Xi Jinping’s World of Treachery and Sacrifice

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Orville, thank you for doing this. You’ve, of course, been on the podcast before for a fascinating conversation with Steve Kotkin about Mao and Stalin, but I’m very glad to have your solo return.

ORVILLE SCHELL

My pleasure.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve been one of the most perceptive observers of interactions between American presidents and Chinese communist leaders, really since those interactions began with Nixon and Mao more than 50 years ago. You’ve personally witnessed some of these, with President Carter and President Trump in his first term, and surely others. What did you take from watching the first summit between Trump and Xi Jinping in Trump’s second term last week?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think whenever you are at one of these presidential meetings, whether it’s in China, another country, or in this country, you can feel the atmosphere of whether the two principles are really willing to play or if there’s a lot of resistance on the line, or whether they’re just out to get each other. And I think that the thing that’s so striking for me about Trump, and having been on his first trip to China and watched him since, and one other trip with him and Xi Jinping, is that I think his manner has built up a very high level of resistance in Xi Jinping. And you could sense that in Korea. But you could also sense a common conclusion that they were heading for an abyss and they ought to at least take a time-out. And I think that’s basically what we got.

But I think that the fundamental antagonism and contradictions that exist, but within the trade system, the geopolitical sort of structure that the US and China find themselves in, in the world, that really has not abated.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There was a sense, after the meeting, of a certain kind of paradigm shift in the U.S.-China relationship and in the Trump-Xi dynamic, kind of a moment of China treating this as its own arrival. I mean, it was an encounter that would fit with one of the attempted slogans of recent years, a new kind of great-power competition or the like. Some of that stemmed, I think, from Chinese generation and use of leverage around critical mineral supply, the kind of leverage that for several decades we thought of as mostly American, but the atmosphere of the meeting seemed to reinforce that, especially with Trump talking about a G-2 between the United States and China and calling Xi Jinping great. Did you see that paradigm shift or is that over-reading it?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Yeah, I think that there is a paradigm shift here and I think the paradigm shift is sort of, if you look at it historically, it’s that in fact, China has now at last gained the kind of leverage that historically, ever since the Opium Wars, it was seeking. And it was always somewhat of a supplicant. It was always compelled in some way or other to make some sort of genuflection before a meeting like this.

I mean, remember in the past, when people like Bush, or Obama or even Carter and after that, whenever they went to China, there was the presumption that they were giving something and that China had to let some dissidents free, let them out of prison, do something, make some demonstration of its willingness to make a concession. Those days are gone. And so I think the paradox is that we are now in a world where almost everyone ends up genuflecting to Trump except Xi Jinping. Now how that will work out, I don’t know, because it presents us with a kind of an insoluble sort of stubbornness on both sides, but this is definitely something new, where China has enough cards to really play the retaliatory game well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And that reflects work on China’s part, not just since Donald Trump’s first term, but over a longer period, an awareness of American dominance when it came to those kinds of competitions and the broader relationship. And it was really a conscious effort on Beijing’s part to correct that imbalance over time.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Yes. Whatever realm you look at, you see China seeking to correct the balance and gain greater independence and less dependence on the outside world, particularly on the United States. There’s a version of this in trade. There’s a version of this in military rise. There’s a version of it in China’s effort to become technologically, paradoxically, again, almost like Mao: autarkic, independent. So the game plan is, make China as independent and autarkic in all of these realms: military hardware, tech stuff, even finance, in every other way, geopolitically, while at the same time making the United States, Europe, and the so-called allies, partners and friends as dependent as China can make them on China. And this is where critical minerals or rare earths become so important. And if you sort of plot out the two double-entry chart of who has what choke points, you find that China is not without some ability to choke.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You and I were talking recently about the critical minerals piece of this, and we were both somewhat astonished to reflect on the fact that it’s been 15 years since China first used its control over critical mineral supply chains to pressure Japan. That was in 2010. There was a fair amount of focus of this in the American national security community starting in Trump’s first term, and certainly the Biden administration made this a priority. It doesn’t seem to have resulted in real action on the ground on the American part. Is that fair to say?

ORVILLE SCHELL

I think it’s quite extraordinary, when you look back and remember when China first used critical minerals, or what was then known as rare earths, against Japan—nobody woke up. It was quite striking, because you could see this sort of incipient lever being explored by China. I think it was partially because we just sort of didn’t imagine that they had the same kinds of levers that we had.

