The Power Politics behind Xi’s Grand Strategy

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green, and I am delighted to be joined today by Minxin Pei, one of the keenest observers, sharpest observers and analysts of internal Chinese politics, and how that impacts the entire world. Minxin is the Tom and Margot Pritzker, 72 Professor of Government, and George R. Roberts Fellow at the Claremont McKenna College. And before joining Claremont McKenna, he was Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and served as the Director of the China Program there.
His work on China is incredibly insightful. I've leaned on it myself as a non-China scholar for decades. And Minxin has a new book out, which we'll talk a lot about today among other things, called The Broken China Dream, How Reform Revived Totalitarianism. And we'll start with that book, Minxin. But as you know, on this podcast, we like to know what broken dreams created the Asia experts we talked to. I talked to people who thought they were going to be ballerinas or brain surgeons. When you were a young student, did you think someday you wanted to be one of the most authoritative scholars on Chinese politics or was it an accident in your case as well?

**Minxin Pei** (1:33)
That was a total accident. Frankly, when I was growing up in China, when I was in high school, my greatest ambition was to be a cotton farmer in the suburbs of Shanghai. Because in those days, high school graduates were sent to Manchuria, Heilongjiang, and as a southerner, that was a way to code for me. So I said, if I could just stay in Shanghai, I would be totally set.
But of course, the culture of which ended, I got into university, became an English major. I started out as an English major of the government department at Harvard.
So in 1984, I came to the University of Pittsburgh to study creative writing because that was the only way for me to get to the US. But my passion was always in politics. Because of my adolescent experience during the Cultural Revolution, I wanted to find out more about politics. In 1986, I applied and got into the graduate program in the Gulf Department. And from then on, my career was all set.

**Mike Green** (2:44)
Minxin, you seem way too young to have been in high school during the Cultural Revolution.
And I have to say, cotton farmer of the various aspirations of guests I've had, I think that actually may be the most unique. Did you ever become a cotton farmer or the culture?

**Minxin Pei** (2:57)
Never. I think I actually worked in a state-owned enterprise. The tender age of 16 and a half, I worked in SOE for four years before I became a college student. So I know everything about the pathologies of state ownership.
Of course, we can talk about that at another time. I had a more social experience as a student when I was in college, and of course, when I got into graduate school, I was way older than my classmates. I was 29 when I got into the PhD program at Harvard, and my cohort, Ferreza Carrier, was one of them. They were seven years younger, so I was a lot older than my class.

**Mike Green** (3:43)
It's interesting, colleagues of mine, friends who went through the Cultural Revolution, were stamped by it, profoundly stamped by it. Wang Jixue, of course, Cui Tankai, the former ambassador, all of them a bit older than you, and they ended up working on tractor factories or on farms.
The vast majority of them, I don't know dozens, but the ones I know who went through it, they came out deeply suspicious of authoritarianism. In your case, as I know from your work, committed to understanding the sources of authoritarianism, but also reinforcing the pillars of democracy and open societies. We'll talk about Xi more, but since we're on this formative experience you had, it is interesting. When Xi Jinping came to power, many experts told me like others in his generation, he would be suspicious of authoritarianism. The Cultural Revolution stamped everyone that way. But of course, like the Vietnam War in the US or other traumatic experiences, people come out with different conclusions and it seems that unlike you, or unlike, I would argue, Sui Tuan Kai or Wang Juxiu or other scholars and diplomats, he came out with a different conclusion which was not fear authoritarianism, but fear chaos and embrace authoritarianism. Is that a fear? We'll come back to Xi, but do you think that was an important formative element for him and one of the reasons China is in this authoritarian reversion?