and his inability to manage the Diet without worrying about the trade talks. That was really the more important trigger. Once that was announced, a lot of hesitant critics within the party now feel more emboldened because they don’t have to worry about those concerns.

Jordan Schneider: I guess Ishiba needed more of that Netanyahu energy of taking the country down with the ship in order to preserve his political future by blowing the trade deal up. But let’s look forward a little bit. How does one become the next prime minister of Japan?

Tobias Harris: You already now have a number of aspirants getting ready, waiting for the flag to go up when they can start being formal candidates. You had nine people run last year, and I suspect we’ll see a number of the same candidates who ran last year run again.

The question that the LDP is going to have to figure out this time around: normally when you have a leader quit midway through their term, the LDP has emergency rules in place to do a very abbreviated campaign that doesn’t leave a vacuum for a long time. That basically limits the role that rank-and-file dues-paying members have.

Normally, last year you had this month-long campaign where the candidates crisscrossed the country, held forums, and met rank-and-file members because ultimately the rank-and-file dues-paying members of the LDP would vote. Those votes would determine a portion of the votes in the first round of voting, with the other share going to LDP lawmakers.

When you have an emergency election because someone’s resigned, you would not necessarily have that public voting. It generally will be more the lawmakers and party officials at the prefectural level basically making the decision.

Given that the party is having a major loss of public confidence, there’s actually some pushback now saying that we should set the rules for this election to be like a normal election. They want to give the rank-and-file a say in the matter and try to have a full public vote again. The goal is to try to move toward reconnecting with the public to find someone who actually might appeal to more people instead of having this be a behind-closed-doors, proverbial smoke-filled room decision.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a good note to end on. As a note for the audience, the rest of this interview is still very much relevant to understanding the trade deal, the political pain the LDP finds itself in, and the national constraints the Japanese government is operating under.

LDP in Crisis and Japanese Political Economy

[starting from here we recorded Tuesday AM]

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start the clock at the Abe Shinzo assassination. What has happened in Japanese politics since then?

Tobias Harris: That was three years ago. During the last Upper House campaign, Abe was doing a campaign stop at a train station in Nara and was assassinated for reasons that at first were unclear. It quickly became clear that it had to do with his relationship with the Unification Church, which set off a whole discussion of the Unification Church’s role in Japanese politics.

We’re not going to talk about that because it’s less important than the impact the assassination has had on Japanese politics subsequently. I would argue that at the moment Abe was assassinated — even though at that point he had been an ex-prime minister for just under two years — he really was arguably the most powerful figure in Japanese politics.

That’s because he was the head of not only the LDP’s largest faction, but also really the head of the party’s largest ideological tendency. Basically, the right wing of the party was arguably dominant, even though you had a more liberal prime minister at that point in Kishida Fumio. Abe really was in a position to set the agenda because here was this very notable, prominent, powerful ex-prime minister who also was a faction boss and commanded a lot of media attention. When he opened his mouth, everyone was forced to listen and pay attention to what he was saying. He was a tremendously powerful insider political figure who controlled a lot of votes within the party and was instrumental in getting Kishida elected in the first place and then sustaining his government.

You’ll notice that when Abe died and was out of the picture, you essentially lost a fundamental supporting pillar of LDP governance. You had a few unintended consequences where his death meant basically the exposure of the relationship to the Unification Church. That was one scandal that hit the LDP that they weren’t really ready for.

Then you had a second scandal that came in the wake of that. When Abe was gone, the leaders of the Abe faction who followed him basically decided to start this practice that Abe had ended. Members of the faction had these fundraising parties, and they had this practice where everything that you raised in excess of a certain quota that went to the faction was kicked back to you. They decided to start doing that, but those kickbacks weren’t reported according to the requirements of campaign finance law. This turned into a huge scandal that destroyed the faction system essentially. It basically led the party to say, “Okay, that’s it, we’re done with the factions.” That was pretty much a direct consequence of his passing.

As a result, the LDP forfeited a ton of public trust and has performed poorly. They did fine in the 2022 Upper House elections that happened right after he was assassinated. But in the general election last year and now the Upper House elections this year, the LDP lost significant ground. The number of votes that it got in the national proportional election portion — the LDP got 6 million fewer votes this past Sunday than it did in 2022. That’s just an enormous collapse in trust in the party.

There’s some question about precisely measuring how many of those votes are from moderate people who are dissatisfied with the direction of the party versus people on the right who don’t like the post-Abe direction of the party and have been voting in protest. But there’s a real loss of confidence and trust in the party. It has basically meant that the LDP has not only lost public confidence — it now has lost control of both houses of the Diet. You almost have this death spiral feeling going on right now.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s step back and do a little more Japanese political economy fundamentals, because you just threw a lot at the ChinaTalk audience. Can you explain how the Japanese political system works, and what made the Abe era unique?

Tobias Harris: The main thing to appreciate about the Abe era — which was eight years of him in power, and then you have several extra years of him as a powerful ex-prime minister — is that this decade, when he returned to power in 2012 onward, was really the capstone of what had been at that point basically 20 to 25 years of attempts by reformers in Japan to make Japan a much more centralized, top-down political system.

When the LDP was in its Cold War era period of dominance, it was not a top-down system. It was very much — people at times talked about the LDP almost as a coalition government because its factions were very autonomous and competed for power and had different beliefs and different personalities. They were almost like mini parties in and of themselves. The LDP historically was strong, and the governments that it chose were generally pretty weak and had weak prime ministers who were considered first among equals, but they did not have a lot of agenda-setting power relative to other players in the system, including the bureaucracy.

At the end of the Cold War and heading into the end of the century and the beginning of the new century, you had a lot of reformers who basically said, “This is not sustainable. We need strong prime ministers who can navigate a challenging global order because things are changing. We have friction with the United States. We have China rising. There are challenges that require more capable leadership."

You had a series of reforms really going back to the early ’90s to try to make the system much more top-down, to create much stronger prime ministers. Ultimately, Abe was the product of those reforms. You had electoral change, administrative reform, and various other political reforms to basically ensure that the Prime Minister would have the ability to set the agenda, dominate the political system, and basically say, “This is what we’re going to do,” and then follow through on that.

It was a bumpy process to get there, and you had some two steps forward, one step back when it came to actually seeing the Prime Minister reach that point. But 2012 really is when Abe comes back, has really thought about how to govern and how to use the powers that these reforms have produced, and then sets about saying, “Here’s my agenda. I have large majorities in both houses of the Diet, and I’m going to set about doing that.” By and large, he did. He spent eight years saying, “Here are my economic policies, and I’m going to really work on putting those into practice. I’m going to strengthen Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. I’m going to press forward with — if not outright constitution change — some changes to national security laws.” He basically did as promised.

That really explains the 2012 to 2022 decade. What we’ve learned over the last several years was how much that depended on that political foundation, which was the LDP consistently winning national elections and ensuring that it had those majorities with which to govern. That in part also depended on a weak opposition. On all of those fronts, things have started to churn. Some of that is really — like in a lot of Japan’s peers in the G7 — the way in which COVID scrambled everything and changed the political landscape that the parties were operating in. What had been a very friendly landscape for the LDP post-2021 became a progressively tougher landscape for them to operate in.

Jordan Schneider: What are the frustrations of the electorate that are universal? And what are the more specific gripes that people have had over the past few years with the governing party?

Tobias Harris: Like in pretty much every other democracy post-COVID, the problem is inflation. Japan had wanted inflation for a long time. Abe was a reflationist — inflation was the thing they wanted. But the inflation they’ve gotten has not necessarily been the demand-pull, higher wages leading to higher consumption, leading to steady increases in inflation. It was more the supply shock kind of inflation from imports getting more expensive due to a weaker yen because you’ve got divergence in monetary policy between Japan and other countries.

The yen was weak, and Japan imports a lot of food and energy, and that was passed through to consumers. That really has hurt. Getting more of the cost-push inflation has really eroded household incomes. You’ve really seen a lot of pain from that, a lot of frustration, and that certainly contributed to the LDP losing last year. If you look at exit polling this year, it was overwhelmingly the issue that voters cared about most this time around.

The LDP hasn’t really had a good answer to that inflation — the Bank of Japan has started raising interest rates, but it’s still relatively slow, and you still have a pretty big divergence in monetary policy, so the yen has still been relatively weak. Households feel squeezed. You’ve had a lot of effort to try to get wages up, but it’s a difficult process. It is not something that’s happened fast enough to make people feel like they have more money in their pockets. The LDP has just been punished for appearing not to have done enough.

This was a problem last year in particular, where you had this big scandal that showed the LDP skirting campaign finance law and looking like it was taking care of itself at a time when people felt poor. The confluence of those issues really hurt the LDP. This year was probably pure inflation — inflation is up, real incomes haven’t kept pace, and the LDP really has suffered for that.

Jordan Schneider: The kickbacks, if I recall, were in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, right?

Tobias Harris: Yeah, like most Japanese political scandals, it’s more about the behavior than the amount of money involved.

Jordan Schneider: Is there an Epstein-Japan connection? I just asked ChatGPT. It gave me Joi Ito, who’s apparently a VC who took $1 million from Epstein, and then Suga was going to put him as the head of some digital agency, but had to pull it back.

Tobias Harris: Maybe this is a good segue to talking about the party that everyone is talking about now, which is Sanseitō 参政党, the new far-right party whose leader says that he views his peers as the AfD, Marine Le Pen, and Reform UK. They are thoroughly steeped in online memes and online political discussion in the United States. They’ve trained their activists in English so that they can follow online debate. There is some leakage of American online political culture into Japanese discourse that way.

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Sanseitō also — just going back to how COVID and its aftermath changed Japanese politics — is one very tangible way in which it changed because it really emerged as an anti-vax group, and anti-vax, and then from that, opposing anti-globalist conspiracy theorizing. It has now branched into other, more traditional Japanese far-right politics, and is now a new force in the political system.

Jordan Schneider: How weird is this?

Tobias Harris: There are a few ways of answering that because I personally have, on multiple occasions, pushed back against the idea that Japan has been uniquely resistant to populism. I just don’t think that’s true. Japanese populism has often looked different than it looks in other countries because it hasn’t generally been xenophobic, just because you haven’t had a foreign population to really target with it.

But you had populism, because when the bubble burst in the early ’90s, there were a lot of elites to get mad at. You had anti-LDP backlash, you had anti-bureaucratic backlash, you had Koizumi govern as a populist. The literature on Koizumi constantly talks about how he governed as a populist, but the elites that he was using populist tools against were members of his own party because he was targeting these rural fat cats who had relied on pork barrel spending and support for building bridges to nowhere and useless roads that nobody was using.

Populism in Japan has pretty much — certainly post-Cold War — been an urban phenomenon. It is urban voters who feel like they don’t have enough political power in the political system and that they’re slighted, their interests are slighted, that their quality of life has degraded and that the political system is skewed against them. Repeatedly you have had parties that are populist. You have Ishin no Kai, this Osaka-based party that emerged about 15 years ago and has tried to become more national — very much a populist party, anti-bureaucratic, anti-teachers unions, anti-national government. This is not a new phenomenon.

What is new about Sanseitō is the degree to which anti-immigrant, anti-foreign population rhetoric has been part of its appeal. That’s because you do have a bigger — you now have a bigger foreign population in Japan than they’ve pretty much ever had. Thanks to Abe, actually.

It’s on my to-do list of essays I want to write. I want to write the story of how Abe created Sanseitō through his embrace of — if not, he would not call it immigration — it was a de facto guest worker program. Opening the door, simultaneously opening the door, but as in many other countries, not really wanting to talk about it. Basically trying to put a lid on the issue and not have a big debate within the LDP about it, he basically allowed discontent over this to simmer and to grow.

Essentially the business wing won out, right? Because business in Japan wants — they’re basically having trouble getting enough workers to do a lot of jobs, and they wanted it. But Abe basically didn’t get enough buy-in from his own base, his own right-wing base, and let the problem simmer. Now the LDP is essentially paying the price for that set of choices that Abe made.

Jordan Schneider: What’s the complaint about immigrants if unemployment is zero?

Tobias Harris: For example, there’s a left-wing party, Reiwa Shinsengumi, that is also anti-immigrant because they think that relying on foreign workers suppresses wages. Basically, it’s a tool by the business community to suppress wages. There’s a bit of a horseshoe effect going on there where the left-wing populist and the right-wing populist both are opposed to foreign workers for their own reasons. This is not something that’s unique to Japan — you see similar politics in other places as well.

But it’s more about how they fit in, right? There have been some highly publicized stories about foreign communities in certain places where they’re not following the rules about garbage disposal or they make too much noise. There’s an issue with Japan’s growing Muslim population and the fact that they need a lot of space for their cemeteries. That is something generally that the local population — Japanese cremate more. There are just a lot of culture clash issues that come with this.

These issues come with Japan just having — yes, the foreign population is 3% of the whole, relatively small, but it’s increased pretty significantly in a fairly short period of time. There’s going to be friction as a result of that.

But it’s possible to overstate the degree to which that’s been a factor. A lot of the press coverage of this election outside of Japan has focused on this party that has xenophobic appeals and came out of nowhere, and clearly that shows that this is a big issue overall. You look at the exit polling and overwhelmingly it’s inflation, not the question of Japan’s foreign population.

Sanseitō forced other parties to talk about it more than they had been, and certainly their own voters care a lot about this. But I’m not necessarily sure that it’s the only reason that people voted for Sanseitō because they were also out calling for very big tax cuts and limits on Social Security premiums and basically trying to put more money in people’s pockets, which is the main issue for a lot of urban voters, which is where they did best. This keeps with this idea of Japanese populism being primarily an urban phenomenon.

It’s too simple to say that this shows Japan is now joining the anti-immigrant wave everywhere else and that it’s as salient as it’s been in other places. It’s too soon to say that.

Jordan Schneider: To what extent is the demographic crisis something that has seeped into political discourse? Something politicians actually try to have plans about?

Tobias Harris: It’s been part of political discourse for 30 years, and they’ve tried all different ideas and are constantly proposing this subsidy and that child allowance and lots of other ideas. I don’t think Japan has had any more success figuring out how to encourage people to have more children than any other democracy facing a demographic crisis. They’ve just been at it for longer.

There is a feeling, in some ways, that Japan has passed a point of no return to a certain extent, where just a certain amount of decline at this point is baked in. Every year, the number of new births is setting new records for numbers that you haven’t seen since the late 19th century.

The crisis is here. In some ways, now, there are two different sides of it because there’s the “how do we encourage people to have more children?” But then there’s also the question of how to deal with the consequences of demographic decline now, in the moment. “How do we deal with the fact that you have rural communities depopulating, and how do we ensure that there’s still service provision in these communities? How do we entice young people to actually want to go live there? That’s a whole other set of policies that have been debated for a long time.

