YouSaid · the spoken record

Joseph Torigian

lines on the record: 39
first: 2025-08-07
most recent: 2025-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: 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

“Leader he was going to be, right? And these were not stupid people. These were people who had been around the block over and over and over again. And the reason these purges happened, the reason why someone like Xi Zhong Shin, who was actually quite cautious and quite clever, why he crashed on the shoals of power struggles is because he also didn't fully understand the repercussions of what he was doing. In that sense, we should keep in mind just how hard it is to get this system right, not just for people on the outside, but even for people on the inside too.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That evidence is meaningful to you in a way that maybe even a compilers of it did not expect. And also I just made a list of every time that Xi Jung-shun met with a foreigner and then tried to either speak to that person or go to their archives. I spoke to the Dalai Lama. I went to the French Communist Party archives because she jumped into France. I went to the archives in Serbia because he went to a big important congress in Yugoslavia when it still existed, that kind of thing. And so, you know, what are the main misunderstandings? Well, one thing to say is that this isn't always just a case of Westerners who don't understand China getting it wrong for cultural reasons or whatever, but people at the very heart of this system also constantly got it wrong, right? And so as I mentioned earlier, these people who knew the Xi family were totally dumbfounded by Xi Jinping when it became clear what kind of”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future people will find new things, and that it's an ongoing project. There's never going to be a definitive version. But nevertheless, there's enough that you can do to say in the interim, at least, something meaningful, something to start a conversation. And so, for example, a lot of internal documents, a lot of archives have made their way to American libraries and institutions in Hong Kong and Taiwan. people from the mainland were able to publish histories outside of censorship, but also document collections and memoirs. But you also need to use the stuff that comes out of mainland China. So there was a period where party history journals were really pushing the envelope. But even the official stuff like the chronologies and the official biographies, you can mine those things for biographical details, but also you can put it in the context of other material you've collected and then suddenly”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when you do research on the Chinese Communist Party, you can't just go to a couple archives, collect the material, and write it up. You need to have a different sense of sensibilities. You have to be sensitive to the possibilities, not the limitations, and recognize that you're going to have to collect a lot of different”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y'all say one other thing about this it's DH Lawrence wrote chapter in a book about Moby Dick and he talked about all this practicality in search of a mad mad chase and that also really gets to something at the heart of the party that we've talked about which is during the revolution during the Great Leap Forward during the cultural revolution you see these goals that are just utopian and at the same time that doesn't mean that the party sometimes even the same moment sometimes more than others doesn't also have this very practical side very flexible side and these two elements have coexisted from the very beginning in ways that I think are meaningful to dwell on too.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's when you write a biography, you need to talk about psychology And the fact that Xi Jongfun and Xi Jinping went through these traumas can't be ignored. And you need to talk about it. And it needs to be addressed. But psychology and history, psychology and politics are different disciplines for a reason, which is that you can't essentialize their behavior down to what they experienced as children, right? So a lot of people thought that everything Stalin did could be explained by the fact that he was beaten up when he was a young person, right?”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It raises this question of like, why would people be so loyal to this person who's so strange and so eccentric? And I think it's because this idea of the adventure and the thrill and mission was something that spoke to something at the heart of their lives.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ahab, riot, so there's this one moment where he thinks about killing him, but he recognizes that that's a violation of the law of the ship. And also, Starbuck is similar to Xi Zhong-Shun in the sense that when he thinks that something is not going the way he thinks is right, he remonstrates but very carefully in a way that he's almost not even really remonstrating because of just how cautious he is. And I'll say one final thing about this, right? What's interesting about Moby Dick is The whole crew kind of gets on board with this crazy idea of hunting this whale, right? And it kind of reminds me of this quote by Deng Xiaoping about the Great Leaf Ford, which is that we all had the fever, right?”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He knew better, but he still allowed himself to be a victim, and by doing that he doomed himself, he doomed the crew. And even though he was someone who recognized that Ahab was the kind of person who would strike the sun if the son insulted him, which really is a very Maoist thing to say, right? Like Mao really kind of fetishized this idea of struggle and fighting back and having a strong personality. He still didn't really do anything about it. Also like Xi Jung Shun Starbuck isn't clearly a hero or a villain, right? He raises questions about the morality of what he was doing as part of this particular system. Starbuck also didn't really have legal recourse to removing.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, it's not a perfect analogy, right? Because Starbuck is the first mate and Xi Jong-shun was sort of the first mate to the first mate, right? So he's the wrong further down than Starbuck. And also the book seems to suggest that while Ahab is motivated by vengeance, And Starbuck is somebody who just wants to make money. Well, Xi Jungfin, he was on board with a revolutionary project, right? Like he shared many of Mao's views and Dung's views. So we shouldn't essentialize the difference between She and Mao. And also the Pekad, right? The ship crashed, but the party has survived, right? The party is still there. So those are differences. But at the same time, it is, I think, meaningful to think about the similarities, right? So Starbuck was the deputy, the first mate to Ahab.