YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

lines on the record

203

first

2025-04-24

most recent

2025-04-24

sittings or episodes

1

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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Reveled in disorder and thought disorder 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 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 anything that can't be controlled. So you can, you know, there are a lot of ways that 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. And Confucian traditions are based on kind of stable hierarchies for the most part and sort of clear categories of superior, inferior.”

   2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “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 it was Xi Jinping, you've had a throwback to that period in Communist Party rule, which seemed as though it might be a part of the past. So 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 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 monkey king who could turn the heavens upside down.”

   2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “So, the biggest commonality of them is that they're both the subject of personality cults and that Mao is 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 might have thought that sort of what happened with Comyist 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.”

   2025-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #466 – Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China, Xi Jinping, Trade War, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source