It’s baked into politics — everyone has to talk about it, but I don’t know if anyone’s got any brilliant ideas for how to fix it.

Jordan Schneider: I think it’s just getting American YouTubers to continue making those incredibly viral videos of how they fix up the beautiful house in the valley or whatever, which is a shockingly popular genre.

Let’s talk Russia connections. There was a whole foreign influence arc in the most recent campaign. How did that play out? What’s your read there?

Tobias Harris: It kicked off when a Sanseitō candidate went on Sputnik News. Sputnik News posted that all over Twitter, and Sanseitō then basically said, “Oh, this wasn’t authorized,” and they fired someone and tried to sweep it under the rug.

Then you had the Ishiba government actually coming out and saying, “We have evidence that says there were foreign bot activities on Twitter promoting basically disinformation about the foreign population in Japan and basically trying to find these wedge issues to divide Japanese against each other and promoting Sanseitō.” Sanseitō denied that there was any connection or anything to do with this.

The LDP in the last few days was raising questions about what exactly was happening here. I have a pet theory that suggests that, compared to some of the polling that we saw, Sanseitō actually underperformed a little bit. It looked like they were actually on track to win at least a few more seats than they did. What I wonder is whether in the final days, the Russia connection may have pushed some voters on the margins away from them.

Basically, there was no polling after the Russia allegations came out, so we wouldn’t really have seen that show up until election day, until we actually saw the numbers. It’s possible that there may have been some races that went differently because of that, but we don’t know for sure.

But I think that’s something that the Japanese public is likely to take seriously. I don’t think there’s a lot of good feeling towards Russia at the moment. If it turns out that there is more there, it is likely to shape opinions of Sanseitō in a pretty negative way.

It’s probably also worth mentioning here — and this is something that maybe people don’t appreciate — Sanseitō ran in an election for the first time three years ago. It won one seat in the Upper House three years ago. It won four or five seats in the Lower House last year. This is a party that does not have a big presence or hasn’t until this election. As a result, it was very fringe. It did not get a lot of mainstream coverage. It did not get a lot of mainstream scrutiny. Everyone would just dismiss them as this goofy party on the fringes.

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Most of the attention that it has gotten has been in the last five weeks. It really did not start climbing in the polls for this election until about five weeks ago. The Japanese media basically has not even begun combing through their dirty laundry.

Jordan Schneider: If people get scandalized by single $1,000 illicit campaign finance violations, then as long as that backbone of integrity in the electorate is there, then you wouldn’t be shocked to find other things going on with these fun YouTube influencer politician types.

Tobias Harris: There was certainly more smoke than just what the government was saying about bot activity. One of the big weekly tabloids actually looked through their finance records and found a series of payments over the course of a few years to some PR company called Vostok that basically changed its office location a few times. No one had any idea what this company was that they made payments to for PR help over the course of several years.

Jordan Schneider: How many Tobias Harrises are living in Vladivostok giving deep domestic Japanese political takes on how to position to win those seats?

Tobias Harris: That kind of information was out there for anyone to report on for years. Those were payments going back to basically the beginning of the party. That just tells you that they really are only now going to start getting more scrutiny.

It’s too early to say, “Oh, this is a party that’s definitely here to stay and is going to be a fixture on the landscape now.” We’ve seen a lot of parties come and go in Japanese politics for a long time, and a lot of populist parties that look like they have the wind at their backs and are destined to change everything. Building a sustainable, durable party is not something that can happen over one or two cycles. This is a longer-term process. We’ll see what happens with them after this.

Jordan Schneider: All right. We’re going to take a few more vitamins. How are parliamentary elections structured in Japan?

Tobias Harris: Well, if we’re talking about the Upper House elections that just were held, they’re a little complicated. The Upper House has 248 seats, like the Senate. You don’t get all of the Upper House elected at the same time — they serve six-year terms. Half the house is on one six-year cycle and the other half is on another six-year cycle. Half the house every three years is up for election.

What you have, like in the Lower House, is essentially a mixed system where a portion of the election is for PR seats. In the Upper House, it’s a national proportional representation list. Each party has its slate. Voters have the option of voting either for a party or for a candidate on one of the party’s lists. That’s 50 seats for PR.

For the remainder, it’s a mix of single-member constituencies, basically representing each prefecture, but the prefectures get more seats or fewer seats depending on their population. Tokyo elects six members at a time to the Upper House, but most of the country only elects one member at a time. In fact, there are four prefectures that essentially elect half a representative because they’ve been fused with a neighboring prefecture because they have too few people.

That’s 32 single-member constituencies and then the remainder — the remaining 13 prefectures have multiple members ranging from Tokyo’s six to some that have two. Every voter gets two votes: one for their constituent representative, one for someone from the PR list or for a party in the PR list. That makes up the constituency for the Upper House. We can talk about the Lower House too, but if you want to pause and talk about a little more about the Upper House, we can do that as well.

Jordan Schneider: What can parties who aren’t in power do?

Tobias Harris: They can try to get more seats. In terms of their role in policymaking, it’s complicated because generally Japan — historically, we were talking about the 30 years of reform and trying to change the system and making the system more top-down — historically Japan was not a textbook Westminster democracy where the prime minister, if they have a majority, is an elected dictator and can do whatever they want as long as they have a majority. Precisely because the LDP as an institution was so strong and the prime minister had to defer to other players in the system.

There were stretches during LDP rule where actually there was a ton of backroom negotiations between the parties, between the ruling and the opposition parties. It was never just a textbook “government has the votes, it can do whatever it wants.”

What happened under Abe was that you did get more of a textbook Westminster-style democracy where you did have the Prime Minister wanting to do this, he’s got the majorities, he’s going to do what he wants. Maybe he’ll defer if public opinion is negative — he’ll make some concessions to public opinion — but basically was not conceding much to the opposition. There wasn’t really that much the opposition could do about it.

Now, it’s changed again because after the general election last year, the LDP-led government does not have a majority in the Lower House. It has had to actually concede quite a bit of power to the opposition. In practice, that has meant the leading opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, controls several very important committees in the Lower House. That gives it a lot of agenda-setting power and a lot of ability to control how legislation moves, the pace that legislation moves, when votes get scheduled, how long debate takes.

The opposition actually at the moment has quite a bit of power. Now, after Sunday’s results, you’re going to see something similar, at least for the time being, in the Upper House where if they want to do anything, they’re going to have to negotiate with the opposition parties to get something on the legislative agenda to ensure that the votes exist to pass it. The opposition parties actually have quite a bit of power to slow things down and to block the government’s agenda in a way that they did not have during the Abe years.

Jordan Schneider: All right. Back to the horse race, folks — Tobias’s favorite new entrant to the scene, Democratic Party for the People. What’s their deal?

Tobias Harris: They’ve been around for about seven or eight years now. They are a splinter from the former Democratic Party of Japan, which was from when Japan had this brief flirtation with two-party democracy and even had an actual change of ruling party via an election — crazy idea, doing that in a democracy.

In 2009, when the Democratic Party of Japan won a huge majority and swept the LDP into opposition, and when they went back into opposition in 2012, they basically were almost powerless. Abe ran roughshod over them. They had no appeal to the public. Eventually what happened is that it split into competing post-DPJ parties. You have the Constitutional Democrats as the more center-left party, and then the Democratic Party for the People is a smaller, more center-right splinter party, basically.

It’s actually funny because both the CDP and the DPFP (some people abbreviate it as “DPP,” but that’s already taken by the Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party) are both still backed by organized labor.

The big organized labor federation, Rengo, is always calling the leaders of the DPFP and the CDP into her office, basically, and saying, “You two have to cooperate more. You two have to stop fighting. You two have to stop working at cross purposes,” which is just funny.

What the DPFP actually has tried to do in recent years is essentially trying to do this identity change where it started as this party backed by organized labor, but a little more conservative on some things. More conservative on national defense, they’ve been pretty pro-nuclear energy, just more friendly to Abenomics-style policies instead of welfare state center policies like the CDP.

What they’ve been trying to do is pivot to become a party of the urban, young working class. The same voters that Sanseitō was trying to appeal to. Basically trying to be a voice for these urban working young workers who generally aren’t well served by the existing parties. The political system has generally not given much voice to these people. They don’t really have a political home.

They’ve been trying to make this acrobatic move where without alienating the organized labor supporters, which are still important in some particular constituencies for the DPFP, without losing that support, they’re trying to make this pivot to being this party of young urban voters. It’s actually worked pretty well now for the last couple of elections.

They have generally been much savvier at social media. They really have tried to do this thing where they try to do campaign rallies almost in the hope of producing viral content that they could then post on YouTube and get shared a lot and get people talking about it. Their leader, Tamaki Yūichirō, is always doing these things where he’s holding his phone out and riffing and taking questions from people. They’re trying to be a little more like meeting young voters where they are.

They’ve had a lot of success with it. Their success this election was bigger in important ways than Sanseitō’s. Because they have more seats in the Lower House, they’re a much more important player going forward than Sanseitō will be at the moment.

They’re part of the picture. They’re an important player. They may end up as part of a ruling coalition depending on how things break. We’ve got to keep an eye on them as well.

Structural Stagnation and the Impact of Foreign Policy

Jordan Schneider: All right, back to the LDP. What happens next with them?

Tobias Harris: The party’s in crisis.

Jordan Schneider: To start off, who’s voting for them? Everyone seems upset with the LDP.

Tobias Harris: They’re still the biggest party in the country by a long way. Don’t underestimate that — they still have the most seats and wield considerable power in many different areas.

What’s happening now is that they’ve gone through several phases since 2012. Abe tried to make it a much more coherent, ideologically conservative party that could still compete nationally and win in many places. To some extent, he was successful in that. But his success depended heavily on voter apathy.

If you look at all the elections held from 2012 onward, turnout was really low. This allowed Abe to win elections on the strength of the electoral machines of the LDP and its coalition partner Kōmeitō 公明党. Both parties are very good at organizing their votes and getting their voters out to the polls. With low turnout — particularly when independents stay home — the LDP has been able to win. That’s how Abe won six national elections with record low or near-record low turnout in pretty much every one of those elections.

He was basically taking advantage of voter burnout. During the first decade of the century, you actually had many very high turnout elections. People were excited about Koizumi, and then they were excited about competition between the LDP and the DPJ, which produced some pretty high turnout elections. But after the DPJ failed in office and left in 2012, there was a lot of exhaustion. Voters were fed up with the DPJ. Many independents weren’t terribly excited about Abe and the LDP and didn’t feel like they had anyone to vote for. Turnout fell.

The LDP can’t take that for granted anymore. Turnout rose six and a half percentage points this election compared to 2022’s upper house election. Independents are paying attention again. The LDP has struggled to keep its own supporters and get them turning out for a mix of reasons: the corruption scandals, and conservatives who think that both Kishida and Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru are too liberal and have turned from the true way that Abe had outlined. They’re punishing the party.

You have many voters who might have voted for the LDP in the past, but have decided to start punishing the party. You also have voters who sat out previous elections who are now coming back. Many of those appear to be younger voters, and they’re also voting to punish the LDP because they feel their lives haven’t gotten any better. The party has been in power uninterrupted for 13 years — what do they have to show for it? All of this has created a situation where the LDP does not have a majority in either house of the Diet.

Jordan Schneider: Is it a personality thing? The fact that we’ve got Tarō Asō at 84 years old still trying to call shots doesn’t give me a ton of confidence.

What’s the incentive structure for a young, upcoming charismatic politician to try to revive this giant carcass of a party, as opposed to going somewhere different that’s maybe more nimble and more easily bent to the things they’re interested in? Are there deep structural reasons for the LDP not to be able to get it together, or are there people with views and enough folks who see the writing on the wall that you think this organization has the capacity to rebuild a mandate?

Tobias Harris: The first part of that question is important — there is a feeling that generational change has not happened. Look at when people entered politics — Abe was elected in 1993, Suga in 1996, Kishida in 1993, and Ishiba entered politics in 1986. There’s definitely a feeling that the party has been led by people who’ve been around forever and are refusing to release their grip. This sounds familiar in some other contexts we could discuss.

There’s a feeling that they’ve really frustrated the ambitions of younger people. In some ways, this was one of Abe’s shortcomings — he ended up filling his government with people who were loyal to him, people he trusted. These were largely people who came up in politics around the same time as him. He didn’t do enough to really cultivate that next generation, to foster talent, or to raise up the next generation of leadership.

It’s ironic that last year, the young, shiny face of generational change — one of the faces of generational change in the nine-person leadership election — was Kobayashi Takayuki, this young, hawkish guy. But he’s 50 years old. That’s what counts as young and as the voice of generational change in the LDP.

There’s a real feeling that the party has not confronted this issue, has not cleared out some of these voices who’ve been around forever, and they’re paying a price for it. It means they’re out of touch. It means they don’t really have a way of using social media effectively. All these other parties are running circles around them when it comes to actually communicating with younger voters and meeting younger voters where they are — delivering information in ways that are relevant to them. The party just feels very out of touch in that way.

The ironic thing is that when I was looking at the general election last year and the candidates that were running, the LDP still has a shocking ability to recruit young people as candidates. That’s probably a hangover from the fact that the party was as dominant after 2012 as it was. During the years when you had this nascent two-party competition, the DPJ actually did have some success attracting young people who wanted to enter politics because they could say, “We might actually have a chance of making a difference in politics and winning. Here’s this new and up-and-coming party, and there’s a place for me in that.”

After 2012, everyone said, “This party’s going nowhere. Why would I want to run for them?” That actually created a problem for the CDP, where not unlike the LDP, they also haven’t had generational change. The CDP is now led by Noda Yoshihiko, the last DPJ prime minister who came back into the CDP’s leadership last year. There’s this feeling that the party is still dominated by all these people who were around leading the DPJ when it was in power. You haven’t had generational change there. They haven’t had an influx of new talent.

One question going forward now — you do have these new up-and-coming parties among the opposition ranks. Does the DPFP get a big surge of new people wanting to run? I’ve seen that. If you look at the candidates they’re running, you are getting people in their twenties and thirties who quit their business jobs and say, “Yeah, I’ll run for office. Why not? I’ll give it a shot."

You are seeing more of that. Of course, Sanseitō has this huge digital grassroots organization that is bringing outsiders into politics. Now, as the LDP is in this crisis and maybe headed into opposition at some point, you may see more of that and more second-guessing: “Oh yeah, maybe I will go run for a different party instead of joining the LDP.” That’ll be something to watch. Is there more diversity in the choices that political aspirants take?

Jordan Schneider: How does one get to run for office for the LDP? Are there the equivalent of Open Primaries? Is it all decided by party central? How does it work? And once you’re elected, how much agency do you have to fight the man or kick out a prime minister?

Tobias Harris: Traditionally in Japanese politics, to enter politics you had to have the “three bans” 選挙の三バン, which refers to jiban 地盤 (a local support base), kaban 鞄 (financial support, basically referring to the bag of money you have, since kaban means bag), and kanban 看板 (name recognition).

