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

The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom. You've compared Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong in the past. What are the parallels between the two leaders and where do they differ? Xi Jinping, of course, is the current leader of China for the past 12 years, and Mao Zedong was the communist leader of China from 1949 to 1976. So what are the commonalities? What are the differences?

So the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults, and that Mao was the center of a very intensely felt one from 1949 to 1976. And when he died, you know, there was tremendous outpouring of grief, even among people who had objectively suffered enormously because of his policies. Xi Jinping is the first leader in China since him who has had a sustained personality cult of the kind where if you walk into a bookstore in China, the first thing you see are books by him, collections of speeches. And when Mao was alive, you, you might have thought that's sort of what happened with Communist Party leaders in China, but after Mao's death, there was such an effort to not have that kind of personality cult that there was a tendency to not publish the speeches of a leader until they were done being in power. I, I was first in China in 1986, and you could go for days without being intensely aware of who was in charge of the party. You would know, but his face wasn't everywhere. The newspaper wasn't dominated with stories about him and quotations from his words and things like that. So with Xi Jinping, you had a, a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So that's, that's a key commonality. And a key difference is that Mao really reveled in chaos, in turning things upside down in a sense that, um, you know, he talked about class struggle, which came out of Marxism, but he also really... His favorite work of Chinese popular fiction was The Monkey King about this legendary figure who, this, this Monkey King who could turn the heavens upside down. So he reveled in disorder and thought disorder was a, was a way to improve things. Xi Jinping is very orderly, is very concerned with kind of stability and predictability. So you can see them as very, very different that way. And Mao also liked to stir things up, liked to have people on the streets, um, clamoring. So Xi Jinping, even though he has a personality cult, it's not manifesting itself. He doesn't like the idea of people on the streets in any- anything that can't be controlled. So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways that they're, they're similar, a lot of ways they're different. They're also different, and this fits with this orderliness, that Xi Jinping talks positively about Confucius and Confucian traditions in China. Um, and Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior and inferior, whereas Mao liked things to be turned upside down. He thought of Confucianism as a futile way of thought that it hold, held China back. So you can come up with things that they're similar and you can come up with things where they're really opposites, but they both clearly did want to see China under rule by the Communist Party, and that's been a continuity and that connects them to the leaders in between them too as well.