And so then when we got into the first sort of retaliatory cycle, which was Americans using microchips and the machines that fab microchips, particularly leading edge chips, the low nanometer range scale, we sort of didn’t realize that what’s fair for the goose might be fair for the gander. And then China began cataloging the things that it had. So that’s a very interesting exercise. We might even look at, What choke points does China have and what choke points do we still have? Because this is where we’re headed, despite the pause that was brought about by the meeting in Korea,

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There have been many surprises in Trump’s second term. One of the biggest to me is the shift in his China policy and his approach to China from the first term. What do you think Xi makes of Trump’s second term so far? As you’ve tried to understand Chinese reactions to the second coming of Trump, what do you think they understand of what he’s up to?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think we have to sort of forgive the Chinese if they have trouble making sense out of Trump, because I’m not sure anybody really has a handle on that question. And what you note is quite striking, that he’s gone from being sort of the prime hawk, recognizing a China threat, thinking that balance of payments is unsustainable, viewing China as the main competitor, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to where we are now, which is quite ambiguous, but there certainly is a strong sort of incipient tendency just to say, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter what the threat is, whether the geopolitics, what the political system is, just leader to leader, ‘I think I can fix this.’” This is sort of Trump’s attitude, and that what really matters is just two guys get together and slug it out, hug it out, whatever it takes, and sort of letting the whole notion of China as a threat, as a risk, and thus we need to be more hawkish in every category, whether it’s trade military diplomacy, that is, I think, up for grabs right now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you have a theory that there’s a Rorschach test quality to attempts to discern the China policy of Trump’s second term. Do you have a theory of—if we were going to give it the best possible analysis—what is your theory of what he’s trying to do at this point?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think one of the things that Trump has accomplished, which I think the Democrats and even the more sort of conventional Republicans fail to accomplish, is that his unpredictable nature is reminiscent of Chairman Mao. You don’t quite know what he’s going to do. It’s almost the madman theory of geopolitics. And so that has really thrown everybody, including China, somewhat off balance. He’s not very predictable, and there is power in that.

So I think it’s caused a lot of consternation in China, but fortunately, they know how to play that game because they’ve been doing this a long time too, and now they have the power, although Xi Jinping is not so unpredictable as Chairman Mao was, or as Trump. He’s quite predictable actually. I think he realizes that he’s going to have to play a game of hardball, and that’s where we are. And the paradox is that while American allies don’t wish to stand up to Trump because the costs are too high, Xi Jinping might be willing to, although you see him sometimes becoming a little cautious and recognizing that he better maybe sometimes give a little to get a little or the whole train will run off the rails.

And remember, China is a very export dependent country. It overproduces and it cannot absorb what it produces, whether it’s concrete, steel, copper, lithium, whatever. And so it is deeply embedded in the world, and this is one of the choke points, of course, that the United States has. It’s such a big market. Everybody needs it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to come back to Xi Jinping, but I want to first linger on this idea of Trump the Maoist, that Trump has this Maoist theory of power in some ways. There’s the foreign policy dimension of that. There also seems to be a domestic dimension of it—that his ideas of control and struggle and keeping people kind of both worked up, but also unsettled seems to be central to his theory of power domestically, as well. Do you think that’s fair to say? I’m not saying he was reading the writings of Chairman Mao and building his theory accordingly, but there does seem to be something connected there.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think Trump is Maoist in the sense that he, kind of in an animal way, recognizes that if you can put people off-balance and if you can make them unclear, not able to clearly recognize where you’re headed, you derive immense power from that. And so I don’t think this is a conscious thing, and unlike Mao, he’s not written it down in any sort of philosophical treatise, but he uses it. And so I think this makes him quite a threat to China. And I think if China really did want to understand him better, they would look at their own Cultural Revolution, when everything was getting turned upside down, and where the mantras were, “Make great disorder under heaven,” that was da nao tian gong, that was one of the great mantras of Mao. Or I remember there was a slogan back during the Mao years: “The world is in great disorder; excellent situation.” And there were many of these kinds of expressions.

And I think, again, Mao had a deep and abiding sense of the power of disorder, and his whole notion of the world as being in a state of contradiction constantly and that most contradictions had to be solved by struggle and even war was the outcome of that. I don’t think Trump has that sort of worldview and he hasn’t thought it through or written it down, but he almost instinctually knows what to do to make people scratch their heads and wonder, “Where are we? What the hell do we do here?”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I wonder if anyone has had the idea to create a little red book of Trump’s sayings. There’s probably one out there somewhere, but—

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think it would be a quaint idea. There is a certain virtue to that. And of course, on his side, we need to understand Xi Jinping in this equation because there are two things that need to be factored into the equation. People have spoken of him as being somewhat of a Maoist, and in a certain sense he is, but he’s not a Maoist in the sense that he likes disorder in China. He doesn’t. He’s not a person thrusting giant political mass movements and red guards attacking the party and the state.

