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本期播客的文字版在作者的Substack专栏

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本期播客的文字版在https://caminodetexas.substack.com/publish/post/153877656.

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本期播客的文字版本，请见作者的Substack专栏

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本期播客文字版，请见作者的Substack专栏

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Bolds are best reads, *Bolds are best of the best.

Soviet / Russian History & the Cold War

*To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, Benjamin Nathans, 2024. Covered in an upcoming podcast. A masterful book. For a taste:

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. 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?

*The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973. Survivor and stylist. Energy and humanity sparks though the prose.

Look around you—there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.

*To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko, 2024. Covered in a two-parter.

Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War, Sergey Radchenko, 2014.

Apple in China. Patrick McGee, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

China & East Asia

*The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, Joseph Torigian, 2025. A China book at the level we get only a few times a decade. A true must read for anyone hoping to deeply understand the CCP and Chinese 20th century history. Covered in a podcast here.

A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598, Kenneth M. Swope, 2009. Inspired by the Yasheng Huang shows.

Hideyoshi, man. A letter he sends to the Koreans before he invades them…

Whenever and against whomever I have waged war, the victory has always been mine. The lands and districts invaded by me have always been conquered. Now our empire has entered upon a period of peace and prosperity, and the people are enjoying a benevolent rule. Lonely old men and forlorn widows are all well provided for. Both the national wealth and that of individuals has been so greatly augmented that it is unparalleled in our history. Since the nation’s founding, our empire has never before witnessed such glory as that of our imperial court and such splendor as that of our imperial capital.

However, human life in this world is brief. . . . I am not willing to spend the remaining years of my life in the land of my birth. According to my idea, the empire that I would create should not be separated by mountains and seas, but should include them all. In starting my conquest, I plan that our forces should proceed to the country of the Great Ming and compel the people there to adopt our customs and manners. Then that vast country, consisting of more than four hundred provinces, would enjoy our imperial protection and benevolence for millions of years to come. I have in mind a plan of conquest which shall surely be carried to a successful ending. Your kingdom has taken the lead among the continental states by sending an envoy to our court, thus showing reverence to our throne. You have acted in accordance with the wise saying of the ancients that one who has foresight and is humble and cautious will always be free from grief and worry. . . . You, King of Korea, are hereby instructed to join us when we proceed to [the country of the] Great Ming at the head of all your fighting men. You may thereby further renew your pledge of service due to us as a neighboring state. Our sole desire is to have our glorious name revered in the three countries [of China, Korea, and Japan].

Swope writes: “while some of Hideyoshi’s statements to foreign rulers are overbearing to the point of laughter, it seems likely that he, like so many great conquerors, truly believed in his destiny and ability to overcome all odds.”

People used to be so petty too!

Hideyoshi at that time was on campaign, so the envoys had to await his return. But this was not the first indignity they had suffered. When they first got to Tsushima, the Koreans were treated discourteously in their eyes, for Sō Yoshitoshi’s retainers had brought him into a banquet hall in a palanquin, then Sō proceeded to sit in an elevated position. This infuriated Kim Sŏngil, who stormed out, exclaiming, “These barbarians really have no sense of propriety and cannot distinguish between higher and lower officials.

Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security, Fiona S. Cunningham, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations, David Kang and Xinru Ma. Covered in a pod here.

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, Eva Dou, 2025. Covered in a pod here.

Israel & Jewish Studies

Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History, Joseph Telushkin, 2014.

Fascinating less for any particular advice he gave people or viewpoints about Judaism or politics and more rather how and why people held him in such esteem. We already have something close to a Rebbe we can consult 24/7 in our pockets but no-one feels like asking ChatGPT a personal question deserves the weight and reverence that a private meeting with or letter from the Rebbe does.

Why? Meetings were scheduled months in advance and all after dark, with many occuring after midnight following a multi-hour long build up as you wait in line. “You saw the Rebbe when the rest of the world was asleep.” All who went through this ordeal came primed with the understanding that the Rebbe has access to deep spiritual knowledge and decades of learning of a religion you hold in high regard.

When you finally get your meeting, for the time you’re together he interacts with you as if you’re the only other person in the world. “The Rebbe’s most striking physical characteristic, the one most often commented upon, particularly by those who met him in yechidus, were his eyes; in Swados’s case, he recalled how ‘the pale blue eyes remain fixed upon [me] with an unblinking directness that could be disconcerting.’”

Clinton could do this too: Game recognize game, from Obama in 2009: “Now, I think everyone knows what it’s like when Bill Clinton asks you to make a commitment. He looks you in the eye … he makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room.”.

McChrystal is the only person I’ve sat in the same room with whose gaze made me feel this way. Six weeks after getting fired in Afghanistan he’s teaching a seminar at Yale and sitting down with me to talk about some sophomore about a mediocre paper idea. I don’t think this is a thing people can fake—this breed is that curious and able to live in the moment.

The fact that someone important took the time to care about your situation means something that you can’t get from Scarlett Johannsen in Her.

The case involved a seventeen-year-old girl who was having extreme emotional difficulties, involving issues of rebellion and serious doubts about faith and religious practice—‘the typical kinds of things that you find among teenagers, but in this case quite severe and for some reason.’ The young woman herself would often write to the Rebbe and then share and review with the young rabbi the responses she received. Kaplan was amazed at the speed with which the Rebbe responded to the girl’s letters—sometimes within hours, never longer than a day. One exchange of letters remains vivid to Kaplan: the young woman had written an extended letter describing the continuing emotional turmoil and constant anguish she was experiencing, and the Rebbe, in turn, responded that he felt her pain. Kaplan recalls the impact of these words: the girl felt that there was a person who actually did feel what she was going through and truly wanted to help her; from that point on, her life slowly started to turn around. To this day, Kaplan remains staggered that the Rebbe—a man known to receive hundreds of letters a day—placed himself in this situation with such intensity, ‘answering the girl’s letters back and forth…and doing so within a day, and sometimes within hours.’

Like , the Rebbe “was known to personally open all letters addressed to him.”

Productivity hacks brought to you by the Rebbe.

His father-in-law taught him the secret of “success with time,” a technique that the Frierdiker Rebbe had learned from his father, the Rebbe Rashab: The first prerequisite for fulfilling one’s responsibilities is to fully grasp that a person can never add to the amount of time in the day or the night. Since time is finite, the only way we can carry out all that we need to do is to utilize whatever time we do have to its full capacity; this means giving our entire focus—our full concentration—to whatever we are doing at that moment.

Therefore, while working on one task, “we must regard anything else we have done before and anything that we are planning to do later as totally insignificant.”

This was a good line. Or maybe I just don’t consume enough chicken soup.

Rabbi Zev Segal, a community activist, encountered a similar, though subtly different, response. After a long career in the rabbinate, Segal went to work for the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Once, as he was getting ready to depart on an overseas mission, he received a call from Rabbi Hodakov, with a request from the Rebbe that he fulfill a certain assignment. Segal agreed to do so, although he eventually found the task requested by the Rebbe to be much more difficult than he had anticipated, and even a bit dangerous.

When he returned, he said, “I came back and gave the Rebbe a report and I concluded that the Rebbe should know that this was not an easy task for me. It was, rather, very difficult. The Rebbe looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Rabbi Segal, since when did you make a contract with the Almighty for an easy life?’

At a speech delivered after the Rebbe’s death, Segal explained how this one, seemingly throw-away line, uttered in fewer than ten seconds, permanently affected him. Even though a task will not be easy, each of us must do what we know we were put on earth to do.

“If the Nazis had murdered Jews with Zyklon B gas because it was cheap, a few pennies for each person they suffocated, the Rebbe wanted to elevate the value of human life…I recall him saying something to the effect that even capturing the Kotel ha‑Ma‘aravi (Western Wall) was not worth losing one innocent Israeli soldier’s life.”

And I found this quirk endearing.

For the Rebbe, the desire to choose positive words was so deeply ingrained that he hesitated to use terms like “evil,” even when describing something that was…The Rebbe’s search for non-negative language went well beyond anything traditional Jewish texts might have intended. He apparently believed that words with bad connotations could trigger harmful associations even in the most innocent contexts. He avoided the word “undertake,” lest it evoke “undertaker.” And, no matter how great the pressure to finish a project, he never referred to the due date as a “deadline.” Once “deadline” is removed from one’s vocabulary, a natural alternative is “due date,” with “deadline” connoting death and “due date” connoting birth.

*Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, 1963. I would have read this years ago if anyone told me how funny it was! As she wrote to a friend, “You are the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted—namely that I wrote Eichimann in Jerusalem in a curious state of euphoria.” It shows and is so much better for it.

World-historically funny.

Extended excerpts here in my Tel Aviv writeup.

I paired this with Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany, Rebecca West, 2025.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, Ronen Bergman, 2018. Love how sourced this book is, mostly by people who did cool secret shit for years, retired, and now want to tell the world how cool the secret shit they did was. His conclusion that the incredible tactical successes have helped cover up for massive strategic failues seems a little premature in light of Israel eliminating Hezbollah and tbd on Iran…though if Iran ends up with the bomb in two years the thesis will have been all too true. Deserves a new edition!

World War II

Eastern Front

*The Stahel Arc

Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, David Stahel, 2009
Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941, David Stahel, 2013
Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel, 2012
The Battle for Moscow, David Stahel, 2015
Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany’s Winter Campaign, 1941-1942, David Stahel, 2019
Hitler’s Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded, David Stahel, 2023

Operational history does not get more grounded and gripping than this. The enormity of the Eastern Front from a manpower, space, and materiel perspective even after consuming all these books is still too much for my brain to get around. He also weaves in enough human color to let you start to develop a feel for the experience of the soldiers and officers.

Once Moscow survived the initial push in 1941, which Stahel convincingly argues wasn’t really even all that close-run a thing due to the Nazis burning their mechanized army and didn’t really have any contingency plan…

Industrial weight and, as Williamson Murray called it, the Nazis “strategic myopia” completely washes out always beats out tactical and operational creativity if you’re committed to staying in the fight over a long enough time horizon.

In November 1941 Stalin confidently exclaimed: ‘Modern war is a war of motors. The war will be won by the one who produces the most motors. The combined motor production of the USA, Britain, and the USSR is at least three times that of Germany.’ In fact the combined motor production of the three Allied powers was far in excess of Stalin’s three-fold estimate. The remaining years of the war continued to see a commanding Allied lead in armament production, dooming Germany to eventual defeat by sheer weight of arms. The ebb and flow of bat­tlefield successes affected only the length of the war, not its eventual outcome.

Oh, and it’s never a good look when you feel like you had it worse than a Napoleonic soldier.

Brilliant page of analysis here.

A death cult means living soldiers aren’t important.

The most nauseating bit of all this military history was reading Heinz Guderian’s love letters.

War is the fucking worst.

The Soviet Union at War 1941-1945, David R. Stone, 2010 + lots of David Stone articles.

The Military History of the Soviet Union, Robin Higham, 2002.

All this I cover in an upcoming podcast with Stahel and David Stone together (that’s still looking for a sponsor! Hit me up!)

Espionage & Intelligence

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal, David E. Hoffman, 2015

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, Shaun Walker, 2025.

Military History & Theory

Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War, S. L. A. Marshall, 1947. The guy has a weird relationship with the truth, but still worth reading for the unique perspective on WWII infantry combat. Lots of aphorisms that sound right?

The most common cause of psychological shock, however, is a partial victory. The adage that "the weakest point fol­lows success" is a fundamental truth of minor tactics and the danger is always greatest when the success is easily won.

Success is disarming. Tension is the normal state of mind and body in combat. When the tension suddenly relaxes through the winning of a first objective, troops are apt to be pervaded by a sense of extreme well-being and there is apt to ensue laxness in all of its forms and with all of its dangers.

The ideal relation­ship between a commander and his subordinate is nowhere better illustrated than in a passage from the letter of instruc­tion wherein Grant told Sherman to proceed to the destruc­tion of Johnston's Army: "I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign: but simply to lay down the work it is desirable to have done and leave you free to execute it in your own way."

Great Captains Unveiled, B. H. Liddell Hart, 1927.

Reputations, 10 Years After, B.H. Liddell Hart, 1928. Hart at 33 years old delivers a hundred pages of scorching takes on the leading WWI generals. France’s Joffre “not a general but a national nerve-sedative”. Von Falkenhayn “The ablest and most scientific general, ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish,’ who ever ruined his country.” Luttendorf was “the Robot Napoleon.” Hart would have killed it on substack.

A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, 2016. Covered in a podcast to come!

Economics, Technology & Innovation

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 2025. Covered in a pod with Dan Wang, Ezra, and Derek.

Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth, James Bessen, 2015

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, Edward Fishman, 2025. Covered in a pod.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, Ben Smith, 2023. If we thought the race to clicks was brain-warping, just wait until we have AI friends that optimize for engagement and microtransactions.

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level, James K. Sebenius and Nicholas Burns, 2018. Written almost like a business book, “what lessons can we learn from Kissinger the negotiator,” but if you get over that there’s good diplomatic archival work in here. Covered briefly in a pod here.

Best bits were about the 4D chess he used on Rhodesia to try to get them to change their ways.

Loved this bit about how trilateral leverage unlocked a ton in the US-China relationship.

Dobrynin also was probably more into Kissinger than he should have been. Zhou Enlai would never be caught glazing like this, clearly Kissinger’s superior on the political mindgames front.

The 1920s

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen, 1931. did a great job summarizing this book here.

Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression, Christopher Knowlton, 2020. The best part about history books is even if they aren’t great as long as someone has spent real time in the archives and has a decent eye you’re bound to learn things! Good sociological details on really rich people in the 1920s and architecture.

At the very top of the social heap were those who arrived in Florida by private yacht or, better yet, in their own private railcar. During this period, which fell at the end of the Gilded Age, “The near­est thing to a real aristocracy in America was the private-car peerage,” ac­cording to the New Yorker writer Alva Johnston, “and Palm Beach had the world’s most snobbish rail road yard—a Newport-on-wheels, an exalted trailer camp for the gold-encrusted Pullmans of the New World nobility.”

Nothing changes.

Popular resorts, it was commonly thought, had an almost Darwinian evolution: first, they were discovered by writers, artists, and academics; following them came the “nice” millionaires, who didn’t flaunt their wealth and valued their privacy; these were then followed by the “naughty” millionaires, who did flaunt their wealth by building extravagant houses, opening social clubs, throwing grand balls, and, in general, consuming conspicuously. The latter was the moment when an architect on the scene could succeed beyond his wildest imaginings—and Florida was rapidly approaching that stage. In the social historian Cleveland Amory’s view, there was one final step in this evolution, which he simply, and aptly, described as “trouble.”…

Restrictions against buying property or frequenting the hotels often applied to Jews as well as blacks. Anti-Semitism had been on the rise since the arrival in the United States of large numbers of Jewish immi­grants from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s. Exceptions to the restric­tions were often made for wealthy or prominent “assimilated” Jews who ran investment banks or successful corporations. Fisher’s correspondence in later years is full of letters of exception he wrote for friends such as yeast company president Julius Fleischmann, taxicab magnate John Hertz, and department store mogul Bernard Gimbel, granting them access to his ho­tels or privileges at his clubs. Fisher liked to think of himself as a fair per­son, staunchly unbiased, but for business purposes, he was quite willing to share in the prevailing bigotry of the day. It wasn’t until 1948 that the US Supreme Court eventually ruled such race covenants unenforceable. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 would ban the practice altogether.

Cool kids got divorced in Paris.

Elizabeth left for Europe around September 5 on the liner Homeric, accompanied by her best friend, presumably to vacation for a month and then to establish domicile in Paris for a quickie Paris divorce—a favored method for the wealthy to part ways during those years. As the lawyer Frank Shutts explained to Carl Fisher, whose marriage was in similar trou­ble, “the French court will grant divorce decrees up on the general proposi­tion that two people do not want to live together anymore.”

Retvrn actually looks like advertising “social supremacy” in your real estate brochures.

‘Social supremacy and fi­nancial solidarity are assured to Boca Raton by the wealth and standing, the character and achievement of its proprietary sponsors. These men and women of world-standing in society, finance, and affairs know that the best of democracy is the flower of genuine aristocracy. They therefore invite men and women of substance and standing to participate in their unique undertaking.’

You used to be able to get sued for ‘breach of promise’ if a guy renegged on marrying you.

They built ‘foreign villages’ in Coral Gables just like Huawei did with its campus. Here’s a photo of the Chinese one refurbished today:

Bruce Catton on the 50’s, good line but not surprising from a Civil War historian: “All the old rules seemed to be vanishing in the twenties. In exchange came a strange new world both gaudy and sad.”

Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott, 1929. Vivid and gripping proto-Nora Ephron. You really have to wait until the 1920s to read prose that feels completely modern, and this alongside some early Fitzgerald passes the threshold for me.

Grab Bag

They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Carlos M. N. Eire, 2023. Fun read of a careful and writerly historian who takes seriously claims of levitation in the late Middle Ages.

Every age and culture has its own unquestionable beliefs, and our own tends to prize the rationality and superiority of unbelief as one of its core beliefs, especially in regard to denying the existence of a supernatural dimension. Such unquestionable pervasive beliefs—Troelstch’s “social facts”—which William Blake called “mind-forged manacles” in 1794 and Max Weber spoke of as the “steel-hard casing” or an “iron cage” a century later, are difficult to detect and acknowledge, for they frame our thinking and are very much like the air we breathe, which we take for granted as much as an octopus takes water for granted. And even when perceived for what they are—as difficult as that is to do—these manacles and cages are even harder to discard or annihilate.

Monasticism itself is deeply rooted in holy foolishness because of its rejection of worldly values, which can make every monk or nun seem insane, or even a raving lunatic. The Cistercian luminary Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who greatly admired Antony the Great, captured the essence of monastic foolishness brilliantly in one of his letters:

For what else do worldlings think we are doing but playing about, when what they desire most on earth, we flee, and what they flee, we desire? We are like jesters and tumblers, who, with heads down and feet up, exhibit extraordinary behaviour by standing or walking on their hands, and thus draw all eyes to themselves. But ours is not the play of children or of the theatre, which excites lust and represents sordid acts in the effeminate and shameful contortions of the actors. No, ours is a joyous game, decent, grave, and admirable, delighting the gaze of the heavenly onlookers.

Strong writing here:

Discerning the difference between the natural and the supernatural or between genuine and fraudulent miracle claims can become immensely difficult, if not impossible, for the clerical elites in charge of ensuring the purity of the faith, as well as for the laity, including crowned monarchs. Inevitably, given the devil’s reputation as the ultimate trickster—the fact that he was “a liar and the father of lies,”1 ever eager to cause trouble—he, too, could more easily wheedle his way into the picture.

Such was the dilemma faced by early modern Catholicism when miracles became a highly valued feature of Catholic identity as well as a polemical weapon to wield against Protestants and skeptics of all stripes. It was a vexing conundrum, and a painful one, for it required doubting, and doubt always rubs faith raw. Sorting the genuinely divine from the fraudulent or demonic was an ordeal that also required intellectual, emotional, psychological, and spiritual fortitude on the part of all involved in the process. Teresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino, and María de Ágreda were liminal avatars of the impossible, suspended between the divine and demonic, their sanctity revered and questioned simultaneously, perfectly poised to play the role of tricksters acting as agents of the devil, the ultimate trickster. All three bore the brunt of doubt and survived their ordeal. But many other liminal “living saints” who claimed similar impossible feats did not survive intense scrutiny.

We will never know how many, exactly, since so many of the Inquisition’s records have been lost, but it is undeniable that in the surviving records, those found guilty of fraud or diabolical mischief do outnumber those who were not. Consequently, to fully understand the context in which belief in impossible feats was forged, one must also consider cases of ostensibly holy individuals whose impossible feats failed to be recognized as genuinely divine; that is, one must take into account cases in which doubt and reason trumped faith.

And it was dangerous to go for sainthood! Tough as its one of the few ways for lay women to have an exciting life. See the story of Sor María, who was on the sainthood track until she got got.

All in all, [the Insquisition] concluded, María’s wounds were a miracle of “supernatural origin and beyond the ability of all human artifice.” The chief lesson to be learned from their report, they concluded, was that the miracles made possible by the Catholic faith testify to its genuinely divine character and that Sor María’s miracles had been ordained by God “to awaken those who are asleep during these times when malice reigns supreme.”

María had prevailed once again. After receiving this report, Master General Sixto Fabri declared all the accusations against María to be false. She was no fraud, after all, but a genuinely holy stigmatic and worthy of admiration. Shortly after this pronouncement was made, María was reelected prioress of La Anunciada, apparently well on her way to heaven, ultimately, and to a privileged place of honor in the Catholic Church. But Fabri had made one decision that undermined the results of the past three investigations: he refused to punish or expel those nuns who had “falsely” accused María of fraud.107 With her enemies still surrounding her, María had no real chance of avoiding conflict. Complaints kept flowing, many of which had more to do with her lack of humility and her poor leadership than with feigned miracles.

But she got re-investigated thanks to politics…

If the Spanish Armada blessed by María had been successful rather than a humiliating disaster, she might have escaped further scrutiny, at least for a few years. But the Armada’s annihilation was doubly harmful for her.

First, it raised new questions about her holiness and miracle-working powers since her blessing of the armada had obviously failed. Then, by giving the Portuguese some hope for their own cause—including the possibility of a successful English invasion led by the contender Antonio—that colossal defeat pulled María into the realm of conspiracies, willingly and unwillingly.

And it didn’t end well! The Inquisition, who contrary to reputation was remarkably diligent and even scientific in looking into miracle claims looking for multiple witnesses and weighing higher the views of not particularly pious people, took another look and concluded…

All of her prolonged ecstasies and trances had been faked; the stigmata on her head were small self-inflicted wounds; the stigmata on her hands, feet, and chest had been painted on; the cross-shaped bloodstains she produced were carefully crafted using blood from self-inflicted wounds; her levitations had been accomplished with the aid of thick-soled footgear known as chapines and wooden poles hidden from view under her habit; and her halos and luminescence had all been produced through the manipulation of lamps and mirrors. And so on. Not a single miracle had been genuine, even those healings that had supposedly occurred through her agency, which she now attributed to the faith of those who believed in her.115 In addition, she also confessed that she had feigned her pain during previous inspections of her wounds, knowing that this ruse would prevent the examiners from scouring them vigorously enough to take off the paint, and that she never thought anyone would ever dare to give her a scrubbing such as the one that revealed her duplicity.

Unlike Magdalena de la Cruz, who had immediately blamed the devil for her duplicity as soon as her fraudulence was discovered, Sor María insisted that she alone deserved blame. When pressed to ferret out the devil, she repeatedly held firm: nothing she had done whatsoever was demonically induced or the result of some pact with the devil. All she would admit was that she had excelled as an actress and illusionist and that her sole aim had been to gain admiration as a saint and mystic, for purely selfish reasons.

On November 7, 1588, the Inquisition passed sentence on María, declaring her guilty of “trickery and deceit” through her own “artifice and invention.” Consigning her to “perpetual incarceration” at a convent outside Lisbon, the inquisitors ordered her to spend the rest of her life continually doing penance, shut off from contact with the outside world. In addition, they decreed that all physical objects and pseudo-sacramentalia related to her were to be destroyed—images, books, manuscripts, crosses, beads, cloths, and any such items—to make it seem “as if they had never existed.”

When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold, 2021

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 2024. I will read anything Lucy writes.

Ex Supra, Tony Stark, 2022. Covered in a pod here.

在中国做企业，得服从党国规矩，很多老板身不由己，要表演爱国。尤其是这十来年，中国知名企业家，好象都成了爱国演员。他们本来都是

有名有姓的，爹妈给起好了名字，像宗庆后、王传福、余承东、刘强东…等等，叫起来都不难听。但他们一上舞台，都是演一个角色，名叫“贾爱国”。

在和平年代，企业家忽悠爱国，肯定是醉翁之意不在酒，在中国眼下这个政治挂帅的时段，有人靠忽悠爱国卖货，有人靠表演爱国自保，都可以理解。这是有正常判断力人的都能做出的判断。但有些企业家可能演着演着就入戏了，演了几集，剧情不出现高潮，观众不答应，官府也不答应。

娃哈哈饮料公司的宗庆后老板，好象就是沉浸在“贾爱国”这个角色中，表演了几十年，死后还有痴心观众，自我带入，群情激昂，像发癫痫一样，直到上周，宗老板此前不为人知的三个居住在海外的私生子，因为遗产纷争，把官司打到法院。

宗老板生前的人设是“民族企业家”“爱国企业家”，他有句名言，说“我的钱是社会的”。但从媒体披露的文件看，他一边说这些话，一边把100多亿美元转入海外银行帐户。因为官司刚刚开打，具体事实细节，还不完整，但大致线索是这样的：从1980年代末开始，宗老板跟手下一名员工生了三个孩子。当时他已经有家室，婚内有一个独生女。他安排独生女继承国内的产业，安排三个孩子定居海外，继承部分遗产。宗老板去世后，国内的独生女继承了娃哈哈公司的产业，又把海外帐户的大部分资产转走，引发遗产继承纠纷。

官司打到法院，消息传到简体中文网上，墙内的“键盘爱国志士”才知道，宗老板不只有国内那个继承“民族产业”的“爱国”孩子，婚外还有三个，都住在海外，而且宗老板生前已经把大部分资产换成美元，转到海外帐户。

婚外生孩子，在中国企业家中，司空见惯，供大家茶余饭后八卦一下。哪个行业的名人，都有一个共同的功能，就是供成不了名人的芸芸众生八卦。宗老板生前都是正能量故事，“爱国”、“爱家”、“爱独生女”、勤俭节约、为人朴实，都是按照中国特色的道德教科书定制的优良品质。一个中国企业家，集这么多优良品质于一身，有正常认知的人一听，就知道是怎么回事，不能太当真。只是有点让人失望：他都挣了哪么多钱，连一点八卦价值都没有。但最终，宗老板还是没有让我们失望，死后补上了八卦价值这一课。

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Ding ling ling，麦克阿瑟给你打来了电话！

没关系，不知道麦克阿瑟是谁也无妨。

总之你在2025年收到了这个电话：“我们麦克阿瑟基金会，决定给你一份为期5年的奖金，资助你做任何你想做的事情。”

是的，没有任何附加条件，你想做什么都可以。奖金一共80万美元，分五年逐步发放，你无需提出具体计划，也无需报告如何使用资金。你拥有最大程度的自由支配权。

现在重点来了：这5年，你想用这笔钱做什么呢？

曾经有人接到了这个电话，它第一天都非常兴奋，但从第二天起，一整周都情绪低落，这是它人生中唯一一次情绪低落的时候。它是《枪炮，病菌与钢铁》的作者贾雷德·戴蒙德，彼时它还未开始写书，仍在做医学和观鸟的工作。它情绪低落的原因是，它意识到这通电话实际上是说：“贾雷德，你是一个很有才华的人，我们给你5年既有自由又有报酬的时间，希望你好好利用这一自由，做点重要的事情。你的人生到目前而言，都在撰写关于胆囊和新几内亚鸟类的学术论文，没能发挥出你的潜能！”

那么你呢？

你现在在做自己真正想做，发挥出你的潜能的事情吗？

你被什么原因阻止了你做这些事情呢？

给你5年的时间和80万的奖金，你想用它们来做哪些对你来说真正重要的事情呢？

这也是放学以后“心愿清单”系列在2025的变身返场。

我从今天就开始想了，这样当麦克阿瑟打来电话时，我就已经准备好了，希望你也是。

欢迎你在收听这期播客时也满怀欣喜地想一想你的答案，也让自己的声音被麦克阿瑟听见！

（本期封面为莫不谷使用Canva制作，经小红书和Substack听友集体投票选出）

【Timeline】（又是一期信息量巨多Shownotes很长的节目）

03:35 破除1个假问题：给你1000万你就可以不抑郁了吗，快乐欢欣有活力有渴望地生活吗？

14:00 想要为自己人生找到正确的解答，就不能在错误的答案上一路狂奔

23:00 为什么说生存危机是泥潭，而存在危机是黑洞？

38:00 听友树：如果有80万美元，我既不想要卷，也不想要创造，我只想躺

45:00 金钟罩：真相是我拿到80万美元，但我真的不知道我想做什么

51:00 莫不谷：我从霸王花身上感受到为什么很多人必须找个班来上?

58:00 霸王花：我为什么喜欢“表演”积极上进，但在行动上却常常匮乏和失败

01:08:52 莫不谷：人需要时时抉择：究竟是勇敢面对解决问题，还是糊弄生活直至崩塌断裂

01:14:00 这个世界没有真正活得金光闪闪的人，因为99%的人都在伪装

01:16:30 让我们讨论真问题：你现在每天在做的事情，是真正想做，发挥你潜能的事情吗？

01:17:20 霸王花：我没有找到真正想做的事，所以尝试去做一些帮助发挥潜能的事

01:25:00 莫不谷：我觉得每个人都需要一些心诀，面对和解决生活的难题

01:29:14 一个有效的方法和思路：如何解决总是难以下决定，容易纠结反复和懊悔的问题

01:36:44 第3个问题：到底是什么东西阻止了你没有做自己真正想做的事情？

01:41:20 霸王花：阻碍我做想做事情的根源在于内在空洞的心和外在疲乏的行动力

01:45:00 莫不谷：我从观察，分析和思考中发现的三个可能阻碍行动的原因

01:48:00 金钟罩：长期以来的恐惧驱动的行为模式，让我失去了发现热爱的能力

01:57:00 莫不谷：我曾经最恐惧的事情，和我最后发现背后真正的答案

02:02:00 一个有巨大安慰的娱乐圈八卦：人只要不自我淘汰，世界不会淘汰任何人

02:15:00 第4个问题：给你5年时间和80万奖金，你想用它们来做哪些对你来说真正重要的事情呢？

02:20:00 如何确立你真正想做事情？我从巴菲特身上学到的一个方法

02:23:27 莫不谷：为了服务我人生最根本的渴求，我已经做，正在做和未来想要做的那些事

02:42:36 抵御日常生活摄魂怪来袭的时刻：建立你的人生乐事lists

03:08:37 第5个问题：这些事情为什么之于你是重要的？目前紧迫吗？不紧迫的话你准备把它放在什么时间呢？紧迫的话你愿意牺牲当下哪些事情来去做它们呢？

03:18:55 欢迎大家来游荡者平台创作、分享，我们已经开通付费图文咨询功能：www.youdangzhe.com

【播客&文章&影视&书籍】

播客：

放学以后往期播客《莫路狂花2：如何对自己充满爱意和敬意，免于混乱逃避低活力？》

放学以后往期播客《莫路狂花今夜不设防：人如何不糊弄和痛恨自己，并找到自己的渴望呢？》

放学以后往期播客《54 我不要只做世界的承受者，我要对这个世界一顿发起！》

放学以后往期播客《44 夏威夷老友记：泪撒太平洋，笑到火山都震荡》

放学以后往期播客《52 美妙人生的关键呀，让我们一起扭一扭它》

放学以后往期播客《12 真的有人“热爱学习”吗？成为终身学习者的可能性》

放学以后往期播客《3 我们挣钱做什么？10个人的心愿清单和金钱彼岸》

岩中花述播客《S7E6 鲁豫对话钱佳楠 | 现实的异乡人，文学的安定客》《S7E3 鲁豫对话李翊云 | 有些艰难无法走出，我始终与其共处》

文章：

解锁放学以后《创作者手册：从播客开始说起》：https://afdian.com/item/ffcd59481b9411ee882652540025c377

莫不谷Newsletter文章《我们穿过河流，去上岸还是来溯溪？》《莫不谷闹学记：在4.4分和8.8分之间，究竟隔着哪道线？》《幸运鬼和理性怪？》《在世界游荡的女性9：莫不谷的滔滔生活和金龟换酒》（游荡者网站www.youdangzhe.com也可查看）

粽子文章《在焦虑重压抑郁的时候，如何建立有活力且健康的日常？》（Newsletter及游荡者网站也可查看）

影视：《乘风破浪的姐姐》；《我的解放日志》；梁海源脱口秀《坐在角落的人》；韩剧《大都市爱情法》

书籍：《空洞的心》《每周工作4小时》《活出生命的意义》《在熙，烧酒，我，还有冰箱里的蓝莓与烟》

【为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台】

游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com），注册完成后可免费阅读由莫不谷和霸王花撰写的三篇文章（Run的800种可能、语言攻略和全球签证攻略），目前游荡者平台已更新上线文章分区功能（游荡区、学习区、欢愉区和闲聊搭子区），欢迎大家注册完成后开启内容创作并在游荡者游荡愉快！找到同类！交易自由！手机端用户可把新网址添加桌面，便于日常使用。在使用新网址期间如果有任何注册、支付、退款等需求，欢迎给我们客服邮箱wanderservice2024@outlook.com发送邮件。目前，游荡者已经开通了付费咨询功能，欢迎大家登陆使用！