What these have added up to is basically hereditary dominance, because the easiest way to enter politics was having name recognition because you’re the son of a politician who’s retired. Jiban — your father (usually father, maybe very occasionally mother) has passed down a support group, basically the electoral machine that’s going to get out the vote for you. Kaban — your parents have been raising money for a long time and are able to pass down that fundraising prowess to you.

You had really prominent hereditary politics for a long time. To some extent that has continued even after electoral reform in the 1990s when Japan switched to predominantly single-member districts in the lower house. You still have many hereditary politicians and many seats being passed down to children, particularly in the LDP.

Gradually, that process has changed. The LDP doesn’t have a primary system, but essentially has a casting call process. If you’re interested in running, you put your name in, apply, and they’ll review your application. That happens with the prefectural party, which reviews applications and then works with the national party to figure out who the candidate in a constituency should be. Sometimes, if you’re a powerful enough politician, you can overrule that process or dominate it.

At times, this has actually hurt the party. It probably hurt the LDP in this election that just passed because Nikai Toshihiro — a big power broker in the party who had been secretary general — wanted his son to inherit a seat and supported his candidacy last year. This was actually against an LDP member who had been kicked out of the party for his part in the kickback scandal. Nikai’s son lost that election.

Then Nikai pushed for him to run for an upper house seat in the prefecture during this election as the LDP candidate against a candidate who was backed by the ousted LDP member Sekō, who was an Abe ally. The independent won against Nikai’s son again — a second straight election where he was unable to win.

There’s a feeling that people are fed up with hereditary politics, feeling that politics has become this family business that people can’t break into. Even a few years ago when Abe’s nephew [Kishi Nobuchiyo] ran for the seat that was vacated by Abe’s brother, Kishi Nobuo — Nobuo’s son ran in a by-election for his seat. He won, but it was closer than you would think given the prominence of the family. You had many people in exit polls saying they didn’t want hereditary politicians. In fact, the number of people in exit polls saying they didn’t want hereditary politicians was bigger than the number of people who voted for Kishi. This suggests that some people who voted for him still didn’t like the idea that this was the choice they were being given.

There’s considerable frustration at how the political system has been dominated by familiar names — that the system hasn’t been open to new blood, to new voices, to people with different perspectives. That frustration is boiling over, and it explains at least part of the problem that the LDP is having. It has explained why there’s openness to voting for different parties. There’s a real sense of a democratic deficit — that the establishment, the LDP, and it hurts not just the LDP but pretty much any established party — these parties have dominated the system, they’re not allowing new people in, they’re not listening to younger voters, they’re not listening to the downtrodden urban working class. Something has to give, and we’re seeing that pressure start to boil over right now.

Jordan Schneider: Well, maybe they’ll just need to add another ban — viral-ban or buzz-ban, the ability to go viral. Thank you, ChatGPT, for allowing me to make jokes in a language I don’t even speak.

Kishida — is there anyone else who can fix this? We have Polymarket at 65% that he’s gone by the end of 2025. Maybe contextualize that number and what it would mean if he stayed or what happens if he goes.

Tobias Harris: I’m skeptical that Ishiba is going to stay on. He gave a press conference yesterday where he said, “I acknowledge that we were dealt a defeat and it was a message from the people, and I humbly accept that. I’m grateful to the supporters who’ve turned out for us, and I apologize to the public that we have not earned your trust."

The LDP doesn’t like losing. No one likes losing, but the LDP doesn’t like losing. The LDP has throughout its history shown that it’s willing to be quite ruthless when it comes to staying in power. It has now lost two straight national elections with Ishiba as its leader and has lost control of both houses of the Diet with Ishiba as its leader.

Beyond just the electoral defeats, there are the reasons for the electoral defeats that we’ve discussed today. You have these new threats on the right who are pulling away the party’s voters. There’s a feeling that the party is closed to new voices, is not listening to young people, and is not really delivering for many voters. Ishiba is likely to bear the blame for much of that, and there are plenty of people in the LDP who would like him gone.

The problem, of course, is what then? There is not an obvious successor. They have many challenges and many things that his successor would have to do, and some of those things are somewhat conflicting. You need someone who can maybe bring back some of the voters who defected to the right. You need someone who can maybe generate some buzz around the LDP more broadly. You maybe need someone who can signal that you’ve taken generational change seriously. You need someone who can negotiate well with the opposition parties who potentially hold the balance of power in both houses of the Diet now. You also need — not to diminish this at all — someone who can sit across the table from Donald Trump and negotiate with the United States and navigate a pretty difficult international situation.

It’s hard to think of any likely contender for the LDP’s leadership who checks all or even most of those boxes. You also need someone who can really build a consensus behind their candidacy that they are the person to solve the problems that the party is facing.

At this point, if Ishiba survives, it’s most likely just because there’s no agreement on who best resolves the party’s problems and they’re better off just sticking with Ishiba. We’ve even heard in the last couple of days that some members of the LDP are suggesting maybe it’s best for the party just to go into opposition and have out the infighting that’s going to have to happen — to do it while they’re in opposition, get themselves sorted, let the opposition parties destroy themselves and mess up, and then the LDP rides back to the rescue, like in 2012.

This is a real perspective being discussed. It would be very uncharacteristic for the LDP to just willingly say, “Fine, you guys can have power.”

Jordan Schneider: That’s true of nearly all political parties.

Tobias Harris: Yes, I don’t expect that to happen. But it tells you something about the state of the LDP’s crisis that someone is even willing to talk like this — that they recognize we’re at a stalemate. We can’t really control the governing process or the legislative process, and we’re also deeply divided internally about the direction of the party.

The right wing wants to be a pure conservative ideological party. The more reformist wing of the party — Ishiba, the younger Koizumi — they want the party to be more of what I think of as almost like one-nation Toryism. We can be the party for all people. We’re not going to be narrowly sectarian. We’re the responsible governing party and no other party can fill that role. We have to be able to do that.

That conflict is essentially irreconcilable. The right wing isn’t strong enough to impose its will on the rest of the party. The reformist part of the party has the premiership, but basically can’t force the right wing to give up their vision for what the party should look like. Until you can figure out what the party should be, they’re all just stuck together in this big tent and unhappy about it.

I do understand where this idea comes from — that going into opposition could be purifying. The LDP almost needs what happened in 2009, where they lost to the DPJ. What actually ended up happening then was that many more moderate incumbents lost in 2009. Abe comes back to the leadership in 2012. Many of the candidates that ended up coming back into the Diet when he won in 2012 were newcomers to the LDP who were much more conservative, who were closer in their politics to him, and they also owed their seats to him.

They were called the “Abe children,” and that basically helped remake the party into this much more ideologically coherent force that was Abe’s instrument for governing. Subsequently, many of the Abe children have lost their seats. It’s a much more diverse party again. Essentially what you need to happen is some sort of —

Jordan Schneider: Some sort of purification rule that only the voters are going to be able to deliver, because there’s not enough party discipline or strong leadership to make that happen.

Tobias Harris: Yes, that’s right.

Jordan Schneider: Is that a function of party rules or incentives, or just not enough charisma in the building?

Tobias Harris: Some of it is the numbers — just the numbers game. There are still enough of these Abe loyalists that they can make a lot of noise and they have ways of being obstreperous and annoying and being a thorn in Ishiba’s side.

I’m a believer in this theory that came out of the study of British politics called the Rubber Band Theory of the Premiership, which was used to talk about Thatcher’s tenure. A Prime Minister’s power stretches and contracts for idiosyncratic reasons. There are the formal powers of the office, but in practice, how big is your majority? What do the opinion polls say? What issues are prominent? What’s the mood of the country? All these issues can affect how much power the prime minister has in practice.

What’s ultimately happened is that when you lose elections, you have less power. When you don’t have the public behind you, you have less power. Ishiba’s approval ratings have been underwater for almost his entire time in office. He just doesn’t have the political capital to really impose his will on the party.

The reason it took him a bunch of tries to win the leadership after a bunch of unsuccessful attempts was that he always had this reputation of being happier as a critic on the back benches than someone who was good at making friends and making allies. Repeatedly, it didn’t do him any favors when it came time to run for the leadership because he just wasn’t good at making friends.

He was a constant thorn in Abe’s side. All of the Abe loyalists hate him. They have not forgotten, because for Abe, one of the most important things about his approach to politics was loyalty. He was very loyal to the people who stuck by him and repaid loyalty with loyalty. The people who stuck with him after he resigned in 2007 — when he came back into power, they came right with him. He stuck with them and they were Team Abe.

There’s no Team Ishiba. Ishiba does not have this group of people around him who are really populating the key positions in his government and are going to stick with him. Team Abe also meant Abe had this group of people around him who helped him make decisions and ensure that those decisions were followed through. Ishiba doesn’t have that. There’s not a Team Ishiba running the show and keeping things on track.

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The result has been that there’s been a lot of oxygen for the critics to run wild with. There’s been a lot of room for the bureaucracy because they’re not getting the top-down direction from Ishiba that they would need to loyally implement the Prime Minister’s agenda. The fact that Ishiba hasn’t been able to govern with a majority means that he doesn’t really have a coherent agenda he’s pursuing. He’s basically governing from week to week based on what he can get the votes for.

If his rubber band is not very elastic, it is very contracted at this point. For a party that got used to decisive leadership during the Abe years, it’s been really hard getting acclimated to the idea of a prime minister who actually can’t do very much and doesn’t have a whole lot of power and hasn’t really articulated a positive agenda.

Jordan Schneider: We centered domestic politics partially because selfishly, I just find it so fun to talk about East Asian politics where there’s this much transparency into what the hell is going on. But also, all politics is local. I imagine a lot of what is transpiring in the US-Japan and Japan-China relationships is driven by these dynamics. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. But Tobias, let’s close with what the current domestic political dynamics mean for Japanese foreign relations.

Tobias Harris: Domestic politics has absolutely been a factor in what we have seen between the US and Japan over the last four months or so, certainly starting on April 2nd onward. You have had a prime minister with not a lot of flexibility domestically and facing an election and being very conscious of what was at stake in that election. Now we’re on the other side of that election, and in some ways his situation is not all that much improved because he’s still the head of a minority government.

He has spent months talking about how he’s not going to make a bad deal. He’s not going to make a deal just to keep the US happy. He’s going to defend Japan’s equities in these negotiations. Getting auto tariffs reduced is a fundamental national interest. Protecting Japan from rice imports is a fundamental national interest. He hasn’t left himself with a lot of room for compromise.

It’s worth mentioning as an aside that we have actually seen a change in the politics of US-Japan relations since Trump took office. Whereas in the past, the politics of US-Japan relations were that the first duty of a Japanese prime minister is to ensure that the relationship with the United States is going well. Successful Japanese prime ministers have understood that, and unsuccessful ones have decided to poke the bear and they’ve paid the price.

The incentives are different now. There’s a lot of anger in Japan over how they’ve been treated by the Trump administration, and the fact that Japan has gotten no credit for being the largest source of FDI in the United States and being a loyal ally and actually doing a lot to increase their defense capabilities. They feel like they’ve gotten no credit for that. They feel that in 2019 when the US and Japan signed an FTA, supposedly, there was this oral promise from Trump to Abe that he wouldn’t raise automobile tariffs on Japan. There’s a feeling that that promise was broken.

Trump talks about his great friend Abe, and yet this was how he treats Japan. In fact, it did not go unnoticed that the letter he delivered about raising tariffs to 25% on August 1st actually was delivered on the third anniversary of Abe’s assassination. That did not go unremarked by Abe loyalists. There’s a lot of bitterness.

Jordan Schneider: How much do you want to bet that they were not aware of that in the White House?

Tobias Harris: Oh, they probably weren’t. Actually, they probably didn’t think about it at all. They sent the same letter verbatim to a bunch of different countries. But no, it was noticed when the letter came through.

There’s a lot of frustration. There was a poll in the Yomiuri Shimbun either late June or early July where something like only 20% said that they trust the United States going forward. That’s an extraordinary number to see in Japan. There’s anger.

We saw the tenor of politics where Ishiba actually was criticizing the United States on the campaign trail and said he’s not going to let the United States push Japan around. I don’t think he says that if it’s not a message that wouldn’t be politically useful and wouldn’t go over well. I don’t know if it ended up being a huge issue ultimately in how people voted. But it’s worth noting that public opinion in Japan on the relationship with the US has changed. In general, the public doesn’t want the government to just make a deal to get the US off Japan’s back. They want Ishiba to stand up for Japan’s national interest and to not just make a bad deal.

All of that has shaped the circumstances that Ishiba is facing now, where he has basically a week to try to avoid 25% tariffs. I don’t know if the Trump administration is going to go easy on him — here you have a prime minister who looks like he’s on the way out. Also, if Ishiba did sign on to a deal that basically betrayed the promises that he made about the kind of deal that he was going to fight for, I don’t think that helps his survival either.

Maybe he saves himself if he actually convinces the US to sign on to a more mutual reciprocal agreement. Barring that, I don’t see a way that this helps him at all.

Jordan Schneider: We have George Glass over there as ambassador right now. Looks like he was ambassador to Portugal and a bond trader for his career. It’s a different vibe from Rahm Emanuel, but we’ll see.

Any Japan-China updates you care to share, or should we leave that for another guest?

Tobias Harris: I would say that China was almost conspicuous by its absence during the campaign in a lot of ways. There might have been hand-wavy stuff about the security threat from China. But it’s interesting — if you look at Ishiba’s stump speeches, he talked a lot more about Russia. It was a standard line in his stump speeches, right near the beginning, where he talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he talked about North Korea joining in, and then pivoted to talking about North Korea’s missile threats, and Russia and North Korea cooperating in East Asia. Interesting that Ishiba was consistently talking more about Russia than China.

China also is a factor in what we’ve been talking about, where one of the big dividing lines between the right wing of the LDP and Ishiba and Kishida before him, as well as Ishiba’s chief cabinet secretary, Hayashi Yoshimasa, is that they’re too soft on China. That part of the party can’t be trusted because they’re too willing to make a deal.

We have seen gradual reopening of political communication between the two governments — a lot of exchanges of visits now at a high level. The Ishiba government got a ton of heat at the start of the year when there was an agreement reached on relaxing visa requirements for Chinese coming to Japan. It’s also connected to the foreign population question because there’s a lot of Chinese buying property in Japan now. Now there’s talk about putting restrictions on foreigners buying property.

When I was in Japan in March, everyone I talked to mentioned that everywhere in central Tokyo, it’s just Chinese buying things up, coming in with cash, buying things. It’s touching Japanese politics in a lot of different ways — they’re ever present, but they weren’t necessarily front and center during the campaign, per se.

Jordan Schneider: Do Japanese political parties have theme songs in general or for each campaign in particular? Like, walk-on music?

