Who does Xi Jinping trust?

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by John Zin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institutions China Center. John is a world-class expert on Chinese elite politics and the internal operations of the Chinese Communist Party. He played a critical role in managing the U.S.-China relationship as director for China on the White House National Security Council during the Biden administration. John, it is great to see you. It's great to see you too, Henrietta. Thanks for having me on. We like to start all of our episodes with a personal question. How did you originally become interested in China and its politics? So the way I became interested in China, it's a little circuitous, but I am from the wonderful state of New Jersey and 9-11 happened a week into my freshman year of college and I had grown up with a view of the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline and that was what really got me interested in national security affairs. And for a time I thought I'd be a Middle East watcher, get involved in counterterrorism work, even studied Arabic, but as I went on in my education, what I realized I was really interested in was great power politics. And then I had an opportunity during some time I spent at Oxford to study Cold War history and learned about the Sino-Soviet split. And I thought this was fascinating, was something I had been totally ignorant of and that was really the germ of my interest in China and what got me hooked on it. So I ended up studying Chinese, ended up focusing on Chinese. Part of what happened too is that I decided to go to the CIA pretty early on. After 9-11 I really felt this urge to serve my country in some way, but as a skinny kid at a Quaker school, I realized a career in the Special Forces or the Marine Corps was probably not in my future and probably not my comparative advantage to serve my country. And so I saw an ad in foreign affairs actually to be an analyst and I thought, this is something I could do. I could be a geek for hire. That is something where I could really make a contribution for my country. We're all so lucky you happen to be looking at foreign affairs that day. Turning to your more recent work, you recently published a piece in the China Leadership Monitor called Plotting the Course to Xi's Fourth Term, Preparations, Predictions, and Possibilities. It's a great read and not only because of the exceptional alliteration, the piece offers really important insights on how Chinese politics actually work right now and how those politics are likely to evolve as we get closer to the 2027 Party Congress and President Xi's all but assured fourth term. And so you start in this piece by trying to make sense of the widespread purges that have characterized Xi's third term, including at the highest levels of the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. And even though Xi uprooted any of his political rivals long ago, the purges are continuing. And you start by drawing an important distinction between Xi's apparent confidence, his actual inner circle, and what you call his putative friends who benefited from his patronage at least for a period of time. So tell us about these two groups of people and how they've both fared under Xi's third term. Yeah, so the way I've been thinking about Xi's political orbit is just as an orbit, right? That there's the political solar system in China, which Xi didn't ping very much at the center of it. In my mind, there are people who are inside the asteroid belt, those people who are really close in, and I would characterize most of the Politburo Standing Committee as fitting that bill. And then there's people outside of the asteroid belt, right? People who are still in his orbit but are not necessarily as close to him. And I think of people like Qinggang, Li Xiangfu, other people that Xi has disposed of in his third term as fitting that characterization. These are people who Xi elevated personally through helicopter promotions, and so they are undeaded to him and they owe his career to him. But I think Xi has intentionally in some ways wanted to demonstrate that these guys are disposable. You can make them, but he can also break them if they get out of line or they do something that he doesn't like or something untoward happens along those lines. But I think what's really striking is that even though Xi, as you noted, has pivoted from going after his rivals to going after his friends, that inner orbit of people have been untouched. Those are the guys in the system who are truly made men at this point, members of the Politburo Standing Committee. And then I would say from the military side, I think it's really striking that Zhang Yuxiao has been so untouchable. Xi not only hung on to him and let him stay on the Central Military Commission even though he had exceeded the informal age limit for retirement at the last party Congress, but Zhang earlier in his career ran, used to be the general equipment department and is now the equipment department for the PLA. And he has gone unscathed even though everybody else who has had that job has gone down in flames. And I think that speaks to the extent of their relationship. I mean, it's worth bearing in mind they have a relationship that goes back not just to Xi and Zhang Yuxiao, but their fathers. They were both in the fourth field army in China's Northwest during China's Civil War. So there's a real deep linkage there through the Prince Ling Network. I think that kind of illustrates what's going on. And I think it illustrates a deeper dynamic in the Chinese political system too. This is for obvious reasons a low trust system, but in some ways because trust is such a rarity in that system, it's all the more precious commodity. And I think for Xi, the people that he really trusts are the people that he's developed a relationship with over decades, not years. So that's why I think these people, like the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, these are guys he's known going back to his time in Fujian and Zhijian provinces. He's known them for several decades. Other guys like Qinggang or even Hewei Dong, he may have had passing encounters with them earlier in his career. Maybe he came across them when he was in Beijing, but