我们还发起了游荡者平台线上游轮活动，我们作为“导游区”成员（莫不谷、霸王花木兰，粽子、金钟罩，有时还会邀请朋友客座）将每周轮值担任船长，在国内时间每周四更新一篇【每周一游】，分享内容包括但不限于各种花花万物和生命体验的推荐和避雷！在临近周末打工人即将解放的周四，和大家一起驶向一些海域打发时间，度过无聊，对抗虚无！欢迎各位游荡者每周四定期登船！

（游荡者平台【每周一游】栏目）

【延伸信息】

永不失联Newsletter订阅链接：https://afterschool2021.substack.com/（需科 学/上 网）

为全球华人游荡者提供解决方案的平台：游荡者（www.youdangzhe.com）

联系邮箱：afterschool2021@126.com （投稿来信及合作洽谈）

同名YouTube：https://www.youtube.com/@afterschool2021

同名微信公众号：放学以后after school

小红书：游荡者的日常

欢迎并感谢大家在爱发电平台为我们的创作发电：https://afdian.com/a/afterschool

片头曲：《寄生兽》Bliss

片尾曲：《世界上仅有的花》槙原敬之

播客封面：莫不谷用Canva制作

放学以后表情包：微信表情包搜索“放学以后”，感谢萝卜特创作。

播客收听平台：

【国内】爱发电、网易云、苹果播客（请科学/上网）、喜马拉雅、汽水儿、荔枝、小宇宙、QQ音乐；

【海外】Spotify、Apple podcast、Google podcast、Snipd、Overcast、Castbox、Amazon Music、Pocket Casts、Stitcher、Radio Public、Wordpress

不知道大家还记不记得一句话，是美团老板王兴几年前说的。他说：“2019年，可能会是过去十年里最差的一年，但却是未来十年里最好的一年。” 当时，很多人听到这话，觉得有点危言耸听，有点小题大做。毕竟那时候，中国经济增长虽然慢下来了，但增长的惯性还在，大家的生活还过得去。

2019年是改革开放40周年。在那前后，国内有各种纪念活动。因为2012年后，改革开放事实上已经死亡，棺材板都钉上了钉子，只剩下埋葬，所以，民间纪念改革开放的活动，开得更像是追悼会，民间人士纪念改革开放的文章，更像是悼词。王兴老板那句话，是在这种氛围中说的。

那时候，中国经济高速发展了40年，经历了两代人和平岁月，成了世界第二大经济体。但政治气候和经济环境的变化，让商界和学术一些感觉敏锐的先知先觉，有了不详的预感。他们忧虑国家的方向——错误的方向正在把国家引入一个巨大的政治、经济泥潭。

Read more

Well, we’ve seen this before…

Lily Ottinger reports:

You’ve probably heard the recent rumors that Xi Jinping is facing the threat of imminent replacement by PLA and party elites. As a longtime observer of internal Russian politics, I’ve become desensitized to this type of speculation — rumors about Putin facing serious illness or internal overthrow first surfaced in 2012, then again in 2015, 2016, 2020, 2022, and 2023. How often has Xi gotten similar treatment? As far as I can tell, this is the third sustained instance of replacement rumors over the course of Xi’s 12-year tenure. A rundown:

September 2022: India Pumps ‘Xi Under House Arrest’

In September 2022, Premier Li Keqiang attended the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in Xi’s place. This absence was followed by a period of about 10 days where Xi didn’t appear in public, which sparked rumors that he was under house arrest and would be replaced by General Li Qiaoming 李桥铭. This coincided with mass changes to commercial flights through China, with more than 9,000 flights being cancelled on September 21st. Rumors of a coup spread quickly across Indian news media in particular, and an Indian politician with more than 10 million followers tweeted about Xi’s supposed house arrest.

Flights returned to normal by the following Monday, and Xi resumed public appearances not long after. Rather than being under house arrest, it seems Xi was observing the zero-covid quarantine requirement after traveling to Uzbekistan for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on September 16th. In December of 2022, Li Qiaoming was promoted to commander of the PLA Ground Force.

August 2024: Xi About to Die?

In August 2024, a Falun Gong-run Chinese media outlet called “Secret China” published a sensational report claiming Xi was gravely ill and that he would step down from his position as General Secretary at the annual Beidaihe leadership retreat, and only retain his position as President of China. The story alleged that party officials had decided to replace Xi with Hu Chunhua 胡春华, citing a cryptic tweet from a princeling. A YouTube video also cited in the report observed that, when Xi had met with the leaders of Vietnam, Italy, and East Timor in July 2024, the placards describing Xi’s position translated to “President of the PRC” instead of “General Secretary” or “Chairman of the Central Military Commission.”

Summer vacation came and went, and Hu Chunhua was not promoted.

May 2025 to Today — Third Time’s Probably not the Charm

This most recent round of rumors began in May, when Xi didn’t appear in public for about two weeks. Like the previous cases, rumors began with commentators in the diaspora — this time it was dissident journalist Cai Shenkun of the Falun Gong-run Epoch Times, citing an open letter detailing 28 of Xi’s policy mistakes and calling for his resignation that was allegedly emailed to Cai in December 2024.

The rumors gained momentum after Li Qiang attended the BRICS summit in Xi’s place on July 6th. Another parallel with previous rumors is that Indian news outlets like the Hindustan Times have been quick to disseminate this speculation for clicks. Yao Cheng, a former lieutenant colonel in the PLA Navy living in exile, alleges that Xi will be forced to retire at the 21st National Congress in October 2027 — so the rumors will probably stick around until then.

Bill is Right

has an excellent riff on the rumors on his latest Sharp China podcast. I (Jordan) couldn’t agree more.

Whatever we talk about here, just remember that when you get into early August and someone writes a story saying Xi has disappeared, it happens every year at this time.

What I will say is, first, we don't know. Chinese elite politics is a black box, so we cannot say with 100% confidence that nothing is going on. That's my initial caveat. However, when you look at the round of rumors and the way I approach them—this is something I've done in my newsletter for a long time.

My master's was in looking at Chinese politics. My master's advisor was at the time one of the US government's top experts on Chinese politics (now retired). I talk to lots of people who spend time focusing on elite Chinese politics. People get things wrong, but I do feel comfortable expressing opinions in this area more than in other areas.

When you see a rumor that Xi is in trouble, there are a few things you should ask. First, what is that being based on? Some of these reports were based on there being no Politburo meeting in May, so therefore Xi is in trouble. Someone says that to you without mentioning that there was also no Politburo meeting announced in May 2023. Actually, during this Party Congress, the number of monthly Politburo meetings that have been missed or not announced is much higher than in previous Party Congresses. If they don't give you that caveat, it tells me they're not actually doing the work of trying to see what is anomalous and what is not.

If someone says Xi Jinping disappeared for 13 days in May and that's a big problem, without saying that he has disappeared for similar periods previously—not around that early August break, but in other parts of the year—it's strange. We don't know why, but it has happened before and then he came back. Again, that's not evidence there is a problem.

Third, if somebody says Xi Jinping looks like he's being mentioned less in People's Daily or state media, that is patently not true. Demonstrably untrue. [See the China Media Project’s coverage on this topic.] Someone who says that is not doing the work. If someone cites a Twitter account or YouTube account, another red flag. That's a problem without understanding their track record of predictions and without checking whether they're linked to Falun Gong accounts. There are dozens of Falun Gong accounts spouting crap about all sorts of things, especially Chinese politics.

For example, there was an op-ed in The Spectator by a professor of Japanese history. The Spectator article, like the New York Post article, got a lot of traction. The guy cited some of the things I talked about without any background, then he cited accounts that were clearly Falun Gong accounts. But people read this—"Oh, it's The Spectator. Oh, it's the New York Post. It must be real." It cycles up and gets amplified.

I understand why a lot of people want to believe it's true. Hopium is a strong drug. The idea that different leadership—this mythical reformer—might come in, like the alleged reformer Wang Yang (poor Wang, he's retired). He's probably not happy that all these rumors about him taking over from Xi keep circulating during his retirement. The idea that Wang Yang is somehow this fantasy that people keep having—that there's just a reformer over there somewhere. As a friend of mine who worked on this stuff for a long time in the government said, "People are always looking for someone to mail the cake to."

I understand why people want to believe this, because the idea that they'll come in and fix the economy, maybe change the approach to Russia, maybe change the approach to trade—it's much easier to hope that's happening than to deal with the reality.

The actuarial tables give Xi a 3% chance of dying or becoming incapacitated this year, and the premium for holding a position for six months on polymarket is around 4%. Even a 2% chance of a coup seems high to me.

For Actual Insight into Xi

Check out our interview with Joseph Torigian on his monumental scholarly achievement: The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade. Joseph’s goal, in his own words, was to “shine as much light into the darkness of the past as possible” to understand the nature of authoritarian politics, and he succeeds beyond my wildest expectations.

This biography gives me a feel for Chinese politics that I honestly thought I’d never have. It does an incredible job of digging deep to shed light on some of the most consequential moments in CCP history, as well as conveying what it was like to live as a senior official under Mao and Deng. Reading it was a powerful experience at both an intellectual and human level.

We get memorable vignettes, like 15-year-old Xi Zhongxun attempting to assassinate a teacher, or General Peng Dehuai using his shoe to silence Xi Zhongxun’s snoring in their shared bunk.

In this interview, we discuss:

• What we can learn about authoritarianism, the CCP, and China’s future from studying Xi’s father,

• Torigian’s methodology for uncovering hidden Party history,

• How the Party became an existential source of meaning, and how it weaponized suffering to paradoxically deepen political loyalty,

• The interplay of family, love, and career under the all-encompassing shadow of the Party,

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Transcript here if you prefer!

‘Containing Xi’, or refining party rule?

What does the latest politburo meeting reveal about Chinese politics?

Dr. is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Glasgow. This piece was originally posted by the Council on Geostrategy.

The Investigator | No. 15/2025

New regulations on central decision making bodies

Speculation about the June politburo meeting readout is feeding rumours of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s ‘weakening’ hold on power. The readout announced that the politburo had reviewed new ‘Regulations on Party Centre Decision Making, Discussion and Coordinating Body Work’ [‘党中央决策议事协调机构工作条例’].

This speculation hangs on two ideas. The wilder of the two is that some elusive group of actors has decided to establish a new body above Xi. This is based on a misreading of the first line of the readout – a boilerplate introduction to the topic at hand, not a declaration of a new power centre being established. The second is that these regulations are designed to rein in Xi’s power by placing it under institutionalised constraint.

Both readings ignore basic facts and two ongoing, well-documented trends: centralised CCP decision making nudging out the state, and ‘rule-based rule of the party’ [‘依规治党’]. Linking the readout to speculation about Xi’s ‘decline’ misses an opportunity to examine the regulations’ significance for the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) evolving political system. While analysis of Xi’s impact on the system rightly points to power ‘centralisation’ and ‘personalisation’, less is known about how the CCP and its leader use power once it has been centralised. The regulations – not yet released – are likely part of the party centre’s ongoing task of modifying institutions to help it put centralised power into action.

To be clear, the politburo meeting readout contains nothing shocking. The party centre has long been planning to formulate the regulations in question. We know this because they were mentioned in April 2023’s Central Intra-Party Regulations Formulation Work Plan Outline (2023-2027) (hereinafter ‘Party Regulations Formulation Outline’).

What is ‘centralised power’ without rules to use it?

These planned regulations are part of Xi’s longstanding pet project to govern the CCP and the PRC by rules – his macro-plan combines ‘rule-based rule of the party’ and ‘law-based rule of the country.’ On coming to power, Xi spoke of the party’s need for rules to rein in the party’s excesses and avoid the existential threat of a breakdown in the party-people relationship, and he has been making rules ever since.

Xi has made rules about making rules – stipulating how party regulations can be formulated and by whom – and has made rules to put his fellow party members’ authority ‘in a cage’ [‘把权力关在笼子里’]. He has used rules to his advantage, giving himself maximum flexibility for pushing through decisions and to remould the party’s internal workings, creating new incentive structures, and making himself the ‘core’ with whom all must ‘align.’ He has used rules for everything; from dictating how many dishes cadres may serve when entertaining to delineating party powers to manipulate the state.

Xi takes rules, and their use for creating governance mechanisms, seriously. He regards them as integral to ‘modernising’ Chinese governance. In 2019, a Central Committee Plenum document resolved to ‘better translate China’s institutional strengths into national governance efficacy.’ The document called for ‘strengthening the role’ of the bodies involved in the controversial politburo readout, improving mechanisms for ensuring party centre decisions are implemented and ‘strictly enforcing’ the instruction requesting and reporting system – a little-discussed system of longstanding importance to the party’s internal workings which is discussed later in this article.

Xi has used rules not only to maximise his concentration of power, but also to facilitate its use. The Central Military Commission ‘Chairman in Charge’ system [‘中央军委主席负责制’] is a case in point. While analysts stress Xi’s being ‘in charge’ – and his ultimate authority to make decisions – his attempt to create a whole set of rules and mechanisms to facilitate this decision-making role go under the radar. For instance, the ‘three mechanisms’ developed through intra-party rules seek to serve the Chairman’s decision making capabilities.

What are Party Centre DDC bodies?

Party Centre Decision Making, Discussion and Coordination bodies (DDC bodies) form a level of authority which shifts major decision making upwards, away from state institutions. Some were originally ‘Leadership Small Groups’ transformed into commissions under the 2018 institutional reform. Their upgrade sought to ‘strengthen the Party Centre’s centralised, unified leadership over major work.’ Others, such as the Central Science and Technology Commission (CSTC), were established directly as commissions.

Though researchers refer to the new regulations as the ‘regulations on the Work of the Party Central Committees [DDC bodies]’, the document’s official title uses ‘Party Centre’ [‘党中央’], not ‘Central Committee’ [‘中央委员会’]. This reflects the nature of Party Centre DDC bodies: they are beholden to the 24 men of the politburo or the seven men of its Standing Committee (PBSC) and not to the larger Central Committee. Xi himself, as General Secretary, has direct control over the topics of DDC body meetings, either deciding on, or giving the go-ahead to, a meeting.

On the functions of Party Centre DDC bodies, the language from the June politburo readout is almost verbatim that of the aforementioned Party Regulations Formulation Outline. The Outline stated that such regulations are needed to help DDC bodies fulfil their functions of: ‘top-level design, choreographing and coordinating, integrated promotion, and monitoring and urging implementation’ [‘顶层设计, 统筹协调, 整体推进, 督促落实’] of major work. This is precisely the language used in the 2020 Central Committee Work Regulations, which stipulate the Central Committee’s power to create DDC bodies. The politburo readout uses the same ‘4x4’ character expression. This language is also used for the specific DDC bodies. The 2023 institutional reform plan describes the then-new Central Finance Commission’s functions in exactly the same way. The PRC Law on Foreign Relations grants the same functions to the Central Foreign Affairs Commission.

The new regulations will complement or adjust existing rules. Said rules themselves reveal something of these elusive power centres’ workings. Xi’s ten-year rule making spree has reinvigorated the Instruction Requesting and Reporting system [‘请示报告制度’] (IRR). The IRR lets lower ranking bodies request instructions from senior organisations and report back up on implementation. It enables party entities to respond to eventualities on the ground in their locality or policy field, although it can also create logjams.

At least since 2019, DDC bodies – and their leaders individually – have been permitted to play the role of IRR responders. This may be a way of delegating party centre authority while helping facilitate calibration of policies with central requirements. It could also help with the apparent spike in IRR requests resulting from a decade of relentless campaigns, pervasive punishments and strict demands for alignment with party centre policy, which has left officials ‘lying flat’ or looking for other ways to avoid culpability. DDC bodies have been ordered to create detailed and specific rules for implementing IRR in their own fields. This could amount to substantive power delegation to the heads of DDC bodies’ implementing offices.

The respective arrangements of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission (CFAC) and the CSTC serve as useful discussion points. Wang Yi, CFAC Office Head, holds triple roles, also serving as a politburo member and Minister of Foreign Affairs. This links CFAC decisions directly to the principal state implementing agency. With Wang heading both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the CFAC Office, he can implement CFAC decisions through both the MFA and through coordinated action with other CFAC member ministries. Wang’s position as CFAC Office Head may be an authoritative lever to press other agencies to coordinate with the MFA. While the CFAC-MFA setup may be an outlier (due to the demise of Qin Gang, Wang’s predecessor), the CSTC’s arrangements are similar. Yin Hejun, Minister of Science and Technology (and Central Committee member), reportedly doubles up as CSTC Office Head, allowing CSTC decisions to flow directly to the Ministry of Science and Technology and giving Yin the lever of CSTC Office Head to help coordinate the implementation of CSTC decisions.