Tobias Harris: Not generally speaking. Abe’s ads always had these exciting, dramatic, movie trailer fanfare kinds of music. The party to look at is the Japanese Communist Party — they always put out songs. They actually have some real bops. You can look for those. Actually, I should send them to you. They had one for each of their policy issues. Oh my god, they had some really good ones actually. Basically every election cycle, they’ll have a playlist.

Jordan Schneider: Amazing. We’ll definitely have one of those as outro music. I’ll pick my favorite from the recent cycle. But Tobias, what is their deal?

Tobias Harris: The Japanese Communist Party. They are a pretty old, well-established Communist Party, and generally they have fielded a lot of candidates. Obviously they never win that many seats. They are like some other more established parties, though — demographic change is hitting them hard. They have an aging base.

Jordan Schneider: Sorry, what does communism mean to them?

Tobias Harris: They’re just an extreme left party. They’re anti-big business. They are very committed to defending Article Nine. They are very opposed to the remilitarization of Japan. They’re big on gender equality. In fact, one of the better songs they have from this election cycle is their gender equality song. In some ways they’re just a progressive party. In some ways it’s Cold War era leftism brought into the 21st century.

What they have had to do in recent years is try to become a more normal party, where for a long time they were like, “We are going to run candidates everywhere. We’re not going to cooperate with any other parties. We’re not interested actually in ever taking power.” They just haven’t wanted to be a normal party.

What’s happened actually in recent years is that they’ve been more willing to cooperate with the Constitutional Democratic Party. Sometimes to the Constitutional Democratic Party’s detriment because the communist brand is still toxic in some quarters. But they’re willing to play with others more than they ever have because they recognize that they now have a superannuated base and they’re not getting any younger. If they’re going to have a role in the political system, they’ve got to be a little more creative and experimental and try to find new ways of being involved.

Jordan Schneider: Do they meet with the Vietnamese and Chinese and Cubans as brothers in the international, or not really?

Tobias Harris: They have tricky relations with China. This was actually interesting. During the Cold War, the Japanese Communist Party was more Russia-oriented and the Japanese Socialist Party was more China-oriented. Actually, the Japanese Communist Party is very critical of China and Chinese militarism — very critical of China’s human rights practices. They put out statements that would be indistinguishable from some China hawks on certain issues and in certain language, which is remarkable. They’re not always what you would expect as a communist party.

Jordan Schneider: All right, I think we’ll just have to invite one of their politicians on the show. We definitely need more communists on ChinaTalk.

Mood Music:

This is a totally functional document with a surplus of creative ideas. It feels like it comes from a parallel universe of a White House that didn’t also roll out DOGE and the most chaotic trade policy in US history. But I’ll take it!

Let’s jump in.

Isn’t declaring any model to objectively reflect truth is itself a social engineering agenda? I’m happy to see government encouragement for Chinese model evals, something we’ve been doing at ChinaTalk since early 2023!

and I have been banging on of late about the dangers of America ceding the open source landscape to hungry Chinese firms. It was encouraging to see this issue get pride of place in the document, coming in as the third subsection after traditional Trumpy concerns around red tape and free speech. Now that Zuck’s done with open source and we’re selling H20s to China, it will take real change to the status quo for an American model to out-compete what well-funded Chinese startups and established firms like a 300bn market cap Alibaba can deliver. Either USG needs to invest 9 figures to relevant nonprofits like Ai2, frontier American labs need to believe in the business use case to open source leading models, or the government needs to make them do so.

Oh, and this bit was weird…if “Advanced AI compute is essential to the AI era…Denying our adversaries access to this resource, then, is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security,” why exactly are we selling H20s to China?

Enable AI Adoption

I recorded a show this morning with the legendary Richard Danzig discussing his excellent new paper ‘AI, Cybersecurity and National Security: The Fierce Urgency of Now’. His conclusion ran as follows:

The White House’s AI adoption section encouragingly echoes some of these themes, but I would give the section below a “we hit the alarm and are still rubbing our eyes” as opposed to full “get out of bed” rating.

ChinaTalk’s ongoing AI and semiconductor coverage can read as a living AI net assessment, so it’s exciting to see more orgs getting encouraged to jump in. Given how important the private sector is to national security AI competition (see this later riff on the ‘break glass and commandeer datacenters in case of emergency’ bullet below), these net assessments should pay at least as much attention to public AI developments as PLAN vs USN implementation plans.

It might be nice to still have an active Office of Net Assessment to lead and share lessons on how to do this work well.

The IC does not have a good institutional home or the muscle memory to do emerging technology net assessment particularly for comparing red vs blue dual use technologies. Here’s the best paper laying out different structures to execute this work, and a pod we did on it.

Hurray for FROs! We’ve come a long way from the show we did with Adam Marblestone back in 2021!

Journalists should be asking agencies and the White House weekly what models they have access to on their work computers. If Trump is leaning so hard into deregulation, how hard can this really be?

The US government is going to want to commandeer private sector cloud resources in the event of a US-China conflict. But there’s nothing today preventing the sort of pre-placed drone attacks we’ve seen this year by Ukraine to Russia and Israel to Iran from happening to datacenters in Virgina.

It’s cute seeing the NSC get assigned some work when Loomer got its entire staff fired a few months back.

Good to see multilateral orgs getting a shoutout but hard to take seriously when Rubio just fired dozens of staffers who work these very portfolios.

I feel some type of way about selling China H20s and disagree with the White House’s conclusion that building datacenters in the UAE is better for America’s long term national power trajectory than husbanding chips. But even Ben Thompson gets that selling H20s only makes sense if you lock down semicap export controls. While nothing substantial has happened on this front seven months into this administration, it’s encouraging to see a policy document call out this side of the controls. We discussed the importance of subsystem controls at length with Dylan on ChinaTalk and in this SemiAnalysis post.

Trump 2 has revealed how it scared it is of China’s rare earths controls and that it’s willing to cave on chip controls that Presidents traditionally held the line on being a national security initiative not up for debate or linkage. The Times reported yesterday that “officials throughout the government say the Trump administration is putting more aggressive actions on China on hold, while pushing forward with moves that the Chinese will perceive positively. That includes the reversal on the H20 chip.” A Trump administration that’s prioritizing a visit to Beijing and trade deal will not be pushing hard on SME. My guess is at this point it will take a national security-adjacent shock along the lines of a balloon to change the trajectory of Trump’s China policy.

Lastly, who gets the licenses to buy H20s in China still an open question. Commerce presumably will try to pick the most civilian-y companies, but the ones that get the H20s will certainly be receiving calls to help out the national security establishment. The new CIA history The Mission by Tim Weiner relates an anecdote that “the MSS gave [the SF86 hack] data to Alibaba, who crunched it all in 90 days. Then the MSS integrated the intelligence on people it suspected to be CIA officers with passport records and biometric data stolen from immigration kiosks.” This Foreign Policy article has more color and also implicates Baidu, Huawei, Tencent and Bytedance. What happens when the IC gets wind of another civ-mil fusion partnership that leverages Nvidia’s best chips?

West Point in the 19^th century was America’s leading engineering institution. Today it has a statutory ceiling for salaries at $225k a year. Without real money and new pay scales, we will not grow military colleges into centers of AI excellence.

And speaking of attracting talent, there was zero discussion of immigration policy, a pretty damning insight when Zuck has shown that the best team money can buy is 3/4 1st generation immigrants.

Why was this not called the Lewis and Clark Initiative? Sounds sick regardless.

Overall, I’m giving this plan a grade of “would be real nice if it happens”, one tick above “too good to be true.” Hopefully most of what’s in this document is not salient enough to allow whoever did the good work of pulling it together too much headache in implementation.

This is part two of our series with Joseph Torigian, author of the definitive biography of Xi Zhongxun. This episode traces the inner world of a man navigating power politics, exile, and reform, and the legacy he left his son, Xi Jinping.

Against the backdrop of the Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening up, we discuss…

• The moral dilemmas of a mid-level party cadre,

• What it’s like to be purged, and why the party prescribes self-criticism as therapy,

• “Frenemies” in the CCP, Deng Xiaoping’s autocratic side, and the unsung heros of the reform period,

• How Xi Zhongxun instilled party loyalty and other values in his son,

• Xi Zhongxun’s return from exile and his complicated relationship with reform,

• How Chinese leaders think about redemption, guilt, and survival,

• And a bonus: Why the PRC-produced biopic of Xi Zhongxun is so disappointing — and why his life deserves the Star Wars treatment.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

“The Blue Flame in the Taoist Stove” 爐火純青

Jon Sine: In 1949, Xi Zhongxun is king of the Northwest. This presages three to four years in which he will be moved into a very important position in Beijing. What is particularly noteworthy about his time in the Northwest?

Joseph Torigian: Two things stand out as interesting. First is how he’s dealing with ethnic minorities. The Northwest includes Xinjiang, but also Qinghai, Gansu, and other provinces with many Hui Muslims as well as Tibetan Buddhists. This process of incorporating these regions into the regime is very bloody — it’s the crushing of an insurrection. But we see that Xi Zhongxun is simultaneously learning certain things about how to deal with ethnic minorities. He’s recognizing the value of winning over local power brokers, of not going too far too fast, of pursuing socialism in a way that’s less costly.

In fact, in 1952, he purges two leaders from Yining who pursued land reform in the nomadic areas and were suppressing at a level that Xi Zhongxun thought was inappropriate. For him, to do work in the Northwest means doing ethnic politics and the United Front. This is an important moment for him because in later years, he would spend much time on ethnic politics and he drew lessons from this period.

The other significant aspect is that in the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Mao began mass campaigns, trying to figure out how the regime could solidify, but also prevent the party from becoming divorced from the masses. During the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, it’s interesting to consider whether Xi Zhongxun was pursuing an agenda that was relatively humane and how much he was listening to Mao versus working on his own. There were anti-corruption campaigns as well.

Xi Zhongxun’s absolute priority is to intuit what Mao wants and deliver it better than anyone else can. He doesn’t do perfectly, but he does a good enough job that Mao says something very striking to this man named Bo Yibo, who is the father of the notorious Bo Xilai. He says that Xi Zhongxun is like the blue flame in a Taoist stove, used to creates elixirs by the alchemists.

Mao always uses phrases that can be interpreted in many different ways, deliberately as the Sage King. Part of it was this idea that Xi Zhongxun had spent much time at the grassroots, that he had really dealt with the peasants and had been forged by them. But he also knew how much suffering Xi Zhongxun had gone through, including at the hands of his own party, and yet remained loyal to the party. This was the famous phrase that people would associate with Xi Zhongxun as Mao giving him essentially the highest, most superlative way of describing him.

It’s around that time that Xi is brought to Beijing. He’s not the only one brought to Beijing from a major bureau — another person who was brought was Deng Xiaoping. To be among what were called the five horses who entered the capital, especially because once again he was by far the youngest, makes Xi Zhongxun’s career stand out.

Mao Zedong was doing this possibly to balance against people like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, to make sure that these guys who had spent many years in these bureaus didn’t slip out of the control of the central government. So Xi is brought to the capital and he’s made minister of propaganda. His task is to figure out how to explain to hundreds of millions of people how they’re going to build communism and why they should believe in communism, which is both an ideological thing but also a very concrete, practical thing. How exactly do you achieve literacy? What are you going to have them read? How are you going to produce what it is that they’re going to read? Are you going to work with intellectuals and inspire intellectuals, or are you going to really scare them and tell them exactly what to do? They’re struggling and figuring things out, and Xi Zhongxun’s story is part of that.

Jon Sine: You mentioned the Xinjiang purge, and the two people you’re referring to are Wang Zhen and Dong Liqun.

Joseph Torigian: Very interesting people.

Jon Sine: Very interesting. But I would like to discuss the enmities that form in this period and that linger onward. Wang Zhen, Dong Liqun, but also Deng Xiaoping, who’s leading the Southwest Bureau — this is a point at which Xi runs into problems with them that you could argue linger on for the next 30-plus years of their lives. What do you make of that?

Joseph Torigian: One of the things I tried to get across with the book was the sprawl of party history — that’s the best word for it. These people knew each other for decades and often didn’t like each other, but they still had emotional attachments to one another. All of these feelings are refracted through the party, and it’s a party that is very leader-friendly. It’s a party in which if you act as a small group, if you act as a faction, it’s extremely dangerous for you.

Certainly people have affections for each other or they have dislikes for each other or they have career ties or they happen to have similar views of a policy issue. But at the same time, even when they hate each other, they’re still frenemies in a sense because they have to work with each other. They recognize this norm of putting the party’s interests first. Even when they’re really going after each other, there are certain limitations, especially in terms of how much they can do that in concert with allies, because as soon as you start forming a small group, you’re vulnerable to the charge of factionalism.

Charisma, Coercion, and Control

Jon Sine: This is a key area in which Xi Zhongxun comes across as a nicer guy, as something of a reformer. In the Xinjiang example, he wants to use the local power brokers who are religious figures, and he doesn’t want to excessively go after them because, for the party, religion is, if not threatening, at least backward and things could get out of hand. But Xi seems to want to turn down that flame. When it comes to Tibet, Deng is leading the Southwest Bureau and it ends up having responsibility for going in there as opposed to the Northwest Bureau — if Xi might have had a slightly less...I don’t know how you would phrase that, but...

Joseph Torigian: You’re asking whether we can characterize him in particular ways with regards to ethnic politics — is he systematically different from other people in a way that’s more humane, in a way that’s more moral, in a way that’s less radical?

I could give you lots of examples where he has differences of opinions with people in the elite, where he seems to want to take a more gradual approach, a less violent approach — an approach that’s more about economic growth, addressing grievances, bringing religion into the open so that it can be controlled, and forging alliances with people who have a preexisting status within their own communities as a vector for communist power.

But we should think about that in a relative sense. These are just other tools of control. Maybe they’re more efficient tools, but ultimately his final objective is the same as everyone else, which is socialist transformation and dominance of these borderlands and placing them under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. There are lots of examples where he doesn’t come off as a soft-liner.

You talked about Xinjiang, which is a rather obvious case. But on Tibet, what’s interesting is that Xi Zhongxun has this very close relationship with the Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lamas had a falling out with the Dalai Lamas decades before, and the 10th Panchen Lama is born in Xining — he’s a young person. The party, especially Xi Zhongxun, sees the Panchen Lama as more progressive and a more natural ally to the party who can be used to pursue transformation faster.

But people like Deng Xiaoping argued that the Dalai Lama was too influential to ignore — that the Party needed to work with him, and that relying too heavily on the Panchen Lama or pushing reform too quickly in Tibet would be risky.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama flees and the people from the Northwest, like Xi Zhongxun, feel vindicated because they never trusted the Dalai Lama and preferred to empower the Panchen Lama to achieve socialist transformation more rapidly.