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting how he plays with this dialectic between tradition and innovation, but in that sense I think his thinking here is a little subtle.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big picture of what his father wanted, which was to ensure that the party and the party's interests could persist from one generation to another. So is he doing certain things different from what his father did, yes? Is it a conscious rejection of his father? I'm not so sure. I think maybe he would say that the heart of what I'm doing is the same as what my father did, but also we need to change with the times. And it's a story of the party constantly learning new things and needing to address new objective conditions as they appear. And one last point on this. Xi Jinping says that the reason the Chinese Communist Party survived when other communist parties did not is because it had this capacity for change, that it was because the party could cynicize Marxism and adapt it to national conditions, therefore find a Chinese style of modernization that they could find this way of a non Western style of development.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then the question becomes well is Xi Jinping inspired by Father as a positive example or as a negative example. Some people have said that while Xi Jinping saw that his father's liberal policies failed and that's why he's doing something completely different You know, we can't say for sure, but I can say a couple things. One is that it's interesting. It's interesting that Xi Jinping's very first article published in People's Daily was about the relationship between older generations in the party and younger generations. And he said essentially that we need to respect them. We can learn so much from them. But we would not respect them if we did exactly what they did and we never innovate, right? We need to move along with the times. And also I think that at heart, what he wants to do is make sure that the regime survives and everything he's doing is for that purpose, which means that he is essentially inheriting”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Xi Jungfun has a reputation as the best kind of person that the party could produce, almost uniquely humane, liberal, pro-reform. And so when Xi Jinping came to power, a lot of individuals who knew the family or knew something about party history believed that he was going to be like what their understanding of his father was. And when he moved in a direction that disappointed them and in fact was quite a surprise for them, they were so, so disappointed. And one of the things that they did was they negatively contrasted him with his father. One dissident, exiled, intellectual in the United States said that Xi Jinping is not the son of Xi Jong-Xuin, he's the grandson of Mao Zedong. So this politicized use of Xi Zhongshun against Xi Jinping. And I'm sure that Xi Jinping hates it.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the reasons why we're seeing China struggle to balance the economy and securities because it's hard to do two things at once.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Maoist figure that a lot of what he's doing has elements that are reminiscent of the cultural revolution. And that's certainly true. But as you said, a lot of what we associate with the cultural revolution has been part of the party since the very beginning. And the question then is, so Xi Jinping, he wants to use struggle, he wants to use campaigns, but he also doesn't want another cultural revolution. Well, what does that mean? Well, he and people around him have said that, well, we're not going to do the tragedy, the cultural revolution. We're going to avoid that kind of radicalism. We're also going to recognize that we lost a sense of vigilance after Mao's death, and we're going to find this happy medium. But what is a happy medium in this sense, right? Like struggle is not a legal concept. It's not a clear idea, really. So you can see how in theory that you would get it just the right amount, but that in practice it's very hard. And I think that's one.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“loyal to the party because now they could do something, now the leftism and the radicalism had gone away, so you could finally work to bring China in the right direction. And in fact, he said that the reason that he didn't want to make up for lost time and have fun and make money was because he wanted to make sure that another cultural revolution never happened. But it raises a question, right, which is how do you stop that from happening? And so some people who went through the same thing that Xi Jinping did, they believed that China needed the rule of law. It needed to prevent another strongman leader from appearing. And Xi Jinping's answer was, you need to have a party that's unconstrained. You need to have a party that's so powerful that it can stop people who, when are given the freedom to do so, take advantage of it and use it to hurt people. And so for Xi Jinping, a lot of people think that he's”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very insightful question. One piece of evidence to get at what you're driving at is to look what Xi Jinping himself experienced during the Cultural Revolution and how he's talked about it. Xi Jinping said that when the Cultural Revolution began, everyone believed in it, which was true. So when it became clear that it was a disaster, it was profoundly disillusioning. And Xi Jinping admitted that he too went through a period of doubt, but that precisely because he went through this time of thinking about why such a terrible thing could happen, but nevertheless return to the party's cause meant that his dedication is more unshakable than anyone's. And the 1980s in these interviews that I found that he gave, he talks about how he saw the 1980s as a time when people should be even more”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It contributed to Mao's preoccupation with this idea of class struggle, and he wanted to figure out a way to make sure class struggle never went away. And his crackdown on Xi Jong-shun in 1962 was related to his marinating in this obsession with the importance of class struggle that was partly inspired by what he saw as the degradation of the revolutionary project in the Soviet Union.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited China just a few weeks later, Mao said to him, your statement made the imperialists happy. And Mao's conclusion was, why aren't the Soviets, why don't they have our back? Why aren't they more supportive? And his answer was that it wasn't that the Soviets were pursuing their interests, we have our interests, it was that they're not really communists anymore. They've gone revisionist. Actually, to tie it again back to Xi Jong-shun.