Xi ‘in decline’ or delegated powers being refined?

Returning to the politburo meeting readout, considering the powerful role of DDC Office Heads it is unsurprising that regulations should require DDC bodies to ‘coordinate, not stand in for, and perform as required, not overstep’ [‘统筹不代替、到位不越位’]. While speculation sees this as a ‘direct criticism of Xi’, it is more likely that the relevant provision seeks to regulate the power delegated by the Party Centre. Notably, Xi has himself used the expression in relation to the Central Comprehensive Law-based-rule Commission.

Overlooking subnational practice misses a chance to reflect on assumptions. Countering the notion that, from the politburo readout, ‘some language could reasonably be read as Xi being shunted aside’, provincial-level party committees are repeating that very same language in a promise to do better. Shanxi, Chongqing and Xinjiang, for example, declared that they will ‘study the spirit’ of Xi’s ‘important [politburo meeting] speech’ and improve the practices of their subnational DDC bodies. They will produce ‘realistic and effective policy measures’ [‘切合实际、行之有效的政策举措’] – a line also in the politburo meeting readout – and better regulate DDC body establishment and operation under their jurisdiction to ‘ensure implementation of Party Centre decisions.’ Provincial-level party committees have the power to make intra-party regulations. It appears communications about the Party Centre Regulations are prompting them to follow suit and make implementing documents to tighten up on local DDC body practice.

The regulations are likely less a signal of Xi’s waning star and more a run-of-the-mill move to hammer out the details of how the CCP uses the power it has centralised under Xi’s first two and a half terms. It may be that the Party Centre (or members thereof) will attempt to have the regulations’ content incorporated into the Party Charter at the 21st National Party Congress in 2027. This would give the CCP ‘constitutional’ credibility to the use of DDC bodies in governance, consolidating their place in the New Era Party bureaucracy.

Read more

Joseph Torigian’s The Party’s Interest Comes First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping is a monumental scholarly achievement — easily a contender for one of the best China books of the decade. Joseph’s goal, in his own words, was to “shine as much light into the darkness of the past as possible” to understand the nature of authoritarian politics, and he succeeds beyond my wildest expectations.

This biography gives me a feel for Chinese politics that I honestly thought I’d never have. It does an incredible job of digging deep to shed light on some of the most consequential moments in CCP history, as well as conveying what it was like to live as a senior official under Mao and Deng. Reading it was a powerful experience at both an intellectual and human level.

We get memorable vignettes, like 15-year-old Xi Zhongxun attempting to assassinate a teacher, or General Peng Dehuai using his shoe to silence Xi Zhongxun’s snoring in their shared bunk.

In this interview, we discuss:

• What we can learn about authoritarianism, the CCP, and China’s future from studying Xi’s father,

• Torigian’s methodology for uncovering hidden Party history,

• How the Party became an existential source of meaning, and how it weaponized suffering to paradoxically deepen political loyalty,

• The arc of Xi Zhongxun’s life — from a young revolutionary to key advocate of reform — and his role during Tiananmen,

• The interplay of family, love, and career under the all-encompassing shadow of the Party,

• The role of “Surrogate fathers” and patronage in navigating political ascent,

• How literature shaped China’s early revolutionaries, and even impacted the Party as we know it today.

Co-hosting today is Jon Sine, former ChinaTalk intern.

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

From Teenage Assassin to Tiananmen

Jordan Schneider: Joseph, how do you define the purpose of this book?

Joseph Torigian: There is inherent value in going to the past and telling stories about these people’s lives, especially because they suffered so much. Second, this book helps people understand authoritarian politics and how the party works, in a way that gives us special insight into Xi Jinping. Finally, the book allows you to draw your own conclusions in many ways.

One of the themes that emerges from the book is how much suffering people in the party experienced and how they brought different meanings to it. The party imposes one interpretation on the past, but what I wanted to do with my book is facilitate multiple different interpretations for people who want to read it closely.

Jordan Schneider: Generally, when people read biographies of major political figures, there’s a bias in authors to tie bows around the narrative and make some overwhelming moral judgment about whether their decisions were right or wrong, and whether this person was morally upright or lacking in how they behaved and their impact on the world.

Remarkably, this book stops before going there. This man, whose life was incredibly gray, complex, and shaded from many different dimensions, could have been interpreted through party narratives or through the lens of liberal outside reformers projecting their ideas onto him. As you were going through his life and trying to portray what you learned and discovered to your audience, how did you think about your role as the author?

Joseph Torigian: I wanted the evidence to lead me in the direction of what was most interesting about his life. I didn’t feel there was a missing part of the literature that needed to be explored. I just wanted to do justice to his life in a way that would allow people to make their own judgments. As you see in the book, people in his own life — and Xi Zhongxun himself — sometimes found it unclear which morality was most relevant to make a particular decision.

Narrative certainly plays a role in the book. I wanted to make people feel just how dramatic, exciting, and electric it was to be a member of this organization, especially in the times and places where Xi Zhongxun found himself. I wanted people to draw broader lessons about how the party worked.

But I also didn’t want to allow the need for it all to come together or for there to be a single argument to do violence to the evidence. As I said before, I wanted people to be able to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of his life. Certainly I needed to bring an interpretive lens and my own analysis because facts don’t speak for themselves. Even choosing which evidence to include in the book required some level of reflection and thought. In many ways, a lot of the conclusions are obvious, but I don’t spell them out because they’re obvious. Allowing people to think about the most striking parts of his life on their own is a better approach.

Jordan Schneider: Before we get too meta, I think it’s important to ground folks. Generally, when you read a political biography, it’s about the number one leader, maybe the number two. Xi Zhongxun, though he was not quite at that level, lived one of the most incredible lives I’ve ever engaged with in book format. Joseph, can you give us an introduction to the arc of this man’s life?

Joseph Torigian: He grew up in Shaanxi province, which was a fascinating place because his home village was near Xi’an, where the first unified state was forged by Qin Shi Huang, and dynasties had ruled from there for millennia. But by the time he was born, two years after the Qing collapsed, it had fallen into banditry, war, famine, and poverty. It was a place of extremes.

He’s trying to figure out a way to address these wrenching problems facing society — feudalism, imperialist encroachment. He’s attracted to the party, but he doesn’t really understand it well. In fact, he’s able to read this revolutionary literature because the Nationalists and the Communists are still getting along. But of course, that all changed in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek betrayed the Communists and massacred them.

It’s in this milieu of violence that Xi Zhongxun is told to kill an academic administrator. He fails, instead getting a bunch of other teachers sick. He goes to prison and joins the party while incarcerated.

Jordan Schneider: At nineteen?

Joseph Torigian: Fifteen. He was fifteen years old. He became a founding member — although not one of the most important ones — of the base area in the northwest, which is where the Long March concludes. If it weren’t for that base area there, Mao Zedong and the other members of the Central Leadership would have needed to move even farther away from the interior Chinese areas.

He works in these fascinating places on the border of the base area, where he has to think about the United Front and manage relations with the Nationalists. They’re not at war with the Nationalists, but they’re not at peace either. It’s a very complicated liminal world he finds himself in.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was head of the Northwest Bureau, which is a giant expanse of Chinese territory that includes not just Han areas, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hui. He was brought to the capital and worked as Minister of Propaganda. There, he was a witness to several power struggles — the target of the first great purge of the People’s Republic of China is a man named Gao Gang, who was also a Northwesterner quite close to Xi Zhongxun.

Xi Zhongxun worked for Zhou Enlai, the famous premier who ran the government at the State Council. Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 because of a novel. He spent 16 years in the political wilderness facing incarceration, humiliation, and exile.

When he went back to work, it was in Guangdong province, where the failures of the revolution are perhaps most obvious. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing from the Communist mainland to capitalist Hong Kong. He sees with his own eyes just how developed things are right across the river.

Then he went back to Beijing to work on the Secretariat, managing its daily affairs. He’s the right-hand man to Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, the general secretary of the party. He has a fascinating set of tasks — he spends about 70% of his time on the United Front, returning to ethnic politics. But he also looks at Beijing’s relations with foreign leftist, revolutionary, and communist parties.

He witnessed this difficult relationship between Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping, which mirrored Zhou Enlai’s relationship with Mao Zedong. It all comes together in June 1989 when Xi Zhongxun faces the question of how he’s going to react to these student protests. Ultimately, he goes along with the crackdown, even though it seems he had very intense doubts and skepticism about using violence to resolve the crisis.

He spent much of his later years in the south, only rarely returning to Beijing. It’s quite a dramatic life — marked in particular by persecution by his own party. On many occasions, the party hurt people close to him or forced him to betray people close to him. One of the central themes that emerges is how he balances his own thoughts, emotions, and feelings with a party to which he is totally loyal, but which often does things that are deeply, deeply distressing to him.

Jordan Schneider: This book was especially engaging because you were able to find sources that really brought you into all these moments in his life. They also gave you a sense of his interior monologue and psychology at all these moments of incredible stakes, trial, and national as well as personal drama.

You take us on this arc from this 15-year-old who tries to kill his teacher all the way through to Tiananmen Square, including the family life and the experience of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and reform and opening. But it’s all through this man who is incredibly faithful but also scarred in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend as a coddled person who grew up in America over the past 30 years. This book is a tremendous accomplishment.

Jon Sine: You open the book saying that Xi Zhongxun can fill one of three roles at least — his legend in the party, the role of the father to Xi Jinping, and the role that you take him as, which is a lens to party history. Could you explain how this book evolved, and why you chose to focus on Xi Zhongxun? I’m sure you’ve experienced the immediate reaction from many readers is, “How does this explain Xi Jinping?” when the thrust of the book is how Xi Zhongxun illuminates party history through the 20th century. We’d love to hear more about that.

Joseph Torigian: The book was kind of an accident, actually. I was asked to participate in an edited issue of an academic journal and was asked to write about Xi Jinping. I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then I decided that the best way would be through a historical lens. I envisioned an article that was half about Xi Zhongxun and half about Xi Jinping as a young person.

I had just finished a book on elite party history, and that had been a training session on how to do it, find sources, and interpret them. As I started working on it, I realized there were many more sources than I had envisioned, even though I had just finished this other project. But also that Xi Zhongxun was an interesting person, not just because he was the father of Xi Jinping, but precisely as you said — he is someone whose life illuminates in powerful ways party history and party culture. His life is really a microcosm of the party in the 20th century.

With the book, it’s certainly the case that people are reading it because of Xi Jinping, and I’m glad people are reading it. I’m not going to be nitpicky about what reason they pick up the book. But ultimately, it says two things about Xi Jinping.

One is that it says a lot about the party and how the party works, and how every leader has tried to manage dilemmas that have been with it from the beginning. These are dilemmas that can be managed, not problems that can be solved. Xi Jinping is bringing his own approach, and we can understand how he’s bringing that approach because party history gives us the context. That’s the clearest line between the book and Xi Jinping.

But of course, there’s another line which is psychological. Here, we need to be careful because even Xi Jinping’s siblings drew very different lessons from the meaning of their father’s life. Xi Jinping, like his father, is a product of multiple influences. He’s someone who changes his mind, someone who reacts often to the peculiarities of his situation as opposed to some dogmatic worldview that always makes him do the same thing.

I hope my book is one tool in a box of tools that will be useful as we think about contemporary China. I didn’t write the book so that people will know what he’s going to do during the tariff war, although these Taiwanese talk show hosts quite loudly thought that my book might be relevant in that regard. That might be true to some extent. But the real value of the book is to take a step back and just get a general sense of the party and the milieu from which Xi Jinping emerged.

The Politics of Suffering

Jordan Schneider: There’s a very striking quote you have at the end of your book from Xi Jinping, where he wrote a letter to his father on his 88th birthday. I guess he couldn’t visit because everyone in the party is too busy to be at their kids’ births and parents’ birthdays —

Joseph Torigian: The party’s interest comes first, Jordan.

Jordan Schneider: Exactly. But the line that stuck out to me was him saying, despite the Cultural Revolution, “I always stubbornly believed that my father was a great hero and that he was a father most worthy of feeling proud of.”

The central question in Xi Zhongxun’s life, as well as Xi Jinping’s life, is, “Why are you sticking with these guys?” The party was treating them terribly while they were giving their lives to this organization. On several occasions, the lesson seemed to be that the party does not care about you and will chew you up and spit you out in ways that are illogical and detrimental both for yourself and for the country.

But you write this line explaining it:

“Some may wonder why Xi Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father. But perhaps the better question is how could Xi Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?”

That’s the central psychological question we explore over these 500 pages — how does this man relate to this organization, to which he has devoted his life, but is riddled with problems? What did the party mean to Xi Zhongxun?

Joseph Torigian: The party was the source of meaning in his life. It was the source of purpose. It was salvation. It was a place where a young boy growing up in a society wrecked by turmoil found an answer to solving that chaos. This was someone who didn’t really understand the intricacies of Das Kapital, but believed that only an organization as powerful as the Chinese Communist Party could respond to the challenges China was facing. It was the only way of organizing society that would allow China to return to its rightful place in the world and defeat the imperialists, the warlords, and all these other people who had brought China to the brink of collapse.

Sometimes when you join an organization like this, you don’t always fully understand what it’s going to be, but once you’re in it, it also changes you. You understand the principle of the organization, but then the organization has all these methods for changing your very soul. That’s not the language I’m using — it’s the language the Communists used. You have self-criticism, you have study sessions.

If you believe you are participating in a grand adventure, where you are a leading figure in a world historical force that is inevitable, that is a really exciting place to be. Also, think for a moment that you keep seeing the party failing over and over again, and then suddenly one particular person emerges in the form of Mao Zedong, who seems to finally have a way of getting it right. He takes this ragtag group of revolutionaries who had nearly been destroyed on many occasions and forges a new nation.

For Xi Zhongxun to reject someone like that would be rejecting his own self. When the party persecuted him, it didn’t turn him away from the party. It motivated him to ask, “How do I win back the party’s trust? How do I show that I’m better than other people? How do I show that, actually, precisely because I am going through this torment and still return to it, I am even more dedicated than other people who didn’t have to suffer?”

You see other people grumbling about the party, and Xi Zhongxun would say, “Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t go through this.” It was almost like a badge of honor that he could weaponize — this politics of suffering, of who went through the worst experiences, and that gives you political capital within the party. It’s an interesting way to think about life, but it does raise the question — what kind of suffering leads to dedication and what leads to alienation? This is really a fundamental question or puzzle.

Xi Zhongxun admitted that during the Cultural Revolution, he went through a period of doubt. But Xi Zhongxun says precisely because he wasn’t sure for a little while and nevertheless returned to the cause of the party, therefore his dedication is totally unshakable and even more powerful than someone who didn’t go through that experience.

That also raises a question for young people in China today: If you want them to eat bitterness, how do you do that without turning them away from the cause entirely? That’s a philosophical question in some ways, and it’s one that Xi Jinping thinks about all the time—something that keeps him up at night, I’m sure. It’s also at the very heart of the question of the future of the People’s Republic of China: whether or not they get that right.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, there was this very evocative moment with Xi Zhongxun towards the end of his life. In the 80s, during this spiritual pollution campaign, all these old revolutionaries were excited for the future but also worried that the youth were going soft and didn’t understand. One of his answers was that they just needed the old comrades to go into the high schools and tell their stories — like the astronaut showing up in middle school and telling you how cool space is.

Joseph Torigian: Yeah. He talks about them as flowers in a hothouse garden, right? They need to go out into the real world so they can survive in the real world. Interestingly enough, he thinks that young people who went through the Cultural Revolution might be a good group of successors because they underwent these terrible experiences.

Of course, the Cultural Revolution was largely about succession issues at the very top and at the very bottom — getting rid of Liu Shaoqi, the revisionist who proved to be unsuitable to the task, but also toughening young people who had been growing up in the privilege of youth in a socialist nation. Many of those youth actually did go through a period of disillusionment. They wanted to have fun, they wanted to study overseas, they wanted to make money.

Xi Zhongxun consciously contrasted himself with those other youth, and he saw a lot of danger in this spiritual crisis that many young people in China found themselves in during the 1980s. Of course, this was one of the roots of what happened in 1989.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, I mean, it is a religious attachment. There’s no other word to describe what someone like Xi Zhongxun or Xi Jinping has to the party. You have these little trials of faith, right?