While Xi Zhongxun is deeply involved in ethnic politics — now in the State Council in the late 1950s — the party is literally at war with these areas that Xi Zhongxun had incorporated into the regime. It’s literally fighting a war against people in Qinghai and Gansu, and Xi Zhongxun is working with the Ethnic Affairs Commission.

He had a sensitivity. At the very least, he had an intuition for how to work with people when he wanted to, which wasn’t a very common characteristic of these guys. When he interviewed the Dalai Lama, he talked about how people often were very rude to him and they would just say things about what he was wearing and make those kinds of remarks. Whether Xi Zhongxun liked him or not, the Dalai Lama felt like he did. That was a credit to Xi Zhongxun’s ability not only to do what the party wanted, which was to win over the Dalai Lama, whatever his views might have been, but because he could be rather charming when he wanted to — which is a somewhat rare talent in the Chinese Communist Party.

Jordan Schneider: In the theme of grays, you have this quote later on where he’s like,“We need to kill people to do revolution”? That was probably during the...

Joseph Torigian: Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries — when he uses very Stalinist language about how the bad guys are going to become more brazen because we’re doing so well, which means that they’re scared, which means that they’re going to be more dangerous. This is a way of saying that there are enemies because we’re successful, not because we’re screwing up, which means that we need to kill them and not win them over because there’s something inherently wrong with them.

Jordan Schneider: As an illustration for moral judgments — he wasn’t the one to roll the tanks into Tibet, right? That was more of a Deng-Mao thing than it was a Xi Zhongxun thing. Yes, they’re killers, but they’re killers at scale and they’re killers in a very dogmatic way. It’s more a question of whether we can do this easier or more aggressively, which is the right frame to see his actions, as opposed to projecting our own image of this man as a liberal bulwark in a revolutionary time.

Joseph Torigian: One other thing to say about the United Front is that it demonstrates an inherent dilemma. The United Front was described by Mao as one of the three treasures of the party’s toolkit. It’s essentially a way of figuring out who likes you, who’s wishy-washy about you, and who hates you. Then you empower the people who like you, you win over the people that are in the middle, and you either isolate or destroy the dead-enders. It’s a very intuitive idea — it’s what politics is all about.

But for the party it’s really hard to get right. Judging which people fall into what group is totally arbitrary and often difficult to figure out. Then, when you are winning people over, you need to listen to them, making them feel they can speak out and not get punished. It means empowering them so that their communities still have faith in them. All of those things are dangerous because those people can actually take you at your word and say things that other people don’t like, and these people also don’t like you.

You’re the party, you’ve taken over the country, you’ve conquered the nation. A lot of people think, “Why are we paying attention to these people at all? Why don’t we just kill them or throw them in jail? We’re the ones who won. Why do we have any need to accommodate these people?”

For example, in 1957, the anti-rightist campaign — it was doubly embarrassing for Xi Zhongxun because he’s working at the State Council and there are lots of people who are not members of the Chinese Communist Party working there. He’s one of the people who tells them to speak out. They do and they get punished for it. The party is mad at him for not handling these people better so they didn’t complain in the first place. These people also feel betrayed that Xi Zhongxun told them that they would be safe and then they weren’t.

In 1962, one of the accusations against Xi Zhongxun is that he was too accommodationist to the Panchen Lama and that’s why the Panchen Lama made all of these criticisms of party policy. You get this question — they returned to it in the 1980s — which is when you give space for people within the party to speak up, at what point do you co-opt them, and at what point do they take advantage of you?

In the 1980s, there was this debate. “Why are all these people protesting now? We’re being so much nicer to them than we were in the past.” In a way, it’s clueless, because people protest — that’s what they do. Perhaps you haven’t gone far enough to give them other opportunities to complain, or you haven’t done enough to make them happy.

There’s this interesting quote by Hu Yaobang where he’s just stunned at people protesting. But also he’s someone who brought this whole new model that seemed insightful and open to possibilities. This speaks to the heart of authoritarianism — when you co-opt and when you repress, how you decide and how you do it, and how you interpret certain behavior as either threatening or the system working. It’s not easy to get right, especially when there are a lot of other people in the system who don’t like you and will, when you make a mistake, not work with you to figure out a better way of doing it, but accuse you of ideological heresy of being either too left or too right. Doing the United Front is really hard.

Jordan Schneider: The question of the rate of change, both for party discipline as well and in handling restive regions, is a really interesting one. It echoes de Tocqueville’s observation that revolutions happen when you give people a little bit and then you take it away. You let up a little bit and then people are like, “Oh my God, maybe they won’t kill me if I tell them that I would actually like to pray every once in a while."

But it’s a hard thing to process if you’re as abstracted away as you are as a Hu Yaobang. Maybe your soul is a little softer and you don’t necessarily want to be burning everyone’s temples, but you want to be in control too.

Jon Sine: United Front is one of DC Policy Circle’s favorite bogeymen hiding behind potentially every organization. But reading your book is very interesting because I imagine this might be replaying nowadays — nobody actually wanted to work with the United Front. Not only because it was low status, but also because you might run the risk of being associated with people who will get you in trouble.

Joseph Torigian: The vector can go in both directions. If you tell the party, “Hey, these people are telling me stuff that makes them unhappy,” and they’re like, “Why are you telling me that they’re unhappy and not telling them to stop being unhappy?” It’s an implicit criticism of the party when you voice their criticism for them.

I thought about this a lot, which is people are really afraid of the United Front. It’s hard to do it well, you get in trouble for not doing it well, and you just don’t like doing it because it means listening to people you don’t like that much. But on the other hand, intuitively and empirically, it is nevertheless a very powerful thing.

I hope my book shows that, at the very least, even though it is something that the party has used very effectively in the past, it’s not something that’s perfect. It’s actually something that it’s easy to get wrong and that the party does get it wrong pretty regularly.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a parallel there to actually listening to the masses, because on the one hand, yes, we’re the Communist Party, of course we’re going to listen to the masses, the masses are going to lead us. Can you talk about this in the context of Xi running the remonstration bureau and the challenges that he has bringing up these complaints to the central government?

Joseph Torigian: During the Mao era, Xi Zhongxun, as a Vice Premier, was an important person but not a leading figure per se. His work on the State Council, particularly his role in managing the Petition Bureau, is interesting because of his relationship with Zhou Enlai, the State Council’s relationship with the Secretariat, and with what happens to Peng Dehuai, who is a close associate with Xi.

He’s running the petition bureau management system for the State Council, in which Chinese citizens formally had a right to go to Beijing to complain or to write messages to the party center to complain. For a party that was deeply worried about becoming divorced from the masses, you can see why in principle this is something that they should take seriously and often did, because you want to know what’s going through their heads. There were a lot of tensions in Chinese society during the 1950s, and they accelerated in dramatic ways during the Great Leap Forward.

But then you get into the politics of information control in the Leninist system, especially at a moment of crisis, and especially at a moment where you have one leader who is dominant and frightening and mercurial. One of the themes of the book is how dangerous the politics of course correction are in the Leninist system.

Xi Zhongxun knows better than most people within the elite about how bad things are going, but he has to figure out when and where to pick his battles. He also appreciates that the information he’s getting probably often is not perfect, because as he admits in a rather remarkable speech that he gives, he knows that local party officials are arresting people who are trying to complain to the top leadership.

When there’s famine everywhere and you’re trying to get a sense of how serious it is, they return to the Petition Bureau saying, “We’re not getting nearly as many complaints as we used to.” Of course, if you’re getting a lot of complaints and you’re reporting on a lot of complaints, people might say, “The Great Leap Forward is going great. Why are you taking these complaints seriously and not hunting down the people who are complaining as saboteurs who are trying to destroy this wonderful thing that’s going so well?"

He’s watching Mao who often changes his mind not because of people who are high ranking and have a lot of information showing him the evidence, but sometimes it’s his family that actually changes Mao’s mind, which is quite revealing.

Then in the 1980s — we haven’t talked about this yet — but one of the most interesting roles for Xi Zhongxun is his two stints at the National People’s Congress. This is a moment when they’re trying to figure out whether the NPC can be something more than a rubber stamp, but they’re also thinking a lot about the rule of law and how you can use the rule of law, and what the rule of law means for the party and party control.

There are debates about whether it can be used as an effective tool, but there’s tons of crime in the 1980s because the Cultural Revolution had been damaging to society and reform is in trouble if you can’t get a handle on it. They decide to do the Strike Hard campaign. Even though Xi Zhongxun says remarkable things about how seriously he takes the rule of law, he’s also still sensitive to these exigencies of the situation and allows the party to do things that have negative effects on that trajectory.

The Art of the Purge

Jon Sine: Let's turn to the Gao Gang Affair. I'm curious about your perspective, particularly through the lens of factionalism. There are different academic views on CCP factions: some, like Victor Shih, see them as more fluid ‘coalitions of the weak,’ while others view them as more durable networks. It’s quite popular now, on some websites, to categorize figures into factions based on where they worked or where they grew up. Xi Zhongxun is often placed in a ‘Northwest Faction’ alongside Gao Gang, but your evidence doesn’t lead to that conclusion. What was the Gao Gang affair actually about?

Joseph Torigian: Faction is one of these words that, like ideology, depends on which definition you’re using. If you reify this idea of faction, you have this image of cohesive blocks that work closely with one another because they happen to have had career ties — that’s very misleading. But to say that historical ties don’t matter at all would also be misleading. People are paying a lot of attention to it precisely because it’s become easy to measure those career ties. It’s valuable, but needs to be put into the context of what the party is about.

What does the party do? It makes you put the party’s interests first, and factions are a violation of that norm. Factions are one of the great taboos of party culture. It’s clumpy, but it’s not blocky, if that makes sense.

The Gao Gang affair — this is a foundational moment in Chinese Communist Party history because it’s the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China. Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun are both Northwesterners. They have a relationship with each other. Were they acting in a factional way? Not really. In fact, Xi Zhongxun was telling Gao Gang to be careful. He wasn’t really supporting Gao Gang’s machinations and thought that Gao was acting in a dangerous way.

Then, Gao Gang goes too far. Xi Zhongxun says, “I told you to be careful, you didn’t listen to me.” When Gao goes down, Xi Zhongxun is very upset, but nevertheless, he goes along with the party’s decision. He says these terrible things about Gao Gang. If they’re a faction, then why didn’t Xi Zhongxun go down along with Gao Gang? The reason for that is how far a purge goes, who’s included in the purge, how the purge is characterized is an art form that is shaped by a myriad of different considerations that are only fully understood by the top leader. In that sense, you can see that historic ties mattered, but if we take them too far, they can be very misleading.

Jon Sine: For people who maybe don’t remember what happened in the 1950s, Gao Gang was seeing if he could get support for displacing Liu Shaoqi as the presumed successor — if I have that right.

Joseph Torigian: What was going on was two things. First, Liu Shaoqi’s problem wasn’t that he was pursuing a different line than Mao Zedong. His problem was that he just wasn’t lining up with Mao Zedong, and Mao was really unhappy about this. He starts complaining to people like Gao Gang about Liu Shaoqi and Gao is motivated by his own historical antagonisms and his own distaste for Liu Shaoqi. But Gao goes too far. He whispers to the wrong people and they go to Mao and they say, “Mao, we’re worried about this. We think it’s going to split the party.” Mao then decides to give up on Gao Gang.

He’s accused of ridiculous things. The attacks on him are so vociferous that Xi Zhongxun is frightened and surprised. In fact, he says, “I’ve never seen the premier like this. I’ve never seen Zhou Enlai like this.” The way that the purge of Gao Gang was characterized foreshadowed many other purges that would happen in subsequent years because it showed that party members were not treated like they were in a court of law. It wasn’t like they were given a serious opportunity to explain themselves. There wasn’t an objective adjudication of the evidence. Mao decided what was going to happen, everybody lined up and that was the end of that, which was a violation of the party’s own alleged norms at the time.

Jordan Schneider: Let's discuss Mao and the concept of contingency. Under Mao, under Deng and now in the Xi era, the Party has consistently operated under a model where the top leader ultimately dictates its direction, including purges and promotions, despite occasional rhetoric about collective leadership. This is the institution that Xi grew up with in this time period.

Considering the Leninist system and Mao's personal influence, what’s your interpretation of how much of this current reality is simply a downstream effect of the Leninist structure itself, versus the unique impact of ‘Mao being Mao’?

Joseph Torigian: There are different ways of thinking about this. One is that a person like Mao tends to rise to the head of an organization like the Communist Party, that people who are unlike Mao wouldn’t be able to survive as heads of the Communist Party, or that once you’re the head of a Communist Party, you become a Mao-like figure. Those are ways of thinking about counterfactuals that are important.

This question of possibility is at the very heart of the study of not just China, but the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the question was, what if Bukharin had been the successor and not Stalin? Or what if Mao had died in 1950 before the party had given up on this idea of new democracy, which was putting off socialism, putting off violent transformation before Mao changed his mind, which is one of the reasons that Liu Shaoqi got caught up because he didn’t realize Mao was changing his mind so quickly in that regard? Or in the 1980s, what if Deng Xiaoping had died in ’84 or ’85 and Hu Yaobang had become the top leader?

These are really tough questions. But one thing that does emerge from the book that’s relevant for this, even though it can’t give a definitive conclusion, is that these are such leader-friendly systems that make the leader behave in particular ways that are strikingly similar, no matter who they are. This emerges in particular in the story of Deng Xiaoping, because Deng more than anybody should have understood the pathologies of the two-line system where you have a top leader and a deputy that breeds all of this distrust. He should have understood better than anybody the pathologies of succession politics.

These two are related because if the deputy isn’t doing what you want and this person might be the leader after you go, then that’s a big problem because you don’t want them to do a Khrushchev thing and de-Stalinize you after you’re dead to violate your legacy.

Here we have Deng Xiaoping, who was purged by Mao twice. This view that Deng opposes Mao or is not as radical as Mao and that he was with Liu Shaoqi or more pragmatic — it’s just not been borne out in the evidence. We have a different understanding of this interim between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which is a story of Mao being distant and people misreading him as opposed to really a concerted effort to undermine him.

In 1975, Deng Xiaoping is brought back after he’s purged a few years earlier and told to get the country back on its feet. He thinks he’s doing exactly what Mao wants him to do. Then people like Ye Jianying say, “Are you sure you understand what it is that Mao wants you to do?” Deng says, “Oh, he trusts me. Of course he trusts me.” Then he’s purged again because he goes too far too quickly and Mao — mercurial as ever — changes his mind.

Later, Deng purges Hu Yaobang because he says that Hu is not listening to him enough, not obeying him enough. He’s incensed that Hu Yaobang agrees when Deng says that he’s going to resign. Then Zhao Ziyang gets purged, although he’s not even opposing Deng during the June 4 crisis. He’s trying to figure out a way of saving Deng and protecting his authority while also not allowing a violent crackdown to happen. Then in 1992, Deng Xiaoping almost gets rid of Jiang Zemin. This idea that Chen Yun and Li Xiannian reined him in and he didn’t do it because they opposed him — that’s not been borne out in the evidence that I’ve been able to collect.