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Split that was really something that the Chinese and Soviets had trouble managing happened while she was visiting the Soviet Union. And what had happened was there was an altercation on the border between China and India, the first one and several Indian soldiers were killed. And while Xi Jong-shun was traveling, the Soviets put out a statement that essentially took a neutral position, even though the Soviet Union and China were in a formal alliance.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Gaugong of belief that exactly Mao came to believe that God was a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1959, at the famous for Chinese historians Lushan Plenum, when the defense minister Pengdehuai made critical remarks of the great leap forward, he also, in Mao's mind, Only did that because of a special relationship with the Soviet Union and he saw some machinations there. And Peng Dehuai was the commander on the Northwest battlefield and Xi Zhong-Shun was his right-hand man. So Xi Zhong-Shun was basically a forest gump for the two first great purges of the People's Republic of China. And they both were seen by Mao as having had illicit relations with the Soviet Union. And then he is purged in 1962 as well. I'll say one other thing about this, which is quite remarkable. So the first...”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Win new victories for the revolutionary agenda. And so Xi Jongshin would have witnessed this story. He would have witnessed how Mao Zedong gradually came to the conclusion that the Chinese project was going to be different. And he also would have seen something else, which was how dangerous it was to talk to people outside the Chinese Communist Party, especially foreigners, because one of the accusations against him in 1962, other than as you said, that he was trying to revise history, was that he was a spy for the Soviet Union. So it would have been very frightening for Xi Jung to manage relations with the Soviets, right? So the first great purge of the people's republic of China was a man named Gao Gong, and he was another Northwesterner. He had known Xi Jongfun for years.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're always going to accused what is this communist jargon. And revisionism basically means you're not really a true communist anymore, that you are not as actually leftist as you need to be, right? You're not pushing forward. You're too scared to try to.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in 1953, the most prominent slogan in the People's Republic of China was the Soviet Union of today is China's Tomorrow. And in fact, that also was the year that Xi Jinping was born. And his father, Xi Jong-Shun, was Minister of Propaganda. In subsequent years, when Xi Jong-Shun was working for Zhou Wunlai at the State Council, as you said, one of his tasks was to manage the Soviet expert program. And for a period of time, the number one priority was to learn wholesale from the Soviet Union. And it was rooted in this idea that there was only one way of doing communism. Mao Zedong increasingly came to the view that something had gone deeply wrong with the October Revolution, that the Soviet leaders were engaging in revisionism. And I know you were chuckling about this word.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to win the hearts and minds of young people by talking about the party as an organization that went from one victory to another because it was the only way of organizing society that can guarantee China's return to its rightful place on the world stage, right? So for all of these reasons, history is so important. And so when you're purged from the leadership and you're doing self-criticisms, what are these self-criticisms about? Well, it's a reflection of your own personal history. So when Xi Jung Shun spent 16 years in the political wilderness after he was purged, what he was writing about was his past over and over and over again and negotiating with the top leadership just exactly how what he had done previously was going to be officially evaluated.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two reasons primarily one is for a top leader your legitimation narrative is to say I was always on the right side of the debate and so when you make the case for why everyone should listen to you whether or not your version of history is affirmed has a lot to do with whether or not you are seen as someone who deserves to be the chairman and the second reason is that the party is a totalizing organization, right? So your entire sense of self-worth, your prestige, your status, your sense of meaning is how the party characterizes your contributions to the revolution and to the regime after it's established. So history in that sense is absolutely existential for them. And I think that also when it comes to, as I said, this preoccupation with whether the regime will survive,”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. Part of it was about the succession, right? So Chinese top leaders always are thinking about what's going to happen after they die, and they don't want their model to disappear with them. And so they're testing their deputies. They're trying to figure out whether their deputies can do the right thing on their own. And so they don't always want to be clear because they want to see what you do. But also the top leaders change their mind all the time. They're mercurial. They can watch a situation and decide that things aren't going the well that they wanted and then they don't say that immediately to see whether or not other people are going to realize that on their own. But also I think that by leaving some ambiguity, they can see whether or not you are going to use that space to do everything you can to remain loyal to the top leader or whether you're going to show some of your own inclinations, which you may or may not like as the senior leader.