The decision to go left or go right from Xi Zhongxun, as compared to all the other princelings who are having fun in Hong Kong and driving cars or whatnot. A wide swath of humanity would get disillusioned from the fact that you have all these people you idolize turn on you and say you’re a capitalist roader and making leftist deviations and being anti-party and whatnot.

The emotional effort to harmonize whatever you’ve seen and experienced and look back at that time in the wilderness from 1962 to 1978 — not as these people stealing 20 years of my life, but actually as a forging event that is making me a better party cadre, more well-honed to serve the people — requires some kind of deep spiritual belief. Even something as catastrophic as watching this party starve tens of millions of people or turn the country upside down in a Cultural Revolution is not able to shake it.

Joseph Torigian: We should remember though that even though he had this idealism, this conviction, these were not easy experiences to live through and he suffered. It was difficult for him to understand why this was happening to him. Part of it was this sense that the party was still the best future for China. But part of it was utilitarian, right? The sense that if we are going to move forward, we can’t think about the past too much.

There’s both an idealistic sense, but also this idea that if we are too reflective, if we’re too critical of the party, if we go too far, then we’re going to shake the whole house of cards and it’s going to come down with us. That was a central puzzle for the 1980s: how do we justify moving in any direction but still maintain this sense of faith even as we can’t even say what communism really is because we’re groping as we try to figure out a new direction?

That was the reason why there were so many zigs and zags in the 1980s. That was the shoal that Hu Yaobang crashed on. You could understand in theory how you could integrate reform with conservative principles because you needed to have stability to reform and you needed to have reform to have stability. But as Hu Yaobang said in his self-criticism, even though in theory that makes sense, practically it’s not easy and you need a lot of political skill. His inability to do that was one of the reasons that Deng Xiaoping scapegoated him.

Of course, Xi Zhongxun is this very close associate of Hu Yaobang and felt very strongly about that, even though he put the party’s interests first and went along even with Deng’s persecution of this very close associate of his.

Jon Sine: You cite Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government several times, primarily for its generational analysis and its examination of how faith erodes over time. But Slezkine’s central thesis is that the old Bolsheviks functioned essentially as a millenarian sect. You don’t use much of that religious language in your book, but I’m curious whether you see similar parallels. As someone who studies both Soviet and Chinese history, what similarities and differences do you observe between the old Bolsheviks and these Chinese revolutionaries?

Joseph Torigian: Culturally, they’re very similar. Xi Zhongxun, on his very first trip overseas, goes to Russia and meets these sinologists. He talks about how he loves reading a Russian novel, What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky. Of course, it has this very famous character, Rakhmetov, a professional revolutionary who would sleep on a bed of nails to inculcate his revolutionary élan. Xi Zhongxun said he wanted to mimic this person and walk around in the wind, in the rain, in the snow, and sleep on a hot kang stone bed with his shirt off. In that sense, there are some very powerful similarities.

Just like during the terror in the Soviet Union, people were sent to their execution yelling “Long live Stalin!” During the Cultural Revolution, these old revolutionaries had no idea what Mao wanted, didn’t understand what Mao wanted, and were going through intense physical and emotional torment. For them, the problem wasn’t Mao — it was that they weren’t keeping up with Mao. It was that they didn’t understand Mao. They were looking into themselves for the problem. They weren’t looking at Mao for the problem. That’s how they thought about the world.

More broadly speaking, what’s interesting too is sometimes when I give this talk, a person will come up to me and say, “You know, I was raised in a faith tradition. I went to Catholic school. A lot of what you’re saying, it’s not that unfamiliar.” Seeing meaning in suffering, redemption in suffering — it’s a universal thing.

Now, whether you call it a religion or not, or how similar these phenomena are, that’s a big discussion. Certainly, the contexts are very different. Class struggle is a message of violence. The gospel is a message of love. The gospel is also a message of individual conscience, while the party’s message is that conscience is the party’s conscience.

I don’t want to essentialize similarities or differences, but at the very least, even though many of the themes we’re discussing today seem very foreign to us, I think with radical empathy, it’s not impossible to understand these lives, and we should try to understand these lives. We should never underestimate how hard it is. We should never think that it’s easy to appreciate how culturally dissimilar or unique these situations can be, but nevertheless we’re all part of the human condition.

Jordan Schneider: I also think that one level down, at a tactical level, you see a lot of parallels in the moves that the church uses and the moves that the party uses. This whole confession, self-criticism thing, which is a central part of these guys’ lives, is this introspection and these doctrinal fights of who has the right line. Are we doing this right? The importance of words is just a really remarkable thing — they’re arguing about phrases and spending days and days trying to get the idea right, which is something that’s really important for religion and not really important for a lot of other parts of life. But it was literally life and death for these folks a lot of times.

Joseph Torigian: That’s one of the other ironies of this book. One of the communities in China that Xi Zhongxun was tasked with managing in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s was Catholics. He sees Catholics as the biggest problem for the party, partly because they’re in communion with the Pope and Xi Zhongxun sees the Pope as a tool of imperialism. But they’re also hierarchical, they’re very motivated, they’re very idealistic. They also have these texts that need to be interpreted. It’s not surprising that they have a very interesting collision both in the 50s and the 1980s, which people can read about in the book.

Jordan Schneider: But the Catholics figured out succession in a way that maybe the party hasn’t. Jon…

“Eating Sawdust” 吃木屑

Jon Sine: Let’s talk about the art and science of putting together a book like this, because I think a lot of people have a perception, maybe a misperception, that the regime today is hiding everything, that if you go to the government sources, sanctioned sources, you can’t really rely on them. But when you have the background that you do, there are things that you can pull from them and you can triangulate something — I think you call it “a mosaic.” There are about 2,000 endnotes in this book, and I know that you’ve probably had to cut quite a bit.

Joseph Torigian: A lot.

Jon Sine: Can you speak on the art and the science behind putting this together?

Joseph Torigian: Well, it wasn’t easy. We’ve talked a lot about ideals and conviction, and for Xi Jinping to achieve that, you need to have a single view of history. Xi Jinping was a surprise to a lot of people, but one of the first signs that he wasn’t going to be a reformer like people thought his father was came when he gave the speech about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said one of the reasons they collapsed is they lost control of their history, and nobody took it seriously anymore.

If you want people to think that the party is an inevitability, that it just goes from one triumph to another, the more you talk about its dark past, the more dangerous that is for party rule. He has this term “historical nihilism” that he uses to describe people who talk about the party’s mistakes too much. For someone with that view to write about their father is certainly something that is challenging.

I don’t want to say that my book is the final verdict on Xi Zhongxun’s life. It really is just the latest draft. Whether or not it’s a meaningful draft has to do with whether or not there are enough new sources since the last person took a look and whether or not you’re doing enough justice to the sources that are available.

The question becomes: what are those sources? I don’t really think in terms of good and bad evidence. I think in terms of getting as much evidence as possible and then parsing it and then using it in different ways as that piece of evidence demands. You can’t just go to one archive and collect the materials and then write it up. You really need to have a detective sensibility. You need to be sensitive to possibility and limitation. You need to have a capacity for tedium.

There’s this expression “eating sawdust,” that China watchershands have used, becausewhere you need to eat a lot to get any protein. I’d probably say 99.99999% of everything I read is totally useless. But when I do find something that is really useful, it’s very, very exciting.

I was able to get some primary sources, of course. For a variety of reasons, a lot of documents or internally circulated material have become available at US institutions, as you saw in the book. Some very interesting document collections were also published in Hong Kong, as well as memoirs and party history written by insiders who had access to a lot of evidence. I did a lot of interviews for the book. I used a lot of material published in the mainland. There were these party history journals that were really pushing the envelope for a very long time that included subjects that were very sensitive — the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward.

I use official sources as well. That might strike people as surprising, but they are absolutely essential. There are cases where they changed the literal words that people said, but they’re quite rare. More often the problems are what they don’t include. But what that means is that you can treat what they do include as a hypothesis for what happened, at the very least. Then you look for other sources to back it up. It sensitizes you to things you might want to look at. Or, you use this phrase ’mosaic theory’ — they reveal a piece of evidence, unaware that I can connect it with all these other pieces of material.

The other thing I did was to make a list of every time Xi Zhongxun met with a foreigner. Then I went to speak to that foreigner, or I went to their archives, which are open. That allowed me to tell a story not just about Beijing’s relations with global communism, which I think is a very meaningful part of the book, a very significant part of the book, but even to get his understanding of Tibet, right? I interviewed the Dalai Lama. I was able to get these Tibetan language transcripts of negotiations between Dharamsala and Xi Zhongxun in Beijing and have them translated into English so I could use them in the book.

If we are taking these issues, these questions, these subjects with the seriousness they deserve — and because in a way it is a matter of life and death, right? I mean, people are dying and we’re writing about why these people are dying — we should feel a sense of moral obligation to do everything we can to get these stories right. I certainly didn’t in this book, as I say in the acknowledgments. I’m sure that in some cases somebody else will come and tell me I got something wrong, but I’m very open to that. I hope people will tell me.

I’m hoping my book will lead to further questions and other avenues for research because the world files its information very miscellaneously, which means that people may figure out that there was something I didn’t look at because I didn’t think of it. If there weren’t so many people who knew what I was working on, who said, “Oh, by the way, I stumbled onto this.”You never know what tiny, tiny breakthrough then leads to huge breakthroughs. That happened so many times in my book that there was some complete stroke of luck where I was looking at something completely different, or I was going for a long walk and I said, “You know, maybe I should go back and reread this.” Then you reread it and then it has a new meaning that wasn’t there before.

For example, the Li Rui Diaries. Li Rui (李锐) was a secretary to Mao Zedong. He was working for the Organization Department in the eighties, knew Xi Zhongxun very well, was the senior pro-reform constitutionalist comrade in Beijing during the 2000s and 2010s. His diaries are available at the Hoover Archive. Now they’re extraordinarily hard to use because it’s a diary. There’s a lot in there that’s wrong because he would write down rumors, and he wrote a lot in shorthand, which I couldn’t understand at all the first time I read it. But when you read other stuff, you go back, even if it’s just a few characters, and suddenly it has this huge meaning that was totally invisible to you the first time that you looked at it.

Jordan Schneider: For instance?

Joseph Torigian: One example was a curious incident in the 1980s where there was a debate about how to think about princelings and how to promote princelings, especially the ones that had engaged in really brutal violence as the so-called old Red Guards in the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Somebody wrote a letter and it was immediately approved by Chen Yun. It raised these questions about whether or not the whole thing had been planned ahead of time in the first place.

I saw the names had been mentioned in a conversation between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui, and I wasn’t quite sure what that was all about. But I read a memoir written by the person who knew about this letter and then suddenly, because I knew that background, this very brief discussion between Xi Zhongxun and Li Rui that Li Rui didn’t include a lot of information about because it was his own diaries — suddenly I knew what Xi Zhongxun thought about this very interesting moment. That would be one example.

Jordan Schneider: That is just a tiny window into the amount of work that went into this book. Because you have that moment, but you actually have a 90-year life, and on every single page you can feel the amount of sawdust that you chewed through, Joseph.

Joseph Torigian: Each chapter has its own ecology of sources. I need to mention that I relied heavily on histories written by Chinese scholars — work published both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. For his family life, I inevitably needed to rely on commemorative essays written by the children about their father. You need to take these sources seriously, but one way to approach them is to understand the broader context.

What was it like to grow up in Beijing in the 1950s? What was it like to attend that particular school? Often, instead of researching Xi Jinping directly, I would take a different approach. If Xi Jinping went to August 1st School (北京市八一学校), I’d find every book I could about August 1st School. When Xi Zhongxun was exiled to a factory in Luoyang, I’d research the history of that factory. His name might not even appear in these sources, but you can at least understand what happened to him while he was there and what he would have experienced, even if we can’t say exactly what he did or thought about it.

Jordan Schneider: Those moments showcased your scholarship at its best. People will probably flip ahead to read the Tiananmen chapter first, but I appreciated how you condensed these experiences. In just a few paragraphs, you gave readers a sense of what these worlds were like — it’s some Robert Caro-level work. You’re not literally getting a job in a factory in Luoyang, but you’re doing the best you can with the available material.

Joseph Torigian: Robert Caro is my idol. His book on research methodology is perhaps the best guide to research ever written. The only other useful recommendation I have for aspiring researchers is watching old Gordon Liu kung fu movies like 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Fists of the White Lotus. Those training sequences offer a great way to think about learning research skills.

Caro writes about trying to understand LBJ but feeling like he couldn’t get close to his subject. He told his wife they were moving to the hill country in Texas. Only when he experienced how difficult life was there did he feel he understood who LBJ became — seeing the poverty and hardship firsthand. I often wonder how different my book would have been if I had lived in Shaanxi Province for two or three years. Those are the regrets you think about. You can only write the book that’s possible with the sources available to you, but it does make you wonder.

No Saints, Only Martyrs: Xi’s Early Years

Jon Sine: This seems like a good jumping-off point to discuss the book’s chronology. My first question is about getting into the mindset of someone like Xi Zhongxun, who was born in 1913 in a place of unimaginable suffering, death, battle, and tragedy — at least from a modern developed-world perspective. You might be uniquely positioned to answer this, having spent time reading dark literature from the Soviet archives and authors like Solzhenitsyn.

You open the book with Xi Zhongxun attempting to murder a teacher at age 14, which serves as a device to help us understand that this wasn’t particularly strange for the time — people of all ages were dying and being killed. How do you advise readers to get into the mindset of this world when Xi Jinping was growing up?

Joseph Torigian: One regret I have about this book is that people sometimes focus on the most salacious moments, like the one you described. You need to put these events in context. I’m not saying that understanding him means we should forgive him, but we should understand the conditions that led to this behavior. This book is as much about the party system as it is about Xi Jinping.

People like to think of the party as inhabited by good guys and bad guys, but it’s much more complicated. They’re all part of a system, trying to figure out what they can do in limited situations. This needs to be understood when we consider who these people were.

When Xi Zhongxun was 15 years old and attempted to kill this academic administrator, it occurred in a milieu of violence. The Nationalists were killing many of his comrades. This was an act of desperation by a frightened young person — a huge failure that wouldn’t have improved the party’s position even if it had succeeded. Not only did the administrator survive, but Xi Zhongxun and many others were arrested.

This illustrates a pattern Xi Zhongxun faced throughout his life: you need zeal and fearlessness, but too much zeal can lead to actions that go too far and trigger backlash, often making situations much worse. However, if you’re not aggressive enough, others will accuse you of being a rightist — an opportunist too frightened to use violence and risk to advance the revolutionary agenda.

There’s a famous communist text called “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder that recognizes being too radical can get you killed. But they don’t debate these questions rationally because of the ideological charge, which makes management extremely difficult and can lead to purges, arrests, and executions.

Jordan Schneider: The life-or-death stakes and emotional charge of those early years are hard to comprehend.

Joseph Torigian: Those were the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days.

Jordan Schneider: Kids these days aren’t getting horses shot out from under them or taking bullets through the leg while running from Nationalists. But seriously —

Joseph Torigian: You can see how Xi Jinping in the 1980s looked at younger people born under socialism, after all that violence was gone. When they criticized the party, he wanted to tell them what it was really like. I can see how some students would be inspired by that, while others wouldn’t be. It depends on who listens and who is moved.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay with the 1920s and 1930s. There was this one guy accused of something serious who said, “I’m going to show you just how committed to the party I am.” He was reckless in battle, got shot, and died. That tension — if you’re redder than red, you might literally end up being killed.

Joseph Torigian: You’re referring to Xi Zhongxun’s first great mentor, Liu Zhidan (刘志丹). What’s fascinating about him is that even though they faced persecution and their cases hadn’t been fully rehabilitated, he would tell Xi Zhongxun that the party would eventually get things right and he should talk to others about this. Then this same person, Liu Zhidan, because he still had a black mark in his file and wanted to show his loyalty, got himself killed.

Jordan Schneider: It’s not like the Catholic Church as we know it today — this is early Christianity. There are martyrs, everything is life and death, the world is against you. To believe and commit your life to it, you need a truly revolutionary vision of how society will change.

Joseph Torigian: When you see people around you getting killed for these reasons, once the regime is established, you can understand wanting to do everything possible to ensure the regime persists not just during your lifetime, but for decades or even centuries into the future. This is something Xi Zhongxun thought about constantly — he would ruminate on how to make sure the party survives not just him, but deep into the future. This makes the fact that his son is now the leader of the country particularly interesting.