The puzzle here is quite striking, which is that these deputies never oppose the top leader. That’s clear from the evidence. The problem is that they keep misreading the top leader, and the top leader interprets it in this way that makes a mountain out of a molehill than is really necessary. Whether they know that and they’re doing it anyways or whether they really believe it, whatever the reason, it’s one of the fundamental factors that explains why elite politics in China has always been so explosive and why it’s always been such a leader-friendly system.

Jordan Schneider: The muscle memory of the purges and how these “personnel changes” are the way to stamp your vision onto the system seems like something which is baked in from the very beginning. With Deng and all the personnel moves as well as Mao and all the personnel moves — it’s just age. These guys are old and they’re making these decisions. You can just imagine a cranky person who has lived through everything and is convinced that they have all the answers. If you imagine the most decisive, self-confident, temperamental person, and then add on to that 60 years of revolutionary history.. But interestingly, the transition between going from someone who is subordinating themselves to another leader to being the leader yourself — or even Xi Zhongxun at the very end of his life, once his career was over, being like, “Look, I’m an independent person. I have views on this, and there were some mistakes that maybe not everyone else agreed with, but I thought were really dumb.” It’s a very interesting and maybe a more human way to relate to these folks.

Joseph Torigian: One other thing to say about this too is the Mao of the 1940s and much of the 1950s was very different from the Mao that later emerged. Fred Teiwes writes about this very eloquently, which is part of it was the story of hubris. As you said, for Mao, think of what he had accomplished, the legacy that he had forged. When things start going wrong with the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution — even for Mao these are clearly tragic failures. It was one of the reasons why he was so worried about his legacy and why elite politics was so explosive in so many ways.

Xi Zhongxun was always loyal to Mao, always loyal to Mao’s memory, always someone who believed that Mao was a titan of Chinese history who deserved respect. But Xi Zhongxun also was not totally incapable of reflection. When he’s talking about Mao as he’s getting rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, he’s talking about the Mao before the 1950s, or at least the Mao of the early 1950s. You can see how he would be loyal to someone who was able to save the revolution and actually for a very long time was known as someone who is rather pragmatic and flexible and was known as someone who would take people he had defeated and let them stay in the leadership. They were given sinecures, but they weren’t shot like they were in the Soviet Union. The Chinese took some pride in that for some time. Then the purges started getting more and more...

Jordan Schneider: They started shooting people.

Joseph Torigian: Well, even in China during the Cultural Revolution, most of the deaths were like persecution to death, not executions. For Chinese citizens, many of them were executed, but there weren’t many executions of leading Chinese party officials during the Mao era or the Deng era, really, which is very different from the Soviet experience.

Jordan Schneider: That’s interesting. Most of the senior leadership deaths were suicides?

Joseph Torigian: Or just the physical torment was overwhelming. Or you’re not given treatment. Or mentally it was not easy to experience.

Frenemies and Deng’s Culture of Fear

Jon Sine: If you have the pleasure of listening to Joseph on more than one occasion, you may notice that when he says Deng, sometimes he will put an adjective before it, which is “autocratic” — “autocratic Deng” — which is part of a project of reevaluating Deng because he’s been so lionized. Let’s say more on the Great Leap Forward, because another forms at this time. Xi Zhongxun is again in a role that could be seen as “reformist.” He’s in the State Council run by Zhou Enlai in 1957. But then in ’58, Mao basically moves control of the economy out of the State Council to the Secretariat that Deng Xiaoping was running and Deng becomes the chief implementer of the Great Leap Forward. Can you speak on that?

Joseph Torigian: Through the 1950s and early 1960s, there are a handful of areas where Deng and Xi saw some tension between each other. This has come up already, but just to refresh for your listeners: Xi Zhongxun was head of the Northwest Bureau and Deng Xiaoping was head of the Southwest Bureau. The Panchen Lama was living in the Northwest Bureau when Xi Zhongxun was head of the Northwest Bureau and they established their relationship. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, was someone who was more supportive of the Dalai Lama. He thought that the party should not think that they could use the Panchen Lama as a weapon to undermine the Dalai Lama and that that would just backfire and that they needed to recognize the stature of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan society and work with him and win him over and get him to have faith in the Communist cause.

In the 1950s, you see this kind of weird dance between the two of them. This is the closest part in my book to something resembling factions, because you have these cadres from the Northwest Bureau in the Tibet Autonomous Region with Xi as their patron, and you have these cadres from the Southwest Bureau in the Tibet Autonomous Region with Deng as their patron, and they don’t get along. In fact, they hate each other. Xi and Deng support their protégés, but they’re reining them in and not letting them go too far. Xi and Deng are expressing respect for each other and trying to work with each other, even though they have these different inclinations. It’s such a delicate dance.

Then you have the Gao Gang incident. As I said earlier, Xi Zhongxun had said to Gao Gang, “These are Long Marchers. These people aren’t going to take us seriously.” Deng was a Long Marcher who played a fundamental role in the fall of Gao Gang. When Xi Zhongxun was forced to do self-criticisms and write reports about his relationship with Gao, the person who read them and went through them, and asked Xi all these questions was Deng Xiaoping.

Deng Xiaoping would say, decades later, that when Gao Gang fell, “We protected certain people and we promoted them, including Xi Zhongxun.” He’s taking credit for being good to Xi Zhongxun and helping him survive, although I’m sure for Xi Zhongxun, it wasn’t an especially pleasant experience.

There’s also another area of tension between them, which is related to the relationship between the State Council and the Secretariat. The State Council is the government apparatus, and it’s run by Zhou Enlai. The vice premiers include Chen Yun and one of the party’s economic czars, Chen Yi. Xi Zhongxun is essentially the secretary of the State Council. He runs the daily affairs. He works for Zhou Enlai. Then there’s the Secretariat, which had been created to run party affairs, and that’s run by Deng Xiaoping. His right hand man is Peng Zhen 彭真, a very interesting figure.

Deng and Zhou basically get along. They respect each other. Peng Zhen hates Zhou Enlai and Zhou Enlai hates Peng Zhen for all of these historic and personality reasons. Then Mao decides that Zhou Enlai doesn’t get it and he takes control over the economy from the State Council and gives it to the Secretariat. People think Zhou Enlai might be removed from the leadership. He’s going through this mental torment and Xi Zhongxun is witnessing it. At this time, the Great Leap Forward is run by the Secretariat where Deng and Peng are really true believers.

Then in 1962, Xi Zhongxun is purged from the leadership and it’s a collective effort against him and Deng Xiaoping eggs on one of the people who goes after Xi Zhongxun in the first place, Yan Hongyan 阎红彦, who is from the Northwest.

In the 1980s, it’s impossible to say how much they’re thinking about these antagonisms. Xi Zhongxun is certainly not happy that Deng Xiaoping doesn’t allow Gao Gang to be rehabilitated. I’m sure that grated on Xi Zhongxun. There are all these rumors that Xi Zhongxun will be the general secretary of the party, but it’s Hu Yaobang instead, even though Hu doesn’t have the level of prestige and status as Xi does. Whether Xi Zhongxun was unhappy about that, we don’t know. Deng was possibly using Xi even though he didn’t fully trust Xi.

Over the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun is increasingly unhappy with Deng’s autocratic style. He’s unhappy with how Hu Yaobang is treated, and he’s certainly unhappy with how Tiananmen Square goes down. But again, these are stories of frenemies. It’s not a story of Xi opposing Deng. It’s not them having fundamentally different views of how the party should work. It’s once again a complicated dance.

On the big picture of reform and opening, Xi and Deng were quite close. I’m sure that Xi was thrilled when Deng did the southern tour in 1992 and restarted reform. It was a complicated sense of emotions. One last coda to this: in the 1990s, Xi Zhongxun said something very interesting, which is that we shouldn’t give credit for all good things to Deng Xiaoping alone. It wasn’t just Deng.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned this in the first episode — how your book gives a sense of the sprawl of party history across time, across geographies, and across these people who have these half-century of professional relationships, of purge and counter-purge and ideological arguments and policy arguments.

The book manages to contain all of this complexity, giving you a sense of the scale and scope of these people and their relationships to the party and to their colleagues over time, how it evolves, and how weighty and pressureful one’s experience as a person and as a professional becomes over the course of these decades. No other party history book has really given you that sense, because the ones people first gravitate to are the biographies of Zhou and of Deng and of Mao. In Deng’s early years, you get a bit of this sense, but in the middle tier — or the bottom of the top, which is where Xi Zhongxun ends up landing over the course of his career — there are so many forces being pressed upon them at all times. You’re on this religious mission, there are all these trials and tribulations, you want to be a better person, and then you have these enemies who you think are screwing you over, but also screwing the people over. There are these incredible decisions that you have to make. Can you illustrate this with the Great Leap Forward as a case study in how you respond when you see really horrific things happening, while understanding that you are just an atom in this broader system?

Joseph Torigian: The Great Leap Forward is interesting because Xi had very powerful insight into what was going on throughout the country because of his relationship with the civil ministries and the petition bureau. Nevertheless, at the same time he is trying to radicalize the government apparatus, and he’s saying all these remarkably leftist and extreme things about how individualism is a virus, that even if you’re a very heavy-set person, if the tiniest bit of the virus gets into you, it will engulf you and consume you very quickly.

There’s a constant inner struggle within every human being to destroy the individualist and bourgeois elements — and one of the ways you do that is through physical labor. You go help build a dam or you’re sent to the countryside. He warns people: “You think you’re such an expert, but really you don’t know nearly as much as the peasants do.” He’s facilitating this radicalization by calling for things like big character posters, by empowering non-technical people to criticize technical people. That’s foreshadowing something that I don’t need to describe to you as historians of Chinese politics.

Later on, in private conversations in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun would talk about how he had tried to prevent things from getting even worse. He claims to have ended the campaign to kill sparrows, one of the most famous elements of the Great Leap Forward. He claims to have tried to protect people like Li Rui by giving him a less serious political categorization. He was involved in famine relief. He was going to the countryside and he could see people putting a mound of dirt and putting seeds in it. And people would say, “Oh, that’s creating more space for more growth.” He was a peasant himself and he knew it didn’t work that way. He would talk about how there were fields where the crops were on the outer rim, and then you look past the crops and the whole field is empty.

He’s learning essentially about what a culture of fear does to the party. He talks about how people would watch him as he tried to fix things and then feel grudges toward him and wait and then come back at him. He talks about some of his experiences during the Great Leap Forward and this habit of lying, how lying is dangerous for the party. But in the speech where he’s talking about the fall of Hu Yaobang after Hu has just been defeated [in 1987] — we know Xi Zhongxun is unhappy and he knows all of these alleged crimes against Hu Yaobang are false, and he knows that this is a violation of collective leadership — but he says all of these horrible things about Hu Yaobang that we know he didn’t believe. He’s praising Deng for being a collective leader and saying Hu Yaobang was not a collective leader because he would just make these sudden decisions. It’s almost certain he doesn’t believe these things. In that same speech he’s talking about the Great Leap Forward as a dangerous moment where people were lying too much. How do you explain that? I don’t really know, but it’s interesting that he was reflecting on the Great Leap Forward at that particular moment.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun, as you mentioned, has a quite large portfolio in the book, and one of them is managing, at least in part, the Soviet experts at the time. One plausible partial interpretation of the Great Leap Forward is as part of Mao’s growing disillusionment with the idea of fully implementing the Soviet model in China. How Xi Zhongxun’s role as mediator with the Soviets play into this? At this point Xi is traveling and going mostly to the former Soviet Union.

Joseph Torigian: The story of global communism is a big part of the book. The relationship between China and the Soviet Union in the ’50s and early ’60s is part of that. The reason it’s part of Xi’s life is, as you said, he was managing the Soviet expert program, and he was visiting Eastern Europe semi-regularly. He’s also part of the Great Leap Forward, which as you mentioned, is part of a reaction to Mao drawing certain conclusions about the trajectory of the October Revolution and Mao’s preoccupation with how China can do it better — that the Soviets are no longer ambitious enough, aggressive enough, and that he is going to show them there is an even better model than the one that Xi Zhongxun had helped export wholesale for much of the 1950s into the PRC.

In 1962, it’s Mao’s preoccupation with class struggle that Xi Zhongxun gets in trouble. One of the biggest reasons Mao care about class struggle is because he’s worrying about what happened in the Soviet Union. He’s concluding that the reason the Soviet Union has become bureaucratic and privileged — the reason the Soviet Union isn’t aggressively opposing American interests (he’s unhappy with what they tout as peaceful coexistence) — is because of revisionism. Revisionism is another way of saying that they’re not really communists anymore, that they’re heretics. He’s worried about this happening at home. He’s talking and thinking a lot about class struggle. That’s one of the reasons he reacted strongly to this novel in 1962 that saw Xi Zhongxun purged. One of the many crimes that Xi Zhongxun found himself facing was that he was a spy for the Soviet Union.

Jon Sine: We talked about this when we had Sergey Radchenko on. He doesn’t think there’s a real ideological divergence between them when Mao uses terms like revisionism. It seems like when Mao is saying something like revisionism, he’s talking about obsession with material interests. Some source said that he had read The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Putting material interest first, even if it’s within a planned structure, is anathema to him. He’s more concerned with a true spirit for forging a new man and a new world. What are your thoughts on that?

Joseph Torigian: I admire Sergey so much and he’s right that in many cases when we would think ideology would matter, it didn’t. There are lots of cases where competing interests explain a lot. But ideology and factions — these two concepts have something in common with each other, which is that they can mean many different things. To say that ideology explains everything or that it doesn’t explain anything at all, is not the right way of thinking about it. Ideology mattered at certain times, in certain ways, and it shouldn’t be understated or overstated. The Sino-Soviet split wasn’t primarily for ideological reasons, but ideology made it severe and difficult to repair. This stemmed from Mao's characteristic way of explaining differences as manifesting something deeper than reasonable people drawing reasonable conclusions.

Introspection with Chinese Characteristics

Jordan Schneider: How did Xi get purged?

Joseph Torigian: There was the trigger, and there was the political background. The trigger was that a woman, Li Jiantong, a sister to another Northwestern revolutionary named Liu Jingfan, is asked to write about Liu Zhidan, who is also Liu’s brother and Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor. At first, Xi Zhongxun tells her not to. He’s very cautious. He thinks it’s a mistake. Gao Gang’s purge a few years earlier is making it hard to talk about the Northwest. Another level of sensitivity is what happened to Peng Dehuai in 1959 because Peng Dehuai had a very close relationship with the northwesterners. He wasn’t just the commander to Xi Zhongxun’s commissar on the Northwest Battlefield. When Peng Dehuai was fighting in the Korean War, Gao Gang was head of the Northeast and the guy who got him all of the materials that he needed. He was the logistical machine for Peng Dehuai. They were quite close.