So he’s Maoist in the sense that I think he feels there is a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between, well, it used to be capitalists and imperialists and socialists, and China and Russia, but now it’s between countries like the United States and maybe the EU and China—that yes, we have to get along in some degree, yes, we need to trade because we’re dependent on that, but deep down inside, I think he views that the fundamental intention is really to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and the one-party state in China. So that builds into the whole proposition of each analyzing the other a very antagonistic element.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You can discern in Xi Jinping’s speeches occasionally, and certainly in the speeches of Wang Yi, the foreign policy chief, a sense that China has a geostrategic opportunity investment, that the US is stepping back from its traditional global role in lots of ways. It is unsettling and alienating both allies and partners, both traditional allies and also partners in the global South. It’s withdrawing from international institutions. The Chinese decision-makers seem to have some awareness that this creates an opportunity for them.

At the same time, there’s some question about whether they’ll be able to effectively seize this. They haven’t really changed the economic practices that American allies, at least, object to, and many others. You’ve seen aggressive exercises in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea and East China Sea and elsewhere. How do you think China is reacting to this opportunity? Are they handling it adeptly or is this a kind of deficiency of their system that will prevent them from really seizing it?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think that they’re well aware that, for instance, Trump is not doing a very proficient job at keeping allies, partners, and friends together, which was the heart and soul of the whole strategy of deterrence, for instance, in the South China Sea or in Taiwan, or wherever, the border with India. But I think China, in its way—and I emphasize in its way because in its way is not always very beguiling or convincing to other countries, that, after all, it is a Marxist-Leninist state—but in its way, it’s doing quite an efficient and good job at sewing together an alternative universe, whether it’s the Belt and Road, whether it’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whether it’s BRICS, all of these very well-thought-out and put-together webs of interaction that it’s casting out around the world, where the United States is pulling back its aid. It’s also pushing away or confusing allies.

And so I think in this sense, China’s doing well, but you have to ask, does Southeast Asia, for instance—really, they want to, yes, walk in the middle and be able to deal with both the United States and China—but would they like to have a one-party state like China? I don’t think so. So in this sense, China does have an impediment, I think, to really being as successful as it might, but it’s very well-organized, very well-funded, and it’s making, I think, remarkable steps.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’ve been struck by the dynamic with Europe, between China and Europe. It seems like a moment when some shift in the Chinese position, especially on the war in Ukraine, would allow it to pick up some influence with Europeans who are concerned about actions coming from Washington. But Xi seems more committed to Putin and to supporting Putin’s war in Ukraine than I would’ve thought a year ago. Are you struck by the commitment to that policy?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Yes. And I think what we see with North Korea, too, and China—I mean they’re both not going to abandon Putin because Putin and Russia are the one big ally available to them. And they come well-armed with oil and gas. And I think the Ukraine war is a big impediment now between Europe and China. The problem is that countries like Germany are so deeply embedded in the [Chinese] economy, whether it’s automobile industry, BASF and chemicals, and one thing in another—it’s very hard for them to decouple. I mean, this is the word of the age, decouple. And everyone recognizes that as things get more hostile and more uncertain, this is probably the best strategy, but it’s very, very difficult to do. And this is why things like rare earths and polysilicon and chips, and you name it, are what’s going to rule the world for the next few years at least.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You have a fascinating piece in our new issue called “The Miseducation of Xi Jinping.” It’s a review of a book by Joseph Torigian about Xi Jinping’s father. But one of the lines that really struck me as I was reading your piece is about the difficulty of interpreting or understanding Xi Jinping. You write, “I’ve encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little about what’s going on inside their heads. With a Mona Lisa-like hint of a smile permanently etched in his face, Xi’s mien is hard to read.” Why, as you reflect on attempts to understand Xi Jinping by American policymakers over the last 15 or 20 years—I suppose since there was early speculation that he might be the next Chinese leader—why have they struggled and how have you understood that arc, the way we talk about Xi Jinping?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, Xi Jinping is very cloistered. He doesn’t reveal much. In this sense, he’s very much like this early school way back, thousands of years ago, of political statecraft called legalism, where the leader wants to be as elusive as possible, reveal very little, keep people on edge, be always uncertain, so everybody has to tiptoe around him. And I think that if you compare Xi to the whole group of last leaders, who I’ve watched come and go, Mao was a bit enigmatic, but Hu Yaobang, the next party general secretary, was incredibly open and sort of creative, and you could read him easily, he interacted well. And then came Zhao Ziyang, who was really like a normal person, had a daughter who’d been to college in Hawaii, and he would give interviews and sit and drink a bottle of beer. I remember one time with Tom Brokaw when NBC went over to China, he was not an enigma.