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For it, because there was an always expectation that there was going to be some mistakes, that you're going to break a few eggs, right? Nevertheless, because this was a system that took ideology so seriously, when there were differences of opinion, often they weren't understood as such, they were seen as manifestations of a deeper political problem. And as you were alluding to in your introduction, one of the reasons Mao and Dung were so powerful is because they got to decide what was leftist. They got to decide what was a line error. And so often the reason we think that there are factions is because the top leader decides after the fact to label a bunch of people as a group and say that they represented some kind of political view, but almost always what really happened is that these people just simply weren't in line with the chairman and they weren't guessing correctly what he wanted and they were punished for it and then they were given the”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So, when you look at Chinese texts, when they talk about leftism and rightism, leftism is always in quotation marks, right? So what is leftism? In theory, leftism basically means that you're too ambitious. You're moving forward too quickly. You don't recognize the objective conditions and therefore you're making a hash of things because you're trying to achieve what is not possible at that particular time. At the same time, leftism is part of the part of what makes the Chinese Communist Party because of this phenomenon known as campaigns, right? So what's a campaign? A campaign means you get people to go too far deliberately because you need to get them to go too far because the whole point is to gin people up, to get them excited, to inspire zeal. So you expect that things are going to go too far. For these people who are the deputies, typically when they go too far and then there's a rectification, they're not”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a skeptic about how useful the idea of factions can be for understanding the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I don't want to go too far. It definitely matters who you worked with, whether you work in the same organization, that kind of thing, but the reason Leninist parties are known as organizational weapons is because they are so leader-friendly and because there is such a taboo about any concerted political action by certain groups. Now sometimes they approach that level of coordination, but they have to be so careful because as soon as the top leader identifies that, then they're going to be in big trouble. But also people are people. So you can have more liberal views on some issues, more conservative views on other issues, just because you worked with someone doesn't mean that you're going to like them. So often the people who are, as I mentioned, these relationships are shaped by what happened decades previously, they have long memories.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the things in the book that I think is really quite significant is how long these people knew each other. So the book begins in the 1920s and Xi Jong Shun's a major figure through the early 1990s and these names keep coming back over and over and over again and they knew each other for so long and the intricacies of these relationships are really something. So in the West we've often seen this habit of dividing the party between good guys and bad guys, reformers and conservatives, leftists and rightists. And one of the things that emerges from my research is that they were so subtle the way they interacted with each other. So they were kind of frenemies in a way, right? So they all had loyalty to the party, but the way that the antagonism shifted, the way that the loyalty”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things are what members of the party have to manage. And Xi Jung Shen stands out for his ability to keep winning over famous senior men within the party. So he was not one of the oldest of the founding generation, but he really impresses you with his ability to find these big brothers over and over again who saw something in him that they admired.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the dilemmas that my book tries to explore is what does it mean to be a deputy in a system that puts so much focus on a strong leader and discipline? So people might wonder why would I read a book about someone who wasn't the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party? Isn't this just an organization where people do what they're told? But actually, it's so much more complicated than that. And it's complicated for lots of interesting reasons. One is that the top leader often will give a general sense of what they want to achieve, but they won't say what matters more and how to achieve it. And then so the deputy has to figure it out. They have to be loyal to what the top leader wants, but also not screw everything up entirely. There's other competitors that might not like you. You also have to be aware of the fact that often the top leader will change their mind.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he would have seen just how far his country had fallen. These amazing heights during the And so for him, he didn't. intricacies of the ideological”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, it's interesting how politics and the personal mix often for members of the Chinese Communist Party. So there was a political background. There was a social background. Born two years after the collapse of the Dynasty, he saw all of these battles between nationalists and bananas. Nationalists Communists, and it would have been even just. Visibly striking To grow up in this area because he grew up. Your listeners must know as where the terracotta soldiers.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that at the heart of what you're getting at is why would you join an organization that is so dangerous to be a member of, either because you're fighting a revolution against a vastly superior force or because there are so many power struggles within that party? One of the answers is that for these people, communism wasn't just a way of understanding economics. It wasn't just about Marxist dialectics. It was really a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. It was joining an organization that for them was a manifestation of a world historical inevitability. And it was exciting. It gave them agency. It gave them a sense that their lives mattered. And of course, they were often joining the party at moments when they felt that the entire nation was at risk of falling apart because of warlords and bandits and Western and Japanese encroachments.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that breaking down your question a little bit would be meaningful. What decade you joined the party can tell you a lot about that person and also why you stay in the party can be very different from why you joined in the first place because often you don't know what kind of organization it is and you don't know what's going to be coming.”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was listening to your conversation. I was thinking about how one of the things that Xi Jinping is trying to achieve is make the regime immortal by having people study party history. He believes that one of the ways to keep the party vigilant and dedicated and at one with the people is to learn from the legacy of the revolutionary. So what that history is, teaching that history is moral education is at the very heart of Xi Jinping's project. So that begs the question, what was that history? And I tried to tell it through the prism of his own father with my book”
2025-08-07 · Odd Lots · Joseph Torigian on Xi Zhongxun and Elite Chinese Communist Party Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source