Li Jiantong keeps pressuring him. She enlists all of these other Northwest revolutionaries, and they all put pressure on him, and they say, “You’re the only one who hasn’t died or been purged and we really need you to give approval to this because we really care about Liu Zhidan.” Xi Zhongxun finally accedes, but he also gives all this advice about how and why she should be careful. He’s still not really all that enthusiastic. He says, “You should talk a lot about Mao,” and he also says,“You also need to go talk Yan Hongyan."

Who is Yan Hongyan? In the 1940s, Mao was trying to pick a Northwesterner to represent them as a group that he could then ally with. He picks Gao Gang. But this other guy, Yan Hongyan hates Gao Gang. He thinks that he, Yan, has the revolutionary prestige and status that should justify him as being the leader of the Northwesterners. He’s really unhappy about this. So when Gao Gang is purged in the early 1950s, Yan is thrilled. He’s hoping that this is going to facilitate a revision of history that recognizes what he thinks is his rightful place.

When parts of this novel are published, Yan Hongyan is furious because he thinks this is moving backwards from the direction that he hoped, which was to make sure that Gao Gang is never rehabilitated and people like him get the respect that he thinks he deserved. He doesn’t believe that Li Jiantong wrote it. He thinks Xi Zhongxun wrote it. He doesn’t think that this woman could have produced such a work, so he complains. It’s not exactly clear what he thought would happen, but people within the leadership take this novel and they go to Mao and they say, “Why is this novel being written right now?”

“Right now” is a very sensitive political moment because Mao, for many reasons, is preoccupied with class struggle. Many members of the elite are using this to show Mao that they can find trouble when it rears its head and they can warn him so that it can be resolved before it becomes a bigger issue. We don’t know whether Mao actually believed that this was a kind of revisionist novel. It may have just been useful for him to talk about it in that particular way. But for whatever reason it was, it led to 16 years of persecution.

Jon Sine: 16 years is insane.

Jordan Schneider: The craziest thing is Xi Zhongxun is spending years and years and years reflecting on what it is that he did wrong in this and he’s doing all this self-criticism and “Oh, did I misinterpret something? What was my part in this error?” Then 40 years later he’s like, “No, I actually didn’t do anything wrong. These people are crazy.” But it took him a while to get there.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that my book is a book of history and much of that 16 years is Xi Zhongxun doing self-criticism about his history and then when he’s fighting for rehabilitation, which actually doesn’t happen fully until several years after he returns to work — it’s these constant battles about how his life should be understood by the party. It speaks to how much these people, their entire sense of self-worth, their entire worldview is shaped by how the party characterizes them.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about that turn for a second, because going from the self-flagellation to, “Let me do everything I can to convince these people my self-flagellation was wrong and I was not a bad guy the whole time.” It’s a weird turn, right?

Joseph Torigian: You’re absolutely right. When he was actually writing the self-criticism, whether he was forcing himself to believe what he was writing because he recognized that the party is always right, or he was just doing it to get by — that’s an interesting question. We can only conjecture what was really going through his mind. My suspicion is that he really did find the charges ridiculous. He thought they were outrageous. But gradually, painfully and emotionally he forced himself to come as close to acknowledging the charges as he could because he recognized the possibility that it was his individuality that was the problem. He had this faith in the party always being right and in Mao always being right.

When he saw the party moving in another direction and he saw space for his case to be revisited, you can see him seeing it from the other perspective, which is he cares so much about there being a better evaluation that he would fight tooth and nail for it. We can only guess as to what his interiority was during this time, but ultimately you put the party’s interest first and if that means self-criticism, if that means transforming yourself, then that’s what happens.

One other thing too is you want to do a good self-criticism because you don’t want to hurt other people. If you fight it, it just makes things worse because it drags in other people and the party decides that they need to do even more to punish you, to scare you and to get you to break, essentially.

Jordan Schneider: Who was the guy who tried to kill himself, and everyone was like, “Why did you try to kill yourself? These are only words. You could have just chilled out and things would have come back around.”

Joseph Torigian: There’s this interesting hope that if the party is always right and you have faith in yourself, that even if you’ve made mistakes, even if you’ve done something terribly wrong, you can still win back the party’s trust by going far to acknowledge that the party is right, even when they’re going after you, and then to work even harder to show how good you are at your job and how devoted you are. The quote is from Xi Zhongxun to Gao Gang. There might have been this hope that even if you are going to be persecuted, even if you are going to be attacked, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do revolution anymore. It means you do revolution on a smaller scale. Or it might mean that you can’t do revolution for a while and then later on you come back.

Xi Zhongxun makes a remarkable statement in the 1980s, where apparently he says to somebody, “People come up, they go down, it’s cyclical, you can’t hold grudges. It’s just how our party works.” It’s almost like Democrats and Republicans and political parties in Western societies. There is this hope that they will get your case right because even if you were wrong and even if you failed, your heart is still clean and you can still prove it to them if you work even harder to dig yourself out of that hole.

Jordan Schneider: Psychologically, it is easier to stay in that mode than it is to question the essence of this and whether all the decisions you’ve made leading up to that moment were actually fighting for something which is bad.

Joseph Torigian: Oh yeah, 100%. You’re faced with two choices. One is to say that everything you’ve done so far is wrong, and you know that now because the party turned against you. That’s much harder, exactly as you said, than saying that you weren’t good enough for the party. You were the one who made the mistake. You were the one who allowed yourself to be shot by the sugar-coated bullets of bourgeois liberalization. This is how they thought. Even Xi Zhongxun himself kept warning people that there’s no stasis, there’s no equilibrium, there’s no point where you are invulnerable to mistakes because bourgeois elements keep creeping back in. You have to keep fighting it. The more confident you are, the more vulnerable you are. It’s an interesting way of thinking about the world.

Jordan Schneider: These leaders are the most into-therapy people that you could ever come across. All they’re trying to do is reform themselves and shape themselves and interrogate what it was about them as individuals that led them to do this deviation instead of that deviation. On the one hand, they’re trying to create themselves into these automatons, but there’s so much dialogue with their own interiority and individuality, which they’re trying to squeeze out of but can’t because they’re human beings. You’re basically stuck in this weird version of — it’s almost like he has nothing else to do for 16 years, aside from screwing in iPhones and just meditating on himself and all his mistakes and how he thought this wrong thing at this time.

Joseph Torigian: That’s what makes him interesting, is that when he comes out the other end, it’s remarkable how reflective he is, but it’s also remarkable how many limitations still confine him.

Jinping, I Am Your Father

Jon Sine: This is one of the quotes that has stuck with me the most. A man named Yang Ping worked with Xi Zhongxun in a factory when he was exiled. I guess he was in Henan in Luoyang for close to a decade.

Joseph Torigian: He was there twice, both before and in the later years of the Cultural Revolution.

Jon Sine: This one is from 1976, the very late years, near the finale. At this point, Deng is being widely denounced and criticized. Yang Ping goes into Xi Zhongxun’s apartment at 8 p.m. one night:

“Yang was surprised to find Xi drinking strong cheap liquor and crying alone in the dark. Xi explained that it was his son Jinping’s birthday. Xi said, ‘Your father is better than I am; he took such good care of you. I am also a father, but because of me . . . Jinping only narrowly escaped death!’ Xi then proceeded to tell Yang about Jinping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Yang later wrote, ‘That night, Old Xi spoke to me, and at the same time, he cried. He kept saying he had let down everyone in his family. He said that in terms of taking care of his entire family, his behavior had been criminal and so on. One could say that his emotional state was approaching a total lack of control. It made me feel extremely sad. Normally, his words would be very concise. He wasn’t verbose, and he didn’t repeat himself. He definitely was never incoherent.’”

At the end of this same paragraph is the thing that stuck with me the most — Xi Jinping comes to visit him a few days later. They’re both sweltering because it’s summer and they’re both sitting in their underwear smoking as Jinping recited Mao speeches from memory while Xi Zhongxun watched. At some point near the end of the book, you say that we shouldn’t necessarily think of Xi Jinping as thinking, “How could I be loyal to a party that treated my father so badly?,” but rather the inverse — “My father sacrificed so much for the party, yet still is this loyal, and still wants me to be reciting Mao speeches. How could I ever transgress that party?” In some ways, this underwear incident actually helped make that stick a little bit more for me.

Joseph Torigian: Yang Ping is struck by this. He knows Zhongxun cares about his son, he knows he feels bad about what happened to his son, and the son comes to see him on a rare visit, and what do they do? It raises questions about why this is the case.

One reason is the political background. Xi Zhongxun didn’t want his family to be a hotbed for privilege, entitlement and weakness, even though they were high ranking figures. One way of addressing that is by being tough. Xi Zhongxun had this view that if you’re not a very strict disciplinarian (and he was famous for being one), that when your children grow up, they’re not good members of society because they can’t live collectively.

But even if you are that strict and you see that strictness as a gift, as a sign of care and love, why you would have him recite Mao is an interesting question. One reason is that in 1976, Mao is still the lodestar of the communists’ sense of meaning for these people. Mao used to tell Xi Zhongxun, “You’re not reading enough. You need to read more, you need to improve your cultural side, you need to improve your ability to think ideologically.” In a way he’s doing to his son what Mao did to him, which was to tell him to read, and now he’s telling him to memorize Mao.

Xi Zhongxun is hoping is that if you’ve mastered Mao and can use Mao’s language, you can protect yourself in powerful ways. It allows you to think ideologically and not purely empirically. It allows you to be able to justify what it is that you’re doing because “I memorized Mao.” That’s a sign of political and social capital in this society. At this very same time, he’s telling other people about certain distasteful elements of the Mao era that stuck with him. Complicated person.

Jordan Schneider: It’s like a catechism, right?

Joseph Torigian: You have to memorize the ancient texts. That’s how it works.

Jon Sine: It’s kind of weird to me that Xi Jinping ends up going to Liangjiahe.

Joseph Torigian: Which happens to be Shaanxi, near where his father... I mean, the sense of historical sprawl, to use this word again, must have been palpable for him. Returning to the roots of not only communism, but of Chinese civilization, for self-revolution and for continuous re-baptism in Chinese traditional culture and revolutionary legacy.

Jon Sine: Victor Shih said in a recent podcast that the lesson that Xi Jinping likely learned from the Cultural Revolution is that what really matters is to make sure you’re on the winning side of political struggles, so that you can be the one who inflicts your will on the other side. Do you think that is a valid read? Is that interpretation in tension with the “getting redder than red” interpretation?

Joseph Torigian: That’s a false binary, frankly. I don’t think that Xi Jinping concluded when he was 15 years old that he needed to be a leader of the country so that he could protect himself and that nobody could ever hurt him. I don’t think that’s right. But I do think that he learned a lot about politics. He learned about the fickleness of human relations, the fickleness of human nature. He said that literally, in a remarkably candid moment.

How does someone who has seen the fickleness of human nature also have such a preoccupation with ideals and conviction? Stalin was the same way. Stalin was both an idealist and a realist at the same time. I don’t think that these are binaries. You need to be practical and flexible so you can achieve these idealistic goals. And you need to have faith in the final victory to motivate you to work hard and innovate and change so that you can meet the challenges as they emerge and transform.

Xi Jinping is the top leader. When he does things, we can see how it would fit the goals of a vainglorious person. I’m sure Xi Jinping has a healthy sense of personal ambition, but I don’t think he differentiates that from the party’s interests at all. He almost sees himself as an avatar for party interests. He probably almost sees himself as a person inside a machine pushing all those buttons, but the machine itself is a purposeful device that’s useful for the party to achieve its goals.

Both of those things are there at the same time. What’s good for him is good for the party. The party is an organizational weapon because it has a core. What the core does is it imposes discipline and cohesion on people who might have their own views, who might be susceptible to corruption and individualism and materialism and peaceful evolution, etc., and that he is there to stop that. That’s why he needs the power that he has brought into himself.

Jon Sine: I’m glad you call it a false dichotomy. I just spent two months of my life reading the Robert Moses biography by Robert Caro. Brilliant book. It exactly explains that this is an idealist who becomes a realist in one, but the ideals don’t necessarily match with what other people would want. The first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography of Kissinger is titled, The Idealist. It would be quite wrong to put them as a dichotomy.

Joseph Torigian: You can be as utilitarian as you need to be precisely because you have so much conviction that the final goal deserves so much sacrifice.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about Xi’s experience during the Cultural Revolution and how his relationship to his father played into that.

Joseph Torigian: Now we’re doing this armchair Freudianism. If you want, we can put them on the couch.

Jordan Schneider: This is your time to shine.

Joseph Torigian: To be fair, Xi Jinping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution are obviously formative. Xi Jinping, before he came to power, talked about them all the time. He talked about how when he went to the countryside, he brought these dogmatic ideas from the capital. He couldn’t get along with the peasants. He was too extreme. He ran away once because it was too hard for him. The physical labor was overwhelming. He was constantly getting bitten by bedbugs. He said that he doubted. But because he went back to it, his faith is much more unshakable than somebody who didn’t go through that process. He says that anybody who’s gone through that, nothing could make you tougher.

Now that raises an interesting question, which is, you need to go through doubt to have strong conviction. But what happens if you go through doubt and you don’t come out on the other side with strong conviction? Should you subject people to doubt? What kind of doubt is good and what kind of doubt is bad? What kind of suffering leads to dedication and what kind leads to alienation? Is it situational or is it dispositional? These are all very interesting questions to think about.

Jordan Schneider: You got this cute line in your acknowledgements. You write that this book will likely not be welcomed in the PRC at the time of publication. It’s a somewhat ironic outcome. Xi Jinping once said that his devotion to the legacy of the revolution was the result of undergoing a period of doubt when seeing the past at its worst. If the evidence shared in this book helps explain his own choices, why would the party doubt that others would not draw different conclusions about his family’s forging?

Joseph Torigian: I don’t know if you watched this TV show about Xi Zhongxun that was produced on the mainland. It was all these episodes, and I was pretty excited. I spent years of my life studying this guy, and now I get to see him on television, and I thought at the very least it would be exciting and that at least I could hear the clarion call through the show of Xi speaking to young people, and I didn’t hear it. Why? Because it didn’t have any grit, it didn’t have any sense of hazard, it didn’t have any sense of risk. It was kind of maudlin and sentimental, and there were a lot of monologues, and it was, the revolution was kind of a dinner party in a way, to turn Mao’s phrase on its head. I found that almost less inspiring than my book, where you have all the wars and everything. I can kind of get Xi Jinping a little bit when I look at the pages that I wrote, but I couldn’t get him watching this TV show. That should have been even more inspiring because you cut out all of the bad stuff.