And I should say, in a certain sense, neither was Deng Xiaoping, and when he came in 1979 to confirm U.S. formal diplomatic relations with the United States and China, he was a very interesting and open and a person people warmed to very quickly. And even Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, who we thought was a little clownish at the time because he always liked to sing [“O sole mio”] in Italian or recite the Gettysburg Address, but actually he was very open. And when you saw him interact with Bill Clinton, when Clinton visited in 1998, it was an extraordinary moment because these two guys were enjoying each other’s company. You could see it. They were smiling and laughing. And then we had Hu Jintao, who sort of wasn’t there. It was hard to read him at all, but he was just sort of a non-entity.

But Xi Jinping is powerful, strong. He’s had great aspirations, great ambitions, great pretensions, but he’s very closed, very hard to read. And I think this was the result of his coming out of the Cultural Revolution, when his father, as Joseph Torigian so well explains in his book about his father, was a counter-revolutionary for 16 years. And this is when Xi Jinping was coming of age, and I think he learned, “Don’t reveal too much. Don’t say what you’re really thinking. It’ll only get you in trouble.” And he had to be redder than anybody else to survive. And I think he learned to be very sort of retracted. And in this sense, he’s quite different than many of the leaders who’ve gone before him. And that means when he gets together with someone—well, with Joe Biden, you would’ve thought, I mean Joe Biden’s this very avuncular, slap him on the back, “Hey, how are you doing, Xi? Let’s have a beer together.” No, that’s not Xi’s MO.

So he’s now cast in with Trump. I mean, I can’t think of two more unlikely figures, just as human beings. And it’s almost hard to imagine how they could interact, in a way, except by choke points to come up with any new balance to order.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You were in the room with both Trump and Xi, and I believe Biden and Xi as well, when Biden was vice president. What was it like watching that in person?

ORVILLE SCHELL

I mean, it really is like watching a statue. And no matter what Biden did—and you know the way he is, very kind of, “How are you doing? And hey, hey, come on down, let’s get together with the wife and kids”—and Xi Jinping was not buying any of that. He was just not going to go there. So it’s a very different kind of person. And I think we frequently, we who do foreign policy—and God knows Foreign Affairs does a lot of foreign policy—we forget that we are in an era of big leader culture. Ideology is important, yes, political systems are also important, but so is the personalities, the nature of each of these leaders. And I think Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, Kim Jong Un, even Modi—we’re in a different political world where these big leaders are what we need to understand better. Where did they come from? Who are they? What do they want? How are they going to react and respond? And I think we’re ill-equipped to do that.

And I would absolutely—here, I think literature can help us. In fact, there’s this very interesting new book just out called [The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear], and this young Chinese scholar at Johns Hopkins is sort of ruminating on Mao as a kind of a Lear-like figure, and doesn’t really get to Xi Jinping. But I think it’s these people as people who’ve become as important as these people with political worlds and worldviews and et cetera, et cetera. So I think we’re a little bit like we were in World War II: you know, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Salazar, Ho Chi Minh, Mao. I mean, this was big leader culture, and we’re kind of back into it again.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I imagine that’s what explains what’s been so fascinating to a lot of readers about the Torigian book about Xi Jinping’s father, is that this is one way to try to understand perhaps the most important or one of the most important of those big leaders in ways that we haven’t so far. Torigian is very disciplined about not engaging in, I think as you put it in the essay, Freudian analysis of Xi Jinping based on his father’s experience. But as you read about the father, what else beyond that closed quality do you think Xi Jinping took from that experience?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think he learned, first of all, I think he didn’t buy sort of the whole Maoist lexicon, but it’s not so much that as the Leninist version of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, that I think he took away, that you need to be disciplined above all. And this is when his father said, and he says, “The party’s interests come first.” This takes discipline, because no matter what the party has done or what the party does, you don’t leave it. And his father, even though he was literally crucified for 16 years, and that was the second purging—incredibly painful, taken away from his family, pilloried, demeaned, imprisoned—he didn’t leave the party. And I think Xi Jinping has absorbed that kind of discipline, devotion, and loyalty to the party.

And so I think that’s one thing we do need to bear in mind, and that comes with a whole package of things he will and won’t do. And he’s not going to take the portrait of Chairman Mao down off of Tiananmen Gate and say, “That was a bad moment back then, let’s move on.” No, he’s going to embrace the past. He’s going to stick with the past, and that means he’s also going to retain the presumptions of the past towards the outside world, and particularly the United States of America, which is, no matter what they say, no matter what they do, there is a fundamental and antagonistic contradiction. There’s a hostility that we can’t ever, ever ignore.