Jon Sine: There are a lot of novels in the book. When Xi Zhongxun is young, he read a novel with the same title as your second chapter (which is among my favorites of the 30 chapters, by the way). The novel is called The Young Wanderer 少年漂泊者. Xi Zhongxun sees a lot of himself in the protagonist. But I’m also reminded of Stalin. According to Kotkin’s biography, Stalin was very motivated by a novel he read before he was a committed Marxist-Leninist, which has a similar, though less tragic, heroic figure named Koba. So much so that Stalin uses Koba as a nickname for himself.

I’m curious both if you could explain the Xi Zhongxun example, but also what you think of the fact that so many of these revolutionaries were inspired by something like a novel before they even really had a conception of what they were going to be sacrificing their lives for.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting that his life as an early revolutionary was so deeply shaped by this book. In fact, he told Xi Jinping, his son, that he reread this novel after being released from jail to rekindle his love for the party. At the time of his release, he was desperate and couldn’t walk. He was covered in eczema and boils. His father had died, apparently because of the stress related to watching what his son had just gone through. Soon after, he lost his mother and two sisters. There was famine everywhere. He couldn’t link back up with the party because most of it had been destroyed. He couldn’t go back to school because he’s a wanted man. He read this book to get himself back in the mood, so to speak. He rededicated himself because of reading this novel. Then in 1962, he was thrown out of the leadership because of another novel. It’s an interesting bookend.

Then Xi Zhongxun, of course, returned to work in Beijing in the Secretariat. The very first thing that happens is people think that the country is going to fall into another Cultural Revolution because of a movie, a movie called Bitter Love (苦恋). It’s a movie that probably should speak to him in some ways. It’s a movie that is about someone who is deeply dedicated to the party and to the nation, but who the party persecutes. It includes this famous line — “You have always loved the motherland, but did the motherland love you?”

He doesn’t like stuff that criticizes the party, but he still sees the need to reflect on the Mao era, and he’s not quite sure how to criticize it without going too far. But repeatedly, we keep seeing that movies and novels have really fundamental impacts, not just on the party, but on Xi Zhongxun in particular. It speaks to this issue of communism being preoccupied with souls and for communist writers being “engineers of the soul.” And why in the 1980s, Xi Zhongxun, who in many ways was a reformer, would still say things like, “We also need to have a spiritual civilization."

People held different views on how to solve the same problems that Xi Jinping was witnessing. Some believed the solution lay in enlightenment, cultural change, science, and democracy. Mao Zedong disagreed. He thought the right path involved violence, class struggle, and forceful transformation.

In the 1980s, there was a reflection on these two different paths and how the May 4th movement represented one approach while the Yan’an Rectification represented something quite different. The Yan’an Rectification, as I write about in my book, addressed a fascinating problem — all these young people had hero complexes. They were young, entitled, and spoiled, yet nevertheless wanted to save the nation. They went to Yan’an and recognized they needed to become good party soldiers, but transforming into a party soldier proved extremely difficult. It was a wrenching, traumatic experience. However, when they emerged from this process of struggle sessions and self-reflection, they felt like completely new human beings and often experienced euphoria.

Jon Sine: Your book uses Xi Zhongxun as a lens to examine the party. However, for the first twenty years of his life, the party center hadn’t yet consolidated in Shaanxi and Yan’an. This raises a question about the story you’re telling, which relies heavily on Joseph Esherick’s excellent book Accidental Holy Land. How representative do you think this experience in Shaanxi was during these first twenty years of establishing the base area?

Joseph Torigian: The Northwesterners took great pride in the fact that almost all other base areas had been destroyed except theirs. This raises an interesting question. I’ve discussed how Xi Zhongxun was incarcerated in 1935 by his fellow communists and was still in prison when Mao arrived. Mao didn’t release them immediately and wasn’t the primary person involved in investigating. Nevertheless, if that base area hadn’t existed, it would have created a huge problem. Mao didn’t even know it was there. The Party Center only learned about this base area’s existence through a newspaper in some dusty, isolated town, which led them to investigate and eventually arrive. This raises the intriguing question: who saved whom? Did the Party Center save the Northwesterners, or did the Northwesterners save the Party? That situation was unique.

Another factor was the severe infighting in all these base areas, but it was especially bad in Shaanxi for various reasons. No clear leader emerged from the region. One potential leader I’ve already mentioned, Liu Zhidan, was killed for reasons we’ve discussed. Even before him, there was another prominent leader, Xie Zichang 谢子长, who was also killed. They weren’t represented by a single figure who could command the loyalty and affection of the entire group.

When Mao was in Yan’an, he needed to identify a representative who could speak for the Northwesterners’ group and whose promotion would signal to the Northwesterners that they were taken seriously. He chose Gao Gang. Many people disliked Gao Gang — in fact, they hated him. This left behind the potential for struggles that would emerge in subsequent years and continue to affect Xi Zhongxun’s life for decades.

Jon Sine: I was recently in Ruijin in Jiangxi, which some may know as the starting point for the Long March and the capital of that base area. When you’re there, you see the whole place covered with Mao’s little wax statues showing him standing and giving speeches. However, from what I understand of the history, he was actually marginalized for most of the period there after the Central Committee moved down around 1931.

I had a friend who recently went to Yan’an to visit the museum and see what role Xi Zhongxun plays and how he’s memorialized there. His view was the same as mine when I visited — the portrayal seems right-sized, which is pretty small. How would you right-size Xi Zhongxun’s importance, especially during the period before Mao arrived?

Joseph Torigian: He was primarily involved in civilian governance, mostly working with the Soviet structure. While that sounds important, what was even more crucial during this period were the military leaders. In some cases, these military figures who were actually commanding soldiers looked down on the civilians, and Xi Zhongxun was considered as such.

When Liu Zhidan, the commander of these forces, would interact with Xi Zhongxun and show deference to him as someone working for civilian government structures, Xi Zhongxun was quite struck by that respect. After the Party Center arrived, Xi Zhongxun was sent to some real backwaters — dangerous ones — and only gradually, as the party continued to review the 1935 persecution, was Xi Zhongxun placed in increasingly important positions.

What’s striking is that by the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, Xi Zhongxun was the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee. He benefited from Gao Gang’s rise because they were now on the right side of history, according to the view of the past that Mao was imposing on the party. You’re right that I wouldn’t place him as one of the leading figures who helped establish the base area. This was also important for Xi Zhongxun because later, when he was seen as an informal leader of Northwesterners within the leadership, he wasn’t as dominant over the rest of them as figures from other factions were seen as clear standard bearers with much more prestige and status.

Jon Sine: What about the factions that seem to emerge at this time? You have the Long Marchers, whom Mao derisively said something about — that just because you walked a lot doesn’t mean you have special status. Obviously, many of them certainly thought they did. Could you speak about the tension between the Long Marchers arriving and the people in the Shaanxi base area?

Joseph Torigian: The Long Marchers were the central leadership — the Central Committee. Many were very well educated with extensive experience. Many had studied in Moscow. Then they showed up in the Northwest and thought the locals were bumpkins. Yang Shangkun even said, “You consider this a city? I can’t believe you think this is an urban area given how undeveloped it is."

The Northwesterners had built the base area, and then the Long Marchers arrived and basically took over. People like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun continued to face the shadow of the 1935 purge — they weren’t immediately rehabilitated. The Long Marchers looked down on them, while the Northwesterners felt they had built this base area and were upset about the lack of respect they received.

Mao Zedong adopted the Northwesterners in quite striking ways. He gave them so many positions at the 1945 Seventh Party Congress that Mao’s associates from the Jiangxi base area became very jealous and quite unhappy. The story Mao told was essentially this: when he was in Jiangxi, dogmatic people who had learned in the Soviet Union told him to do wrong things and pushed him out through domineering behavior. He said that’s basically what happened in 1935 when people like Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun were persecuted — because they were doing good, real, sinicized revolution and were persecuted by people who had no idea what they were doing.

For Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun, this must have been thrilling. Here was Mao saying flattering things about the Northwesterners, claiming their historical experiences mirrored his, and promoting them rapidly at the expense of his old associates.

Then something interesting happened. In the early 1950s, Mao Zedong started complaining about Liu Shaoqi. He talked to Gao Gang, and Gao Gang harbored antagonism against party cadres who had spent most of their time in the “white areas” — meaning the cities doing underground work. He didn’t understand why they had all these cushy positions when it was the “red areas” — the base areas — that had done the bulk of work during the revolution. He also thought the Northwesterners needed more respect as reflected in official party history. He was motivated by how the party evaluated their contribution to the revolution.

Part of Gao’s machinations against Liu Shaoqi were based on Mao’s encouragement and certain things Mao was saying about Liu Shaoqi. But Gao also had this view of history that explains why he was acting dangerously. Xi Zhongxun was much more cautious. He said they wouldn’t be respected because they weren’t Long Marchers — they didn’t have that credibility, status, and prestige. Xi Zhongxun felt that people like Deng Xiaoping, who was a Long Marcher and knew Mao for a long time, were people he and Gao needed to be careful of. Ultimately, it was Deng Xiaoping who betrayed Gao Gang, went to Mao, and signaled Gao’s defeat.

The Party as Mother and Matchmaker

Jordan Schneider: We have this elite drama as well as human drama. There’s love, there’s death. What’s his relationship to his parents and his first wife?

Joseph Torigian: Xi Zhongxun’s parents died when he was quite young — fifteen or sixteen years old — leaving him an orphan for a while. After he was released from prison, he had to take care of his entire family. Then he left them to join the revolution, which led to an unflattering comment from an uncle. On one occasion, he actually referred to the party as “mother” — I don’t have that in the book, but it’s an interesting word choice. By fifteen or sixteen, the party was essentially his only family, or at least the most important family he had. He went back to his home village once or twice, but the entire emotional center of gravity of his life was the party, not his immediate relatives.

His first wife, Hao Mingzhu 郝明珠, was a very interesting figure. She came from a revolutionary family and was very capable. She did extensive work trying to explain to women why the revolution was something they needed to take seriously and why they shouldn’t be frightened by it. She became pregnant several times, but she hadn’t joined the revolution to get pregnant — she joined to make revolution. That tension apparently led to the break between them.

Jon Sine: Can we pause on his first wife for a second? One of the things that stuck with me most from your book—almost haunting—was a one-sentence line about her first husband who was killed and beheaded. She had to retrieve his body, which was severed from the head, and bury him. She was eighteen at the time. People should sit with that for a second to imagine what kind of normal setting this was, where this woman had to endure that.

Joseph Torigian: She’s also interesting because she went on to have a pretty good career in a very male-dominated institution like the Chinese Communist Party. She became a powerful individual in Shaanxi in subsequent decades.

Jon Sine: Despite this very grown-up tragedy she suffered at eighteen, you offer a very strange description — which I presume is completely factual — of the way Xi Zhongxun courts her.

Joseph Torigian: The stories in the book are funny from our perspective. They’re frightening and sad at the same time.

Jon Sine: I don’t know if you want to give that story, because it has all these elements — they’re twenty, adolescents, but also patriarchal, yet also progressive in some weird way.

Joseph Torigian: As I mentioned, one interesting thing that emerges from the book is how often the party’s own ideals and mission would bump up against something else — exigencies and political needs. You would have matchmaking sometimes to pursue political goals, even as you’re telling women not to bind their feet. It was quite a striking contradiction.

Jordan Schneider: Tell the story.

Jon Sine: I have it off the top of my head. She’s in this group, they basically show up, and they all start pointing to Xi Zhongxun and say…

Joseph Torigian: “This is the guy.”

Jon Sine: She has a shy girl reaction, runs away, and they chase her. Maybe you could pick it up from there — how that eventually ends rather swiftly in their marriage.

Joseph Torigian: There was extensive, forceful party matchmaking during this period. To put it in context, this was an organization built to achieve revolution, and these relationships were seen as something that should be built on principles of what facilitates the revolution. That led to pressure on people to marry people they didn’t know well or might not have even liked.

Jordan Schneider: How does getting married help revolution in the first place?

Joseph Torigian: To move on to the relationship between Xi Zhongxun and Qi Xin 齐心, it’s very striking how much he doesn’t want to be distracted by her, especially during dicey moments for the party, as the Nationalists were tearing up and breaking up much of what had been the Yan’an base area in the second half of the 1940s. When he meets Qi Xin, he tells her, “Why are you coming to see me? We’re in the middle of fighting this war. It’s just a distraction.”

The party was supposed to break down personalistic relationships so people wouldn’t put romance first — they put revolution first. This was something they all understood and intuited. I can’t remember if I left it in the book, but there was one time when Xi Zhongxun facilitated a meeting between Peng Dehuai and Peng Dehuai’s wife, and Peng yelled at him, saying he needed to focus on bigger things than setting up an occasion for him to see the woman he was married to.

Jordan Schneider: This reminded me of arranged marriages where the woman meets this man who’s in good standing with the party, and they get married the next day — like ISIS. ISIS would arrange marriages with women they captured as spoils. On one hand, Joseph, these guys like sex, which you bring up, but at the same time, you have these women who are incredibly conscious and want to contribute to the party. They’re also annoyed by the fact that they have to do all the childbearing. We end up in this weird dynamic where, because Xi Jinping’s mother is a very active person, they just don’t do parenting for six days a week. It shows how dedicated and religious they are — the family stuff and sex are there because they’re human beings, but they’re subordinating this to the broader goal of making revolution and having the party flourish.

Joseph Torigian: Some more context that’s not directly relevant to what you’re saying, but that we saw very commonly in Yan’an, is that the old revolutionaries had wives they had married years before getting to the base area. Many of those wives had their own seniority, prestige, and status because of when they had joined the revolution and what they had done for it. But then these men left their wives for younger party cadres — women often from more privileged backgrounds with more education. Xi Zhongxun’s two marriages were something quite common in Yan’an — they divorced their first wives and married younger wives. Sometimes that was quite controversial.

For example, in Yan’an, Mao was married to a woman who had contributed and sacrificed a lot for the revolution, and he married another person who was an actor from Shanghai who had been in movies and whose life had been affected by rumors about her love life. When Mao started courting her, some people were unhappy about that. This was another element of the social fabric of what was happening in Yan’an during this period.

Jordan Schneider: It’s funny because Xi Jinping almost goes in the other direction where the first wife is too educated and too into the Western world, ends up moving to the UK and living out a global cosmopolitan lifestyle. Then he finds this woman whose background and worldview much more echo what he had from the perspective of coming into the party and forging and suffering.

But we shouldn’t jump that far ahead. Jon, bring us back.

Jon Sine: On the topic of Xi Zhongxun maybe not being that high-ranking at the time, in the late thirties and forties, he’s maybe just an alternate Central Committee member. He’s the head of a county called Suide 绥德, a sub-region of the Northwest.

Joseph Torigian: It was northeast of Yan’an. The first big jump of his life was really in 1945 when he became a candidate member of the Central Committee — he was very young. Then the next huge jump was when he became head of the Northwest Bureau that same year. Peng Dehuai and He Long (贺龙) were also very important figures in the Northwest, but for someone that young to have a position that weighty is one of the more striking parts of his story. He repeatedly was the youngest person in these very delicate positions. He kept winning over older people to support him. He had this habit of collecting big brothers — that’s something that marked his life.

Jon Sine: I wanted to talk about the Suide period when he was there. You’re pulling out these threads of contradictions and tensions that exist within this individual, as opposed to other biographies that might have more of a clear arc for narrative reasons. But it’s a through line — is he a reformer, is he conservative? These tensions run through land reform there, they run through political rectification that he goes through. Sometimes he seems to tone it down, but sometimes he also seems to be turning it up, which just actually means purging, potentially killing, leading to the deaths of people. How do you see that period, if we linger on that, as a harbinger of some of these contradictions?

Joseph Torigian: During the rectification in 1942, at this period, it focused on transformation and education. Xi Zhongxun was the dean of a university in Yan’an for a few months. Then in 1943, he went to the Suide sub-region, which you just mentioned. Their rectification turned into something called the Confession Movement or the Rescue the Fallen Campaign. Now it was looking for spies — it wasn’t just about taking these young people and turning them into good communists, but finding which ones were spies so they could be rescued. That required a whole new level of investigation, persecution, sometimes even torture, and it completely went off the rails.