Jon Sine: It’s what Kathleen Kennedy and Disney did to Star Wars.

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to have Tony Gilroy on to talk about Andor. He’s talked about how it was inspired by reading history and Stalin in particular as its protagonist. I’m going to pitch to him — you gotta do Xi Zhongxun next. He deserves his own Star Wars-inspired film. It’s a sad irony that the party has all this incredible material, which I think you can turn into something very inspiring from a “love the party” perspective. But the fact that they’re too scared to do that is very instructive of where we are in Xi-era China and how they view and don’t view history as an instrument.

Joseph Torigian: This is what I try to do with the book, to show that the party doesn’t just have coercive and organizational power, but that it has real emotional power. For people trying to figure out how to find meaning in their lives, Xi Jinping is telling young people to eat bitterness, telling them to go to the countryside, telling them to learn from their forebears. I’m sure that a lot of people are not going to react positively because they want to rùnxué 润学, meaning they want to learn how to live overseas, or they want to tǎngpíng 躺平, meaning they want to lie down. For Xi Jinping, those are existential problems, because if the young people aren’t on board, then that’s peaceful evolution, and you don’t want that to happen.

But his message is not totally unpersuasive for everyone. It’s human to want to be bigger than yourself and national rejuvenation is something that you would find meaningful to sacrifice for. Collective values are something that people are often attracted to emotionally. What emerges, however, from this kind of system is not just all of this excitement and meaning, but terrible suffering as well. Whatever conclusions people want to draw from that is up to them.

Jordan Schneider: That’s something that we struggle with a lot now, trying to understand the appeal that Communism had in the 1900s to the 1940s, both in the countries where revolution was happening as well as in the Western-educated world, which also found incredible inspirational power in it. Democratic socialism in America today is such weak sauce compared to what was being offered to Xi Zhongxun when he was a teenager in Shaanxi.

Joseph Torigian: There’s one way of living life, which is Netflix, dinner parties, brunch, consuming materialism, watching Andor. And there’s another where you’re a member of an organization that is leading your country to a rightful place in the world that had been lost for centuries. Choosing to support that kind of mission has repercussions, often tragic repercussions. I’m helping people understand these decisions and also helping people understand the implications of those decisions.

Return and Reform

Jon Sine: Let’s talk about how Xi Zhongxun finally comes out of the wilderness and makes it back.

Joseph Torigian: There’s this dramatic moment where Xi Zhongxun is crying again. This time he’s crying in front of a picture of Zhou Enlai who’s just died. It’s sobbing, it’s uncontrolled crying. I’ve wondered who he’s crying for, whether he’s crying for Zhou Enlai or whether he’s crying for someone else, or whether he’s crying for himself. Because the death of Zhou raises questions about what’s going to happen next. Mao is still alive. It’s unclear what the succession is going to be. There had been a brief moment when Deng had been brought back to power when it seemed like the nation was finally digging itself out of the hole in which it had found itself during the Cultural Revolution.

Mao dies, another wrenching experience again. No matter how much Xi had reflected, Mao was deeply meaningful to him in many ways. Then the Gang of Four are arrested. Mao’s initial successor is Hua Guofeng. Xi Zhongxun is rehabilitated primarily by Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing 汪东兴, who is in charge of the special case committees and propaganda.The decision to send Xi to Guangdong not made by Deng Xiaoping, but by Ye Jianying, who at the time was part of a triumvirate along with Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping.

It’s interesting that his first job is in Guangdong because it’s really obvious in Guangdong how bad things are, because the Gang of Four had connections there, Lin Biao had connections there, and all these killings that happened there.

It’s also right on the border with Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of people are fleeing to Hong Kong. Many of them are dying in the process. You can literally see across the street, across the river, how far behind China was.

But the case against him is not revised until 1980. He’s back to work, but on the books he’s still not fully rehabilitated, which is also kind of interesting.

Jordan Schneider: I want to stay on that moment. It must be disorienting where what you’ve devoted your life to, it’s taken 20 years out of your life and killing tens of millions of people is just losing to these colonialist capitalists, to the bourgeois people. He has to grapple with that. On the one hand, he says, “Look, we need to educate them spiritually that capitalism is bad,” but he also understands, “If we don’t step our game up, people want to eat, they want to provide for themselves and their family. Me telling them war stories about Shaanxi in the 1920s is not gonna stop folks from leaving my socialist not-so-paradise.”

Joseph Torigian: It’s another dilemma. On the one hand, you see the sources of political order and belief. On the other hand, if socialism means empty bellies, that’s dangerous. It’s a balance that’s hard to get right. You see him reflecting on it and thinking about it in real time — how you can achieve economic development without giving up on the ideology and how you can make sure people take ideology seriously even as their lives are getting better and even as you’re changing things in society that raise questions about what the heck socialism even is in the first place.

Jon Sine: The other important thing while Xi Jinping is in Guangdong, how much he’s responsible for the reforms, especially the special economic zones. He has a substantial role in the special economic zones, but initially he seems to be against the household responsibility system, which is one of the most important parts of China’s economic takeoff again in the late 70s and early 80s. Can you clarify, based on your deep research, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping’s respective roles to reform?

Joseph Torigian: How we think about their roles with respect to the special economic zones speaks to a lot of party historiography and how the party functions. The traditional story is that the special economic zones happened because Deng Xiaoping wanted them to happen. Xi Zhongxun played a big role too. That’s part of that story.

But actually, Deng Xiaoping wasn’t present for most of the work conference in the spring of 1979 that decided they were going to approve the special economic zones. It’s important that Deng gave his imprimatur because it was still a dangerous risk, because they could be accused of being revisionists and Trotskyites. I don’t want to discount the importance of having Deng’s approval, but it’s also very clear that Hua Guofeng was the main driver of the idea in the beginning.

We know from both memoir and archival accounts that when Xi Zhongxun went back to Guangdong, he was talking mostly about Hua Guofeng and the role that Hua Guofeng had played in this. There’s a coda to this, which is in the 1990s, Hua Guofeng tries to visit Xi Zhongxun and he’s not allowed for somewhat mysterious reasons. He’s finally granted an audience and says, “People say I’m crazy because I say that you [Xi] need to deserve credit for some of these reforms,” which is kind of a remarkable thing to say for a lot of reasons.

But the relationship between Hua Guofeng and Xi Jinping is interesting. When Xi is brought to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, he does what he’s supposed to do. He says all these horrible things about Hua Guofeng that he probably didn’t believe to signify that he was now on board with the new order that was marked by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang.

Jon Sine: It’s remarkable. People should reflect on this. You have this whole idea of the Mao-Deng transition and many people who write histories of it and make a clear delineation. Deng is the reformer and gets all the credit in the party’s details and the Western retellings of it. But here we have Hua Guofeng who is known in the West primarily for the “two whatevers,” of being Mao’s “running dog,” when there’s far more historical evidence of Deng Xiaoping serving as Mao’s right-hand man, being his “running dog,” and implementing the Great Leap Forward. The mental rejiggering this requires for some people is remarkable.

Joseph Torigian: Frankly, I don’t like talking in terms of who deserves credit for reform and opening, because there is a little bit of a historical element to it, of who did what and when. It is somewhat empirical, but it’s also such an easily weaponized and politicized debate because reform and opening is an inherently ambiguous idea and not even the Chinese could really explain it all that well. However, if not for Deng, would reform and opening look the way it did? I don’t think it would.

The bigger point here is that the through line of all these dilemmas went through Deng Xiaoping again and again. For example, the dilemma of “the three” versus “the four.” “The three” was the Third Plenum in 1978 on economic modernization. Just a few weeks later, Deng Xiaoping gives another speech where he introduces “the four” cardinal principles, which were very conservative formulations. So people were wondering, are we going to reform or not?

What’s interesting is when Xi Zhongxun saw those remarks, he was happy apparently, according to his secretary, and that Xi said, “We can’t do reform and opening right without the four cardinal principles because it sets a guideline, it sets a red line. It helps us be clear that there are certain things that aren’t going to be changed, which is very important.”

In theory this makes sense, but that in practice is hard to do at the same time. And so there are these extraordinary zigzags. We think of the Deng era as a stable era, an era of moving in one direction of economic modernization. But as I already mentioned in the previous episode, as soon as Xi Zhongxun goes to work in Beijing from Guangdong, people think another cultural revolution is happening because of a movie that people are criticizing.

Then in 1983, the campaign to eliminate spiritual pollution, people think another cultural revolution is happening. Xi Zhongxun is really unhappy with this campaign, but nevertheless he’s telling foreigners in meetings that spiritual pollution is a real problem.

The challenge of maintaining order without going too far, especially when the top leader is changing his mind and people are trying to figure out what he thinks was a formula for these really dramatic shifts throughout the entire Deng era. In some ways, Xi Jinping is a reaction to this. I don’t want to put him on the couch or anything, but Xi Jinping says, “We’re not going to be as radical as the Mao era, but we’re also going to recognize that reform and opening created real problems and we need to resolve them and I’m the one to do it.” We’re not rejecting either of these eras, but we’re going to find a happy middle. He’s saying, we’re not going to lurch back and forth. We haven’t seen quite as many really stunning things appearing under his rule as we saw during the Deng administration.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun’s next spot is going back to Beijing and working under Hu Yaobang at the Secretariat. There’s a very interesting book by Julian Gewirtz, which is Never Turn Back. It’s a history of the 1980s as this possibility-hood of what could have been in terms of political reform. Hu Yaobang, there’s another good recent book, Robert Suettinger, The Conscience of the Party, Hu Yaobang. If you say reformer, Hu’s is the image that would be conjured to mind of this period. Xi Zhongxun is working under him. How does this get tied into Xi Zhongxun’’s own legacy as a reformer?

Joseph Torigian: At the Party Life Meeting that criticized Hu Yaobang, one of the individuals who was present said to Xi Zhongxun, “You went even farther than Hu Yaobang.” The question becomes, in what direction is he going even farther?

In the 1980s the party is determining whether or not it can move to a new equilibrium, both with the ethnic minorities and with society, but not just those two areas. They are also reflectively thinking about how to reorganize politics at the very heart of Zhongnanhai. At the same time, they only considered certain possibilities, and it was really easy for them to get scared when things weren’t going well. Whether you’re more impressed by their insights or their limitations, I think is up to the reader. But it’s certainly the case that you could see there were good reasons for why that period did not end up in the direction that people looking back now wish that it would.

Ultimately, the question of how serious this possibility was forces us to look at certain counterfactuals that are really hard to answer. How likely were they? Can we really control them? How much can we really guess how different it would be? One of the themes of the book is yet another kind of contradiction — the continuities are obvious and they’re strong, yet at the same time the sense of contingency and accident and the myriad of all of these different structures, how they actually manifest at a particular moment, can also be something that’s hard to guess.

People within the system couldn’t read each other very well and the system could also change people. Let’s say that it was somebody who was not Deng Xiaoping who was the leader. Xi Zhongxun whispered privately that power corrupts. Li Rui said the same thing. Li Rui said, “You know, I really liked Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin used to come to me all the time and ask for advice. Then Jiang Zemin became the top leader and then he ignored me. I’ve seen this kind of person a lot.” He was, you know, clearly also alluding to his relationship with Xi Jinping. It’s not a question that’s easy to answer.

But one last thing I’ll say about Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang — I don’t think that they represented two different lines. The problem wasn’t that Deng and Hu had consistently different views of thinking about the world. The problem was that Hu Yaobang thought he had more space than he really did. He thought that he had Deng’s confidence and that he was given a task of achieving modernization, but also party control. Hu Yaobang agreed with party control, but that he was scapegoated and punished in part because of the student protesters and in part because he didn’t handle the succession issue well.

Jon Sine: This two-line structure where you have the leader, Mao or the “autocratic Deng” and then their deputies — is it fair to call this a Leninist characteristic of a Leninist system?

Joseph Torigian: Yes, absolutely. The tensions between Brezhnev and Kosygin in some ways mirror some of the problems that we saw in China. What’s interesting is the two-line system was created because of the lessons they drew from the Soviet Union.

Mao was very explicit about this at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He said that when Stalin died, his named successor, Malenkov, was pushed out because Stalin didn’t give Malenkov enough time before Stalin’s death to secure his position.

What we in China need to do is allow a successor to essentially run the show long enough ahead of time before Mao dies, so that when Mao dies, somebody who will not allow de-Stalinization to happen in China can hold down the fort and can survive any challenge.

Mao also had this conception of himself — he was the Sage King. He didn’t want to be boxed in with day-to-day decision making, which was a huge problem because if you didn’t report to him enough, you got yelled at. If you reported to him too much, you got yelled at. He got to decide when he was going to be mad.

Liu Shaoqi was brought in so that he could give Mao time to do Mao things, but also so that he could secure himself as a successor so you don’t have in China what happened in the Soviet Union — meaning that the named successor is pushed out and then there’s a move in a new direction.

This is ironic because Liu Shaoqi, as the successor, as the deputy, raises fears in Mao’s mind of revisionism because Liu Shaoqi is not getting it right even while Mao is alive. Liu Shaoqi was not opposing Mao. He did not represent a cohesive different line compared to Mao. In fact, this one figure who appears in my book, Hu Jiwei 胡绩伟, who was at People’s Daily, says in the 1980s, “Boy, I wish there was a Liu Shaoqi line. It’s really too bad there wasn’t one."

Mao gets rid of Liu Shaoqi in the most dramatic way possible, which of course is the Cultural Revolution. The origins of the two-line are related to the Soviet Union model. It’s related to succession and to the nature of Mao as a leader.

When Deng comes to power, it’s even worse in some ways, because he’s not even the chairman of the party. He’s only chairman of the Central Military Commission. He’s harder to manage in some ways because he doesn’t want people to think he’s acting like Mao. Nevertheless he thinks that he’s the core and that the party needs a core. It’s this very confusing environment and he gives enough rope to Hua Guofeng to hang himself with.

Jon Sine: Can you say a little bit more about Leninist pathologies? It seems like it all emanates from the really core issue of succession politics, which was the core focus of your previous book. This two-line thing tries to solve that. You could also tie this into democratic centralism — a dialectic that doesn’t quite seem to work because it tends to just end in centralism. What other pathologies do you see, and does Xi Jinping’s own life bring these to bear?

Joseph Torigian: Pathology is probably too strong of a word, although obviously it can lead to really tragic outcomes, and the reason for those outcomes are structural and can’t really ever be fully resolved.

Ideology is another dilemma that’s really hard to solve — this question of how you take ideology seriously enough, but not too seriously. That also emerges a lot in Xi Zhongxun’s life.

Another is how you co-opt people, whether you co-opt people, how to do that along with repression and how to get that balance right. These are all dilemmas that have been with them since the beginning that different leaders bring their own approaches to, but nevertheless remain with the party.

Stay tuned for part three, where we address Princeling Politics and Tiananmen.

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