And I think that is something that’s probably pretty deep in his being. So no matter how many times Obama says, “China’s rise is not against American interest; we don’t oppose it,” it doesn’t go into the operating system. And so I think this makes it really, really difficult, as we go forward, to find any more than momentary common ground on certain critical issues that both people need to work out or their economies will come to an end, or they’ll have military conflict. So we’re in a very transactional world and a world between blocs that are forming, I think, that are fundamentally insoluble with each other.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Reading your piece, it’s hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for the teenage Xi Jinping during the Cultural Revolution. You recount these anecdotes from the Torigian book about Xi’s own mother denouncing him and turning him to authorities when he searched for food. And of course, he was, I think when he was 15 or so, sent off to a poor village, taken out of school to do manual labor for several years. There was an expectation that that would lead to a degree of moderation in Xi Jinping, that he would take from that experience a desire not to repeat that kind of ideological extremism. It seems to have driven him the other way. How do you understand his relationship with the Cultural Revolution, beyond just reflecting on his father’s own experience?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Dan, I think that we underappreciate how important formative years are in creating a leader. I mean, that’s what goes into the political genome of their being. And I think this is why Torigian’s book, I think, is so interesting. As you point out, he eschews wallowing into the bog of psychoanalysis, but he lays out what happened. It’s like a playwright. You watch the play—here’s what happened. You can read into it whatever you want. Or a great novel.

And I think we do need to understand that—and it’s the same as with Trump, his formative years were incredibly important to him, and I think they were quite brutal too, with his father, who was not a very kind or an embracing man, and books have been written about that. So I think, again—and if you go back in history, Hitler too had these problems. So did Stalin. I mean, people become who they are by the lives they’ve lived. And that part is very hard to understand in foreign policy discussions because we usually think of policy in terms of national interest, of rational things. But the truth is many, many leaders in history have not been rational.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you read Xi Jinping as irrational or actually quite savvy? I mean, there’s a piece in the same issue by Jon Czin, who was the chief CIA China analyst, China political analyst, for a long time, and he talks about Xi’s ability to correct course, and even without democratic feedback mechanisms, a degree of self-correction that might surprise many American observers. Do you think that gets it right or what accounts for that side of Xi Jinping?

ORVILLE SCHELL

I think Xi Jinping is fairly well-ordered and not sort of constantly threatening to run off the rails the way some leaders are. However, I think he is deeply insecure, which means that he’s very sensitive to any imputations of weakness. And this is always a big challenge. I mean, leaders that are confident can make concessions without feeling wounded, damaged, or weak. And I think Xi Jinping probably has a more difficult time doing that than, I mean, someone like Mao was both insecure and confident, could throw his weight around with impunity. But so I think, yeah, listen, this is a difficult area, and I think this is why it behooves us to go back and read Shakespeare and Euripides and Sophocles, because they kind of nailed these archetypes of leadership that help us understand someone like Xi Jinping, and paradoxically, Trump. I mean, the Richard plays, he’s right there, hump and all.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m struck, when I hear Chinese observers talk about Xi Jinping, about this other parallel with Trump in their relationship to their own elites. They both, in some sense, came from very elite backgrounds. Trump was very wealthy; Xi Jinping was a child of a revolutionary leader, was a princeling. And yet they both have this very tortured relationship with elites, the sense that they were not quite accepted by them. And when Chinese people observe Xi Jinping, they say he hates elites of all kinds, but kind of comes alive when he’s among the people, as he sees it. Trump seems very similar in that regard.

ORVILLE SCHELL

I think that’s right, and it’s a very, I think, astute observation, something that’s worth remembering as we read the paper and we try to figure out what’s going on, but who these people are and how they respond isn’t always based on the best interest of their country or the world. I mean, when you think about it, what rational leader would let go of engagement? This was nine presidential administrations on our side all trying to get along, and China got wealthy and China developed. Why put a stake through the heart of engagement? It was working pretty well for everybody. And so you have to ask the question, then: Was that in China’s interest? Well, yes, if you aspire to a China dream and the sense of China regaining a kind of greatness that it historically once had, and it doesn’t matter if you have to break some eggs to get there. But from any other perspective, it isn’t very logical. So we have to understand there is an illogic in some of the biggest decisions that these leaders make, and it’s perhaps based on something else other than kind of a very cool, calculated assessment of what’s good for their economy, what’s good for their people, what’s good for the world. These are human beings.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Unification between the mainland and Taiwan is one of the key pieces of that from Xi Jinping’s perspective. I think there was a lot of anxiety from hardliners on China in this country and lots of others, including many officials from Trump’s first term, going into the meeting in Korea last week that there’d be some kind of deal on Taiwan. As far as it’s been reported, as far as the readouts have it, there was really no talk of Taiwan. How do you understand Xi’s strategy toward Taiwan at this point? Is 2027 a meaningful benchmark?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I think it was sort of amazing that Taiwan didn’t come up in Korea, but it didn’t. But nothing should amaze us too much in this world, where we really are—enlightenment-era minds don’t always tell us what’s going to happen.