Xi Zhongxun had a reputation for being more humane and pro-reform, but the Confession Campaign — the Rescue the Fallen Campaign — was really a case of political radicalism that Xi Zhongxun seems to have been pushing and we should ask why that was the case. In some ways, it’s a puzzle because just a few years earlier, he himself had been persecuted largely on trumped-up charges that resulted from people being forced to give false confessions. He knew this would happen.

Part of it was that the party told him to find spies, and of course he was going to find spies. Part of it was war hysteria — there was fear in 1943 that the Nationalists were going to invade. Also, the Communists had their own spies, making it easy to imagine that the Nationalists were sending agents into this region.

Xi Zhongxun had reasons to be loyal to and grateful to Mao for what we just described — Mao’s new version of history that must have been thrilling to the Northwesterners, crediting them as being on the right side of history along with Mao Zedong.

But Xi went very far, and the form these campaigns took in Suide were very interesting because they focused on a school and included lurid details about many of the young women allegedly being spies sent by Nationalists to infiltrate the party by essentially being honey traps.

Jordan Schneider: To be clear, by young, we mean one of the women who ended up getting caught up in this purge was fourteen. She’s supposedly some prostitute for the Nationalists who can barely write her name.

Joseph Torigian: They had mass rallies where these young people went up and lied about having been spies and having been sent on these missions. What’s interesting is that the target of these campaigns in Suide was this school, and Qi Xin was a student at this school. That’s when Qi Xin and Xi Zhongxun first started to get to know each other. He showed off this inscription that Mao gave him that said, “The party’s interests come first” — something she never forgot.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah. Relationships that start in high school purges tend to be the ones that really see you through the decades.

Joseph Torigian: You can see it was an electric atmosphere. That’s one way of putting it. But he also told her to be careful, otherwise she would be caught up in it. On one occasion, she visits one of the students being persecuted and even interviews her. It was a messy scene.

Post-1945: Surrogate Fathers and Succession

Jon Sine: We can move forward to the part where the Japanese are defeated in 1945. At some point, maybe two or three years into the Civil War, the Nationalists chase the Communist leadership out of Yan’an. What happens to Xi Zhongxun at this point?

Joseph Torigian: 1947 was a really interesting moment. Yan’an had been the Communist capital for many years and was a symbol of the Chinese Communist Party. Then the Nationalist General Hu Zongnan (胡宗南) attacked, and Xi Zhongxun was on the front line. He screwed up a really key battle, and the party was facing a real crisis. Peng Dehuai, a very famous military figure in Chinese history, was plucked from the Central Military Commission and ordered to command the Northwest forces. Xi Zhongxun worked for him. In the subsequent battles, it looks like the two of them basically got along.

Later in the 1940s, Xi Zhongxun also spent time on governance, civilian work, logistics, and land reform, where he worked under He Long 贺龙. On the military side, he worked under Peng Dehuai, and on the civilian side, he worked under He Long. These were very weighty positions, especially for someone young.

I want to dwell on this moment for just another second — how emotional it must have been for Xi Zhongxun in March 1947. He’s in Yan’an, the Nationalists are coming, and Mao refuses to leave. Mao was really frightening the people around him by staying in the city even as the Nationalists were at the very gates. It was Peng Dehuai and Xi Zhongxun who finally saw him off and then tried to create this rearguard action to hold off the Nationalists to ensure the Central Committee could escape. To have spent that much time building up Communist forces in this area and then see them destroyed by the Nationalists must have been another very emotional moment in his life.

Jon Sine: Xi Zhongxun and Peng Dehuai, serving together, would be sleeping in the same room. Apparently Xi Zhongxun was quite the snorer. You write that Peng Dehuai would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and put his shoe on Xi Zhongxun’s face to wake him up and stop him from snoring.

Joseph Torigian: Comrades-in-arms.

Jordan Schneider: Dude, that’s sleep apnea. That’s serious.

Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai was famously mean to people under him, and Xi Zhongxun sometimes acted as a peacemaker, a mediator between Peng Dehuai and whoever Peng was mad at. Xi Zhongxun’s ability to manage interpersonal relationships was emerging here. Even though Peng could really yell at people and get agitated, he also had this communist egalitarian ethos. In that sense, it’s not surprising that he would be sleeping right next to Xi Zhongxun and waking him up with his shoes. It was this interesting mix of hierarchy and egalitarianism that we see in Peng Dehuai.

Jordan Schneider: He does have this LBJ energy to him.

Joseph Torigian: It’s interesting — a few years later, there were tensions between Xi Zhongxun and Deng Xiaoping over Tibet. Xi Zhongxun was very close to Peng Dehuai and one of his protégés. Xi Zhongxun went to complain to Peng about something, and Peng said to him, “You need to be careful because Peng likes to fire cannons.” Then of course, Peng fired a cannon in 1959 at the Lushan Plenum that led to people doubling down on the Great Leap Forward in tragic ways. Xi Zhongxun could read people pretty well sometimes.

Jon Sine: People who have heard of Peng Dehuai, maybe in the China field, probably remember him from the Great Leap Forward, which we will get into. But it speaks to this — at least to me—because my conception of him is drawn from this idea of good versus bad guy. He was the good guy who tried to stop the Great Leap Forward, and people read this back into history. But when you go through the details, you realize he was a very complex person who would be very angry. Everyone at this time was a killer.

Joseph Torigian: Peng Dehuai, too, if you read this wonderful book by Yen-Lin Chung, which is a biography of Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution. Shortly before Peng Dehuai was targeted in 1959, there had been a campaign of anti-dogmatism in the People’s Liberation Army. Peng was just brutal to people. He especially went after this very famous general named Su Yu 粟裕. Peng was a victim, but very shortly before that, he was a victimizer — another very complicated figure.

Jordan Schneider: The LBJ thing I was going for was this cultivating of older men and having these surrogate father figures.

Joseph Torigian: I could give a whole list for Xi Zhongxun. Even later in his life, he was still making new friends older than him, like Ye Jianying 叶剑英, a man with whom he had no historic ties, no career ties. Suddenly, Ye Jianying took a shine to him, sent him to Guangdong, and became a patron to him. It’s very interesting. Apparently in 1959, the person who nominated Xi Zhongxun to become a vice premier was Chen Yi 陈毅, another very powerful marshal who apparently only really worked with Xi Zhongxun on the State Council for a few years in the 1950s but seems to have liked him. It’s really interesting.

There are reasons this might have been the case. Xi Zhongxun could be charming. These older men who liked to drink — Xi Zhongxun could roll with them in a lifestyle sense. He was good at his job, good at intuiting what people wanted, and could manage personal relations. That’s why he did United Front work. He was a Northwesterner — he wasn’t a Long Marcher. He had been orphaned, essentially, when Liu Zhidan, Xie Zichang, and then Gao Gang were gone. He was looking for big brothers. He needed big brothers. Maybe these big brothers didn’t really feel threatened by him because the Northwesterners as a group weren’t really that frightening.

Jordan Schneider: He was young, too.

Joseph Torigian: They were thinking about succession — how are we going to hand over the reins to somebody who knows what they’re doing? We need to test these people and give them an opportunity to show whether they’re good at it and gain experience. He was the youngest vice premier in 1959, the youngest candidate member of the Central Committee in 1945, and the youngest major figure from a regional bureau brought to Beijing in 1952. Then, when he went back to work in the 1980s, he never quite reached the top. In fact, he was sent to work for Hu Yaobang, who was much younger than him and had much less revolutionary prestige. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll pick up the story in 1949.

Today we’re running a guest translation by the great of the Sinification substack which translates leading Chinese thinkers.

Below, Liu Shaoshan — a leading figure in China’s embodied AI research with a PhD from UC Irvine and an official state-designated “high-end overseas talent”— proposes a roadmap for Chinese AI dominance cueing off America’s successful diffusion of TCP/IP protocols in the late 20th century. Just as influence over the internet afforded the USA “a truly global mechanism of discursive control,” Liu argues, AI diffusion and the standards exported along with AI systems will be key to power projection in the 21st century.

He outlines four strategic levers for achieving open source dominance — technological competitiveness, open-source ecosystem development, international standard-setting, and talent internationalisation. Acknowledging that China’s engagement in open source AI still has a long way to go, he advocates for the creation of a comprehensive “China HuggingFace” that maximizes market share by publishing toolkits for model training, embodied AI implementation, and everything in between. Finally, the author argues that Beijing should encourage Chinese AI talent to live and work abroad, especially in Belt and Road participant countries, rather than encouraging them to come back to China.

This piece is particularly resonant at a time when leading White House AI advisors are tweeting stuff like this:

For the policy answer to the challenges Liu raises, check out Nathan Lambert’s call for action to replicate Deepseek in America.

Interconnects

The American DeepSeek Project

While America has the best AI models in Gemini, Claude, o3, etc. and the best infrastructure with Nvidia it’s rapidly losing its influence over the future directions of AI that unfold in the open-source and academic communities. Chinese organizations are releasing the most notable…

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12 days ago · 80 likes · 1 comment · Nathan Lambert

1. US tariffs and export controls heighten global uncertainty but create a strategic opening for China’s AI industry to expand internationally and reshape “the global technological order”.

2. Global adoption of US or Chinese technology — not domestic technological prowess alone — is becoming the key battleground for great-power status in AI.

3. America’s success with TCP/IP’s global rise in the 1980s shows centrally-led government policies, open-source, mandatory standards and talent “exports” can turn national tech into the global default.

4. Rogers’ diffusion model suggests four steps for China: woo “innovators” with cutting-edge tech, attract “early adopters” through open-source, secure an “early majority” by setting international standards, and reach late adopters through Chinese talent going global.

5. Thus, China’s first objective should be to match US-level capabilities so that its AI-related technologies are credible and attractive to global “innovators” and “early adopters”.

6. China’s DeepSeek-R1 and other LLMs now rival OpenAI in maths, coding and/or reasoning, demonstrating their technical credibility for such global uptake.

5. Moreover, China’s embodied AI sector shows strong international competitiveness, with robust upstream manufacturing, rapidly improving midstream technologies and world-leading pilot deployments, forming a highly competitive end-to-end ecosystem that supports rapid technological advancement.

6. Nevertheless, China still trails the US in the maturity of its open-source community reach and its influence over international standards systems.

7. Recommended actions:

   1. Back talent-going-abroad schemes that help place Chinese experts in key positions in emerging markets such as in universities, labs and start-ups, thereby supporting the spread of Chinese technologies and standards internationally.

   2. Establish an “Open-Source Co-construction Fund” to boost China's influence in global technical governance and standards-setting.

   3. Shift from ISO-centric competition to a “code-as-standard” strategy: export products pre-loaded with open-source standards, ensuring that adoption effectively becomes standardisation.

   4. Promote collaborative hardware-software stacks that embed Chinese standards directly in already established code repositories like GitHub and Hugging Face, thereby easing global adoption.

   5. Build a “Chinese Hugging Face”: an integrated and globally influential open-source hub for models, middleware and applications, covering the full pipeline from model development to deployment.

Name: Liu Shaoshan (刘少山)
Year of birth: est. 1984 (age: 40/41)
Position: Director of the Embodied Intelligence Centre at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIRS); Founder and CEO of intelligent robotics company PerceptIn.
Previously: Technology Leadership Panel Advisory Group Member, National Academy of Public Administration (2023-4); Senior Autonomous Driving Architect, Baidu USA (2014-6); Senior Software Engineer, LinkedIn (2013-4); Software Development Engineer, Microsoft (2010-3)
Other: IEEE Senior Member; Recognised as a “national high-level overseas talent” (国家高层次海外人才) by the Chinese government (under its broader Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Programme, historically known as the Thousand Talents Plan)
Research focus: Embodied AI; Autonomous driving; Computing systems; Technology policy
Education: BSc, MSc and PhD (2010), UC Irvine; MPA, Harvard University.

As we moved into 2025, the Trump administration reintroduced tariffs across the board [统一关税] on global goods while simultaneously implementing stricter controls on technology exports, delivering a dual blow to global trade and technological ecosystems. This latest round of trade protectionism and technological blockade policies has significantly increased systemic uncertainty across the global economy and technology sectors. In March 2025, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revised its forecast for global growth in 2025 from 3.3% down to 3.1%, and further downgraded it to 2.9% in June, citing “trade policy uncertainty” and “structural barriers” as factors dragging down global investment and supply chain stability. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) also warned that escalating trade tensions and policy volatility could slow global growth to 2.3%, leading to stagnation in both investment and innovation. Against this backdrop, a strategic window of opportunity has opened for Chinese AI to “go global”. As the United States increases obstacles to trade and to the sharing and export of technology [技术壁垒], China should participate actively in the restructuring of the global technological ecosystem. It can do this by exporting its technology, building an open-source ecosystem, setting standards [标准制定] and encouraging the global mobility of Chinese AI talent [人才国际流动]. This would then mark a shift from a passive posture to a proactive strategic approach. This article offers a systematic analysis of the strategic pathways and concrete steps that China should take across these four key dimensions.

On 8 May 2025, during a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Commerce titled “Winning the AI Race”, Microsoft President Brad Smith issued a warning: “The number-one factor that will define whether the US or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world.” His statement underscored a fundamental shift in the strategic landscape: against the backdrop of Trump's increasingly stringent technology and global trade policies, the extent to which [a country’s technology] is adopted globally has become the key determinant of [that country’s] great power status in AI. It is precisely within this climate of mounting restrictions that China’s AI industry has encountered a window of opportunity to “go global” and reshape the international technological ecosystem.

Looking back at the 1960s to 1980s, the United States successfully capitalised on the opportunity offered by its technological ascendancy in IT. First, in terms of technology export, in 1969 the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched ARPANET [a forerunner to the Internet], and by 1980 had incorporated TCP/IP [its new communications protocol] into its defence communications system. On 1 January 1983, a full network-wide transition to TCP/IP was completed, laying the foundation for the global internet. Next came the construction of the open-source ecosystem: DARPA’s TCP/IP protocols were incorporated into the open-source BSD system, thereby initiating an “open-source means of dissemination” [开源即传播] model. In 1986, the NSFNET project extended this model to the academic community. This made networking functions readily accessible at the operating system level and further stimulated broad participation from the research and developer communities. It was precisely this “code usable is code used” [代码可用即可用] design philosophy that accelerated the internet’s diffusion from the laboratory to commercial and civilian domains. The evidence demonstrates [实践证明] that only when core communication protocols move from closed-loop research to open-source community development can exponential technological breakthroughs occur — moving from source code to [forming the core of] global infrastructure [从源代码走向全球基础设施].

In addition to its advanced technology research and development (R&D) and open-source contributions, the United States also achieved widespread adoption of TCP/IP by standardising outputs and aligning government policy with open-source practice to establish a globally compatible basic infrastructure [全球兼容基础]. In March 1982, the US Department of Defence officially designated TCP/IP as the standard for military communications and announced a nationwide transition scheduled for 1 January 1983 — the so-called “flag day” policy. This was not merely a technical upgrade, but a form of “compatibility mandate”: all hosts connected to the network were required to support TCP/IP, or else they would be disconnected on the day of the switch. This compulsory standardisation not only enforced synchronised upgrades across the US military-industrial and research systems but also fostered a nationwide consensus on protocol standards.

More importantly, this standards rollout did not take place in a closed-off system [输出非封闭]. Rather, it advanced in tandem with the open-source ecosystem: DARPA awarded contracts in phases to institutions such as BBN, Stanford and Berkeley to develop TCP/IP implementations for major platforms including Unix BSD, IBM systems and VAX, subsequently incorporating the code into the 4.2BSD version of Unix for public release. In 1986, the NSFNET project further accelerated [进一步推动] the widespread deployment of this protocol across the national academic network, effectively achieving near 100% coverage.

This series of measures served collectively as the blueprint [机制范本] for the internationalisation of a US-developed communications standard. The government played a leading role by setting a compatibility timeline to guide synchronised upgrades to [this new] standard. Open-source practices facilitated multi-platform availability, enabling “use on demand” by research institutions and enterprises. The infrastructure for global system compatibility was deployed in parallel with the release of open-source code. This strategy — combining policy, open-source and platform integration — not only accelerated the adoption of the standard [缩短了标准推广路径], but also rapidly established TCP/IP as the default protocol for international communication.

From the 1960s to 1980s, the United States established its leading role through the export of technical standards. Of even greater long-term significance was [its strategy of] sending IT talent abroad [人才走出去], which profoundly influenced the global internet architecture. This experience offers valuable lessons for Chinese AI’s [ambition to] expand overseas [中国AI出海]. America’s engineers and researchers didn’t close themselves off from the world [封闭体系]— large numbers participated actively in international standards organisations and met with different parts of the academic community [社区会议]. For example, the International Network Working Group (INWG), founded in 1972 by American scholars such as Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker, played a key role in designing global network protocols and laid the groundwork for the birth of TCP/IP.