I mean, I think Taiwan is such a devilish and such a vexing issue because it bespeaks of one of the last things that the Chinese Communist Party said it would do as it came to power in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the last century, and then since then, that it would reunify China. And it has reunified China according to the old Qing dynasty map, which is very expansive—includes Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and as we now see, the South China Sea. So this was a big deal.

So I think for Xi, it is a kind of a matter of pride. I think he feels he can’t be a big leader and not put this piece of the puzzle back together. Never mind that Deng Xiaoping said in 1979 in Japan, on his way to Washington, “Oh, let’s leave it for future, smarter generations to solve it.” Even Mao Zedong told Nixon, “It’s okay if we don’t solve this for 100 years, let’s not let it get in the way,” and they didn’t.

But for Xi, I think it’s a matter of pride. And I think, again, pride merges somewhere with face, one of the most poorly understudied aspects of Chinese cultural behavior, and makes it a very sensitive issue. So what’s going to happen there? It’s very hard to know. One would hope they could just kick the can down the road for another 100 years, and at some point China would become more of a republican country, and Taiwan would say, “Great, let’s team up.” But we’re not there. So I think it’s—I worry.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As I look at the other pieces of that definition of greatness, if you go back over the past 15 years or so, 20 years, China has gotten quite assertive on each one of them. And despite occasional pushback from the United States or others, and lots of rhetoric denouncing measures in the South China Sea or Hong Kong or treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or Tibetans, China has more or less gotten away with all of those. Some of that’s Xi Jinping, some of it precedes him, but I imagine you’d be quite confident about your ability to do the same with Taiwan if you’re a Chinese leader looking at that record.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Yes, and I think gray-zone tactics are what will probably ultimately happen bit by bit by bit, so that there’s no moment when anyone says, “That’s enough. That’s it. We’re in.” But we have to remember there are other places—the whole area that is west of Burma, up the “Chicken’s Neck” in India, the northeast territories, China calls it South Tibet, and on its maps, every town is in Chinese and they say, “It’s ours.” They just haven’t claimed it the way they have in certain territory in Ladakh. So I mean, there are a lot of pieces of unresolved real estate flying around Asia that a leader like Xi Jinping, who is very grandiose in his pretensions of restoring China to greatness, will certainly want to—it’s like getting the crown of Napoleon’s wife back, and if the jewel’s missing, you want to put them back in the crown. He wants China to be restored to greatness. This isn’t a abiding dream of his, the China dream.

And it is also, I think, bespeaks of his own sense of insecurity and wanting to make himself and China be strong, respected, even if it’s an autocracy, even if you don’t act respectably. I think it’s really important to Xi Jinping that he’d be respected, esteemed, and not treated as some tinpot dictator who’s shut out of the G-7 or whatever. So I think we’ve got some very, very contentious issues here, which are manifested in the most graphic way by the leaders themselves, both in Russia, China, and the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was fascinated by the comment you made a couple minutes ago about face, about the way we misunderstand the significance of face, or the extent to which it’s understudied. This strikes me as something that any American policymaker throws around about China, especially that you need to think about face. What do you think we get wrong in our understanding of that concept?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Yeah, it’s very hard to talk about because it sounds somewhat condescending to just say, “Oh, the Chinese have a face problem.” But you have to remember that the last 100 years have been what they call the 100 Years of Humiliation. There is a narrative that came out of Leninism of the imperializers and the imperialized, and it’s a very demeaning narrative for countries like China, but they built out of it a whole victim culture, and a culture of humiliation, so that even as China has become an immense success, they still have not been able to drop the narrative of failure and humiliation. It’s kind of a paradoxical thing.

And this plays into whatever this category of face is all about, which I think is quite profound. And there are some cultural elements, which I think are distinctly Chinese, that make it difficult to vault over an insult or something that deprives someone in public life, or even private life, of face. And I think this is a really big issue that has been built into a national culture. So it’s embedded in the whole nationalist narrative of what China is and how it interacts with the world, and how the world treats it and denies it face, humiliates it, disesteems it, and all of these things are true.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve talked about the engagement period of the U.S.-China relationship over the course of nine or so presidencies, and how good that was for China. I think what’s so fascinating about your body of work, going back decades, is that you started chronicling China from the outside before you were able to go there during the, I guess, the Cultural Revolution, or even before. You were very much present in the early years of opening and started traveling to China and spending time there, and you’ve watched the end of that era.

There’s a way we depict the engagement period, that there was an expectation that China would evolve in ways that would make it more like us, or at least better able to coexist with us in the international order. As you look back at the early hopes of that opening, how do you understand them and what do you think they got fundamentally wrong, or was it the right thing to try and merely had an expiration date?

ORVILLE SCHELL

That’s a really important question, and I think engagement was the right thing to try. If America is truly a great power, it should always try to peacefully resolve something, particularly when it’s dealing with an autocratic state. And if there is any way under heaven for that state to slowly morph into something less antagonistic—maybe not completely democratic, but no democracy is perfect—that would be a great victory. And I think, to America’s credit, it really did try. Universities went in, ballet troupes, foundations, government, I mean, programs, I mean, we were full on trying to make that work to somehow mute the contradiction between the two countries that existed under Mao. And we came very close. And paradoxically, I think 1989 was a terrible blow to the promise of engagement and reform upon which engagement depended.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This was Tiananmen Square and the images of that massacre?

ORVILLE SCHELL

This is Tiananmen Square, and the Beijing Massacre kind of ended that promise to some really significant degree, but then it did come back again under Jiang Zemin, to some significant degree, and there was grounds for hope. So was it wrong? No, I don’t think it was. Was it naive? Yes, it was somewhat naive because it didn’t take into account the fundamental and flexibility of Leninist systems, and we’ve talked about that with Steve Kotkin on Stalin and Mao. But I think it was a good try. Could it return? It’s possible. And I think it’s really important for us to remember as we look at policy now, and we see these two big leaders lumbering around, bumping into each other, that underneath the suspicion, paranoia, distrust, there’s 150 years of deep and abiding interaction that goes way back to the missionary years. It had its downsides, sure, but I mean, there’s a fundamental aquifer of good U.S.-China feeling that’s beneath the surface, and it will arise up again sometime. When? It’s very hard to say.

So I’m not completely despairing about the future, but I think it’s going to be incredibly difficult to avoid some trigger moment happening that leads to military conflict. That’s my great worry. And then, of course, with military conflict in the Ukraine, and if we had it in Asia, we’d essentially have a world war. So I think that’s the fear. And here, diplomacy is important, but here, Trump is not the steadiest hand on the helm.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s right. It’s hard to imagine how a real crisis in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea would play out with the current set of leaders we have to deal with.

ORVILLE SCHELL

No, we might end up in a terrible conflagration, or he might just give it away.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s another fascinating theme in your work, going back decades, about the ways in which underneath the kind of dominant political narrative or geopolitical narrative, there’s much more ferment and debate and diversity within Chinese political and intellectual and civic life than might appear from the outside. You wrote about this in a 2021 essay about the centennial of the [Chinese Communist Party] for Foreign Affairs, but you also wrote a fascinating piece in 2004 on China’s hidden democratic legacy, where you looked at thinkers, especially in the late Qing and early, early Republican period in the first half of the 20th century, Chinese attempts to define their own political systems, their own versions of democracy. Talk a bit about those thinkers and whether you think there’s any enduring value and perhaps significance in Chinese political life to them.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, Dan, being a historian, I really do believe that history exists and exerts a kind of field of gravity even after it passes, that it is a country’s past and it stays with it. Whether it’s a revolution, it stays with it. Whether it’s a democratic movement, it also stays with it. And China does, as I just said, have a deep and abiding fund of much more liberal, and to a certain degree, Westernized, but a democratic tradition that it can draw on. And I think you see that, for instance, when you go to Taiwan. I mean, here are Chinese people, by at least the mainland’s account—there’s some Taiwanese who don’t think that—but they do have a vibrant democracy. One feels relaxed and comfortable there, not always followed, watched. You don’t have to be careful about what you say and you do. So there it is.

And that came out of the whole Chiang Kai-Shek era, which you’ll remember, in the 1930s, was immensely promising. That was the golden decade. When China was developing, it had a republican government. It wasn’t completely democratic, but it was not doing badly. And then what happened? The Japanese invade. And it was, I think, doing pretty well in competing with the communists, even trying to exterminate them. But after that, the gift to the Communist Party was Japan’s occupation of China.

So that republican experiment, remember that in that government—you’ve written about it in your wonderful book on George Marshall—I mean, he had Christians, he had people who studied in Europe and America. There was no—I see the Chinese just said that any leader that has a child that doesn’t come home six months after graduating from the United States will lose his job. That wasn’t the case back then.

So that tradition of cosmopolitanism exists. And remember Chiang Kai-Shek, he was a Christian. He became a Christian per force of his wife. He also remained a Confucian, and he prayed every day, read the Bible every day, did Confucian meditation every day. So that was another whole world that existed, largely came out of Shanghai in the treaty ports. And it’s not gone away.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You have an ability to follow debates within China that are inaccessible to most of us. It has, of course, become much harder in the last few years as it’s become more difficult to go to China and the kinds of conversations you can have once there, or certainly more constrained than they were ten or 15 years ago. But you still do have interactions and relationships, and are part of conversations that reflect that kind of diversity and ferment now. How much is there that we’re not seeing on the surface? How do you understand that deeper debate about the future of China and its political system that’s unfolding today?