Subsequently, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), established in 1986, held its first meeting in San Francisco [Note: its first meeting was held in San Diego, not San Francisco] with 21 American researchers and received government funding and support. These platforms became key frontlines through which American researchers exercised technological discourse power [成为美国人才传递技术话语权的前沿阵地]. American experts held core technical and leadership roles within the INWG, the IETF and its parent body, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) [ — which together oversaw the development of the internet’s technical architecture]. Figures such as Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, and David Clark participated in meetings for many years, published RFC documents, and oversaw the registration of technical parameters and the standardisation process. These efforts not only ensured the professionalism of the adopted standards, but also reinforced the central role of the United States within global internet governance.

More importantly, the institutional design adopted by these organisations was one of open collaboration, enabling engineers from around the world to influence the direction of standards through voluntary participation. By leveraging their first-mover advantage and influence within the research community [社区影响力], American researchers led the development of key standards. In doing so, the US not only exported the technology itself, but also [American] internet culture, projecting its governance discourse power [overseas]. Furthermore, this strategy of internationalising talent meant that the US exported not just protocols, but also the capability to shape their evolution and the associated rule-making process — thereby establishing a truly global mechanism of discourse control over the Internet.

Technology diffusion is a systemic endeavour [系统工程]. In this section, I will draw on the theory of “innovation diffusion” to analyse the historical experience of US internet technology diffusion, offering systematic strategic recommendations for how Chinese AI can go global.

The theory of “innovation diffusion” was introduced by Everett Rogers in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations. Its main aim is to explain how new technologies and ideas spread and are adopted within a social system. This process does not happen instantaneously but unfolds gradually over time, spreading slowly between different groups in society through various channels.

The diffusion of innovation is the result of the interaction of multiple factors, including the innovation itself, the channels through which it spreads, the social environment and time. In his theory, Rogers proposed that members of society vary significantly in their willingness to adopt new ideas and can be categorised into five groups: “innovators”, “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late majority” and “laggards”. A technology’s influence gradually accumulates [缓慢累积影响] until it begins to be adopted by the “early majority”. Once it reaches this point of critical mass, its adoption accelerates rapidly. By observing the adoption process of key actors and leveraging their demonstration effect [借助他们的示范效应], an innovation can move beyond niche uptake and achieve widespread acceptance.

In fact, this theory emphasises the evolutionary process whereby an innovation adapts continuously to the needs of [different] social groups [创新自身不断适应群体需求]. It not only explains why some innovations enter the mainstream successfully while others stall due to lack of trust from “latecomers”, but also highlights the critical role of communication strategies, social networks and opinion leaders in the diffusion process.

In short, whether an innovation can truly achieve widespread adoption often depends on its ability to bridge the gap between marginal experimentation and mass adoption. This theory offers important insights for understanding technology export and international uptake: true diffusion is not a one-off success, but a gradual process of acceptance.

Step One: attract [the interest of] “innovators” through technological sophistication [通过技术先进性获取“先驱者”]. Innovators focus on the breakthrough advantages of the technology itself. Only by possessing technological capabilities [技术实力] on a par with the global frontrunners—which means, for example, having Large language models (LLMs) approaching the performance of OpenAI’s, or surpassing them in reasoning ability—can Chinese AI technologies be deemed worthy of adoption by [these early] global users.

Step Two: attract early adopters through open-sourcing. Early adopters are not only interested in how cutting-edge a technology is but also in usability and real-world application scenarios. During the internet era, the United States fostered an early ecosystem by open-sourcing the TCP/IP protocol, enabling the global research and engineering communities to use and experiment with it directly. If China, at this stage, open-sources large model code, interface documentation, inference APIs and the like, it would enable overseas developers to adopt and test these models quickly in local environments, thereby building recognition and participation in an international community.

Step Three: Reach the “early majority” by promoting global standards. These users place greater value on whether a technology has become an industry standard and whether it is widely compatible. The United States established global compatibility and interoperability by implementing a “flag-day” — when all connected systems automatically switched over to the new TCP/IP standard — thereby establishing it [统一] as the standard communication protocol. If Chinese AI could similarly embed interface protocols, model formats and evaluation metrics into international standard frameworks, it would help bridge the gap between the peripheral [early users] and the mainstream, thus accelerating widespread adoption.

Finally: [China needs to] gain the remaining user groups by exporting talent [人才输出]. This stage involves reaching the “late majority” and the “laggards”, and relies heavily on “talent going global” [人才走出去]. This is not limited to technical personnel going abroad to implement projects. A more important part is the active participation of Chinese AI engineers, researchers and policymakers in international standards bodies, community conferences and open-source projects—writing forum articles, submitting technical specifications and serving as working group leads. Just as Vint Cerf and Jon Postel once brought American protocol concepts into the IAB/IETF [which set technical standards for the internet], shaping global rules through RFCs and governance, China must also foster deep expert-level international engagement in order to shape norms at the conceptual level and establish its technologies as a credible global standard.

Based on the innovation diffusion theory discussed in the previous section, this next part explores whether Chinese AI technology is cutting-edge enough to “go global” [是否具备“走出去”的领先性], which is fundamental for technology diffusion.

First and foremost, DeepSeek has already clearly demonstrated its ability to compete alongside the world’s leading foundational models. Multiple independent benchmark tests show that DeepSeek-R1 performs comparably to OpenAI’s o1 model in mathematics, programming and reasoning tasks. In some tests, such as the MATH-500 question set, it even slightly outperforms it. [Additionally, based on DeepSeek’s own research], it also outperforms on the SWE [coding] question set. Its reasoning ability has been widely recognised by its community of users. Although DeepSeek-R1 falls slightly short of OpenAI’s o1 on some complex reasoning problems, its overall performance remains at a high level. As the first open-source large model with comparable capabilities — and with its code freely available and easily accessible — it is quickly gaining traction globally among developers. Even more important are its cost advantages and open approach. By using a mixture-of-experts architecture and reinforcement learning techniques, DeepSeek significantly reduces training and inference costs, achieving international top-tier performance not only in capability but also in efficiency.

Second, in the field of embodied AI enabled by foundational models, China has demonstrated clear global competitive advantages. The supply chain for embodied intelligence encompasses upstream core components, midstream system technologies—including foundation models and computational power—and downstream application scenarios. On the upstream side, the rise of the new energy smart vehicle industry has propelled China’s component manufacturing to a high level of localisation and mass production capacity, spanning key elements from sensors and LiDAR to servo motors. This supply chain advantage provides a solid foundation for the large-scale deployment of embodied intelligence systems.

Turning to midstream system technologies, as previously mentioned, products like DeepSeek are at the global cutting edge. In the area of computing chips, companies such as Huawei and Rockchip continue to make significant progress. Although they are still trailing behind their American counterparts for now, they are closing the gap rapidly.

In downstream application scenarios, China currently leads the world—particularly in large-scale pilot deployments of robotics projects initiated by local governments. A notable example is the “robotics district” in Longgang, Shenzhen. Robots are being deployed in urban management, manufacturing, logistics, elderly care and other sectors. Governments in cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen are providing subsidies and development platforms to support the implementation of these projects.

Overall, China has established a comprehensive closed-loop [完整闭环] AI ecosystem spanning upstream, midstream and downstream segments. Although midstream technologies still lag slightly behind, the gap is narrowing rapidly. This industrial structure enables Chinese products to be competitive in international markets and provides a solid foundation for the future diffusion of its AI technologies.

The previous section concluded that China’s AI technology is sufficiently cutting-edge to “go global”. This next section will examine the current state of China’s AI open-source ecosystem—specifically, whether the open-source infrastructure is sufficiently prepared to attract the world’s “early adopters”.

So far, China has achieved certain foundational milestones [取得初步成就] in building an open-source ecosystem for AI and embodied intelligence. However, it still lags significantly behind the United States in terms of global reach, community governance and platform influence—factors that constrain the depth and breadth of its technology’s international expansion. In terms of LLMs, more than ten Chinese open-source models with over 100 billion parameters—such as DeepSeek—have been released. Some of these models have matched or even surpassed OpenAI’s o1-level performance in MATH and SWE-bench, demonstrating strong technological momentum.

By contrast, the US continues to dominate the open-source ecosystem. The LLaMA series of models released by Meta have fostered a broad and robust ecosystem. The LLaMA2 series alone has amassed more downloads and citations on the Hugging Face platform than all Chinese open-source models combined [Note: the time period for this comparison is not specified]. Moreover, the US has established comprehensive mechanisms for model publication, data annotation, benchmark testing and community engagement — particularly through platforms like Hugging Face — affording its models the status of “default standard” within the open-source community.

In the field of embodied AI, China has leveraged its service robotics and smart vehicle industries to establish leading advantages in sensor technology, full-machine platforms and scenario integration. For example, the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has released the AIRSHIP, AIRSPEED and AIRSTONE series of open-source projects, which together form an end-to-end open-source system connecting the model, computing and application [Note: Liu is involved in the first two of these projects]. However, given the relatively short time this ecosystem has had to develop, there remains a significant gap in core middleware and the broader development ecosystem when compared with the US-led ROS (Robot Operating System) framework.

ROS, [an open-source framework for building robot software,] was released in 2007 by the US-based Willow Garage, and its core developers remain concentrated primarily in the United States and Europe. It boasts a clear contributor structure and abundant training resources. By contrast, domestic Chinese alternatives to ROS—such as CyberRT and XBot—have achieved partial system compatibility. However, their visibility on GitHub [a code repository], global developer participation and completeness of development documentation remain low. A strong and influential open-source community around these projects has yet to emerge.

Based on this, as China promotes the upgrade and international expansion of its open-source ecosystem, [my] recommendation is to focus on the following three areas:

1. A “Chinese Hugging Face” with global influence should be established. That is, an integrated open-source platform that unifies foundational models, system middleware and application scenarios, forming a complete pipeline from model training to deployment.

2. The Chinese government could set up an “Open-Source Co-construction Fund” to support universities, research institutes and enterprises in participating in technical governance and standards-setting within international organisations such as IEEE, ACM, RFC and IETF, thereby amplifying China's voice on the global stage.

3. Finally, leveraging China’s current supply chain advantages, efforts should be made to promote “collaborative open-source” for embodied intelligence hardware and software platforms, establishing a standardised open-source stack across hardware and software to truly realise the global deployment and ecosystem integration [potential] of Chinese technologies.

The previous section concluded that China’s AI open-source ecosystem still has significant room for development. In this section, I will examine the current state of the international standardisation of China’s AI technologies, with a particular focus on whether Chinese technologies have formed internationally recognised standard systems capable of attracting the global “early majority” of users.

China’s participation in international standardisation in the fields of AI and embodied intelligence is gradually increasing, but its overall influence still lags significantly behind that of the United States. In recent years, China has actively engaged with international standards organisations such as ISO/IEC JTC 1, IEEE, and ITU, and has submitted proposals on topics including “AI Terminology”, “AI Risk Management” and “General Requirements for Intelligent Service Robots”. However, by comparison, the United States continues to hold a dominant position in international bodies such as ISO and IEEE SA, retaining crucial discourse power on core issues [核心议题中仍掌握关键话语权] such as AI ethics, model interpretability, trustworthy AI and algorithmic transparency.

Most importantly, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 is the core body for setting international standards in artificial intelligence. Its secretariat is the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), operating through ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). Since 2018, this body has led the drafting of several key standards, including the AI Management System (ISO/IEC 42001:2023) and AI Risk Management Guidelines. SC 42 comprises five working groups (WGs), each responsible for a distinct technical area. Among these, Chinese experts hold the convenorship of only one group—WG5 on “Computational Approaches and Computational Characteristics of AI Systems”. The convenors of the other groups come from Canada, the US, Ireland and Japan. As such, in terms of strategic direction, control of the secretariat, and agenda-setting, China still lags far behind the United States. This structure highlights that while China is making sustained efforts in international standardisation, there remains considerable room for it to increase its presence in organisational leadership and more generally in senior roles [within international standard-setting bodies].

Given the current situation, I recommend that China promote the internationalisation of embodied intelligence standards by moving beyond the traditional mindset of “intra-ISO competition” and shifting towards an “ecosystem-led” model driven by technology and open-source platforms. Standards should be embedded into the open-source implementations of leading platforms such as AIRSHIP, with reference implementations and toolchains published on global mainstream technical communities like GitHub and Hugging Face—thereby enabling external adoption through a “code-as-standard” model.

At the same time, standards should be tightly integrated with Chinese hardware and software systems, accompanying product deployments abroad into emerging markets, thereby establishing these standards as the de facto choice. Only when Chinese standards are widely adopted in technical applications and development can China truly build global discursive power — elevating itself from “participant” to “rule-maker”.

Due to how and when it developed [历史发展原因], China lags far behind the United States in both the maturity of its AI open-source ecosystem and its influence over international standards systems. This section will discuss the international discourse power and influence of Chinese AI researchers. In particular, it will look at how global influence of individuals can help China reach mainstream user groups worldwide.

In recent years, Chinese AI experts have significantly increased their standing within — and become distributed more widely across — the global academic community, laying a solid human capital foundation for China's technological internationalisation. According to MacroPolo’s 2023 report, 38% of top AI researchers in the US were originally from China—slightly surpassing the 37% with domestic US backgrounds. In top international AI and robotics conferences and journals, Chinese scholars are approaching US levels in terms of both their output of papers and participation in peer review. Data from Guide2Research also show a steady rise in China’s share among the world’s top-ranked computer scientists, indicating that the academic calibre of Chinese AI talent is now world-leading.

Building on this, national and local authorities in China have introduced numerous policies in recent years to encourage talent repatriation [Note: of which Liu is a beneficiary] and to support the development of research platforms—strengthening the country’s AI R&D capabilities. However, boosting the global influence of Chinese AI cannot rely solely on “talent returning home”; it also requires a systematic strategy for “talent going abroad”. More outstanding Chinese AI professionals should be encouraged to work in Belt and Road countries and other emerging markets. This means actively engaging in the development of local education systems and industry by taking up academic positions, establishing research institutes, launching joint laboratories, or founding tech companies. This will not only support the global diffusion of Chinese technologies and standards but also help build a China-centred global network of scientific and technological cooperation.

Although systematic data on the number of Chinese scholars teaching in Belt and Road countries is still lacking, the activity level of cooperation platforms such as the University Alliance of the Silk Road suggests that China has considerable potential in terms of talent export and knowledge diffusion. Accordingly, while continuing to encourage “talent repatriation”, the state should also establish institutional frameworks to support “talent going abroad”. These might include setting up dedicated overseas teaching and research cooperation funds, advancing joint training mechanisms with Belt and Road countries, and promoting localisation of technology standard certifications and curriculum development—thereby enabling the global expansion of Chinese AI and embodied intelligence and strengthening China’s international discourse power.

This article has provided a systematic examination of the current international landscape and the technological, open-source, standards-based and talent-related foundations underpinning the global expansion of Chinese AI.

In the face of a new wave of trade protectionism and technological blockades launched by the United States in 2025 — which are leading to the restructuring of the global technological order — China is entering a strategic window for technology diffusion. Historical experience shows that while technological leadership is a prerequisite, without the combined strength of early adopters, standard disseminators and consensus-builders in governance, it remains difficult to establish a dominant position within the global technology system. Therefore, the development of Chinese AI must not be confined to domestic applications and talent repatriation; instead, it must shape the global ecosystem proactively, foster international consensus and construct a China-led pathway for innovation diffusion.

To this end, the article recommends that China formulate and implement an integrated internationalisation strategy built around “technology–open-source–standards–talent”. Specifically, this means:

1. Strengthening technological leadership by focusing on critical areas in foundation models and embodied intelligence systems, and promoting continuous technological [upgrades] through iteration;

2. Building an open-source ecosystem portal, enabling the international release of systems, models and toolchains via platforms to capture greater market share;

3. While striving for greater influence [话语权] within the existing international standards system, China should simultaneously promote an “open source is the standard” approach—embedding standards into hardware–software product systems and exporting them to emerging markets as part of their global deployment;

4. Encouraging the international mobility of top-tier talent, supporting their development in Belt and Road countries and beyond, and building a global network for R&D and standards dissemination—thereby securing meaningful international discourse power and a structural advantage for Chinese AI technologies and governance frameworks.

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