ORVILLE SCHELL

The years of reform that began in 1978 continued through the 1990s were profound years for China. It was when China literally came alive after the Cultural Revolution. People were going all around the world as businessmen, students, whatever, cultural troupes. And it influenced several generations in ways that I think are very hard to palpate now, hard to feel it ,because Xi Jinping has sort of put such a dome over what can be publicly said, public discourse. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And I think those years are profound. And if you know Chinese people in the professional classes, educated classes, urban people, you realize there’s a lot of disaffection, but Chinese know when they can speak and when they can’t. They’re realistic people. And to be a dissident in China, it leads to one place: it leads to jail. And it leads maybe to death. And rational people with families and kids and jobs, they’d rather not go there, so they tiptoe around. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking things that aren’t published in the People’s Daily.

So I think my long association with China reminds me that there are many, many layers that we can’t divine easily now, but are there. And I see it in my friends. I see it in the work that I do. It’s just harder to see and it’s harder to participate in than it used to be. We were so accompanied to just running back and forth between China and the United States, whether we were Chinese or Americans or Europeans. The barriers had fallen down for one amazing few decades, and now they’re back up again. So when Xi Jinping grants visas to the New Zealanders and the Europeans—you don’t need to get a visa; you can go for a week—it’s a device, but it doesn’t rebuild the kind of interaction that once was so influential and had such a profound impact for a period of time. But it happened, and we shouldn’t forget it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Not that we’re in quite as dramatic rupture as we were in 1949, but I am struck, reflecting back on that history, the extent to which the inaccessibility of China to American policymakers and journalists and cultural figures and others, the extent to which that created an image of China that I think undermined good policy and good understanding in American foreign policy. And I worry about that a bit now as well. Do you see a similar kind of rupture?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, I mean, I think it’s very easy. We began this conversation talking about hawks. When you get in a situation like we’re now presently in, it’s not illogical to be somewhat hawkish, if you see China as a threat and a risk. And what engagement did for a moment, for a couple decades ,was sort of mute that impulse, and I think in a real way. When Deng Xiaoping was here in 1979, I remember we went down to Texas with this rodeo, I mean, it’s a classical moment. And they were playing country western music, and everybody’s eating ribs and beans, and then Deng Xiaoping was sitting in the front row, and this cowgirl came up on a quarter horse and slapped a 20-gallon hat on his head.

Well, this was the kind of theater that gave everybody permission to relax and to say, “It’s okay to like each other.” But we’re not there now. And Xi Jinping’s not going to do that kind of theater, I wager. Although he would be one of the smartest, brightest, most worshipped leaders on earth if he could engineer such a moment, to say, “Okay, let’s stop. Let’s get back to a time when it’s okay to interact. You don’t need to be careful, you don’t need to have a lot of official talk that doesn’t make any sense. Let’s just be human beings and see what we can work out.” But those moments are few. It didn’t come in Germany and we had a world war. It didn’t come with Russia.

So I don’t know. This is why I say leadership is everything, and who the leaders are really matter. What they believe, yes, that matters, too, but what they’re afraid of, what they like, what they dislike, all of these things are—these are complicated people.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a thread in your work of cautioning the rest of us against drawing straight-line projections from where things are now to where they’ll be in the future. If you look beyond Xi Jinping, what kind of change can you imagine, whether it’s an adjustment back to where we were or something else altogether?

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, Dan, listen, remember what an enormous amount China has accomplished. It’s staggering. In my lifetime, I’ve watched it. I was there when Mao Zedong was wreaking havoc with the Cultural Revolution. And now look at the place.

If Xi Jinping could enjoy that success and all those accomplishments and say, “Listen, let’s take a”—Mao Zedong once called the Chinese people yi zhang bai zhi, a piece of blank paper. If you just take out a blank piece of paper and say, “Let’s try to write this again,” and there actually need not be a contradiction between China and America because we’ve lived a time when the contradiction was very muted. Let’s get back to that. What’s wrong with that? He would be the greatest leader on earth. He would be a man memorialized by today’s Euripides as the non-tragic leader who overcame his tragic flaws and his excessive ambition, and instead positioned China to be a leader in the world with whom everybody could feel comfortable. I think that would be an extraordinary accomplishment. Will it happen? Well, you see, here’s where leadership matters.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a great note to end on. Orville, thank you for both the most recent piece and the series of wonderful pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the years. We’ll look forward to the next one, and it’s been great to have you on the podcast solo for the first time.

ORVILLE SCHELL

Well, great, Dan. It’s always fun writing for you all and being on your podcast. I really enjoy it.