it's a relationship that you can count in years, not decades. But it seems like in looking at the Standing Committee, the one exception to what you're describing in terms of these decades-long relationships, which Xi is Wang Huning, who has proven quite influential and sustainable in his role, even though he lacks that background. And so how do you explain Wang's success? I think part of Wang's success is his ideological alignment with Xi Jinping. Wang was writing about what's known as neo-authoritarianism before it was cool in the Chinese system and even when there were greater moves towards some kind of incipient liberalization. And Wang is a really interesting character for a number of reasons. He doesn't really fit the bill for a polyp-era Standing Committee member in the 21st century, not just because he's not one of Xi's old buddies, but also because he doesn't have the experiences people at that level usually have. He never ran a province. He's an academic who's basically never really run anything except for the central policy research office. And yet he's been elevated to the top of the political system. And it seems like he's been able to hue closely to the leadership and stay in their good graces, not just through one transition from Fujian town to Xi Jinping, but through three. He was also around and influential in Beijing going back to the Jiangxin Minera. So Wang is, I think, probably both intellectually nimble and able to kind of codify and think through what the leadership is, is disposed to do regularly. I think there's probably a genuine affinity for the direction of travel with Xi Jinping and he's got the political chops. He's demonstrated that, I think, throughout his time in Beijing. And he is a brilliant guy in his own right. He's kind of unique in the system. I think if I recall correctly, I think he was the youngest person ever to get tenure at Fudan University going back to the 80s. So this is a guy who's probably one of the great minds of his generation in time. And you mentioned that Xi has started to delegate meaningful authority to those favorite officials who survived this far, which is kind of interesting to see after Xi very intentionally consolidated so much of day-to-day governance into his own person over the past decade. So why has Xi started to hand those authorities back out and why now? Yeah. Well, I think the two instances that I cite in the paper are Li Tiang, the current premier, and Wang Yi, the foreign minister, who's dual-headed as the top foreign policy official for the party. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think for Li Tiang in particular, they do have a long-standing relationship. Li Tiang notably too, when he was working his way through the ranks before getting to the standing committee, he was party secretary of Shanghai, and he was the one who oversaw the lockdown, which was very unpopular, obviously. But he just powered through and went with Xi's policy dictates. I think that shows the depth of the relationship. Those guys have known each other for decades. So I think it's somebody that Xi Jinping trusts, and I think it's probably useful and beneficial for Xi in some ways to be able to trust his premier because he didn't have that kind of relationship with Li Tiang's predecessor, Li Tiang. Li Tiang had been Xi's potential rival as the era parent going back to that period before the 18th party Congress where Xi took power. And so it's probably comforting to Xi that he finally has a premier that he can trust. And I think you can see that trust reflected, and Xi's willingness to represent China abroad. So I think that's one instance. I think it's probably useful for Xi. I think it's a similar story with Wang Yi too, right? Wang Yi is not somebody who's inside the asteroid belt. He is somebody who's come up through the foreign policy ranks and has come up through that part of the system. And he doesn't have necessarily that longstanding personal relationship with Xi. But I think he has probably demonstrated his chops in the foreign policy realm. He's known for being very suave and very effective in advancing China's foreign policy interest. So he's probably built that credibility up over time. And I think we see that trust reflected in Wang Yi as well. I think what's important for both these people in the roles where Xi is delegating is that it's safer to trust these people because they're both affiliated with the state organs. These are not people who are running what the Russians would call the power ministries, the real levers of power, the organization department that oversees personnel, the propaganda department, the security apparatus, and the military. So I think it's an interesting contrast. He's willing to delegate, but he's willing to delegate where the stakes are lower politically. I don't think we have as clear instances of him willing to delegate as much in some of those more sensitive areas. I think he probably still keeps a pretty tight reign on those other officials. And so you don't see delegation of party authorities, is that right? Yeah. And so just to spend another minute with Wang Yi, I mean, of course he has demonstrated competence, but there have been competent foreign ministers and even CFAC directors before him. And it does seem like the level of actual policy influence he has attained is quite unusual and significant even in shaping maybe not the overall strategic direction that she wants to go in the world, but on a tactical level. I mean, you see his handprint on many important decisions. And so why do you think that Wang Yi was able to achieve this level of influence so unusual for the institutions that he is associated with? Yeah, it's a great point. And I argue in the piece that Wang Yi is probably the most powerful foreign policy official since Tianzhi Chen, who was the top foreign policy official late in the Jiangs'an Minera. And there's kind of been this interesting trend throughout the 21st century, even as China has really arrived as a great power on the international scene, that its foreign policy officials within the party apparatus were somewhat diminished, right? And not just diminished, but that their power was fragmented. So it was after Tianzhi Chen left office in 2002, 2003 that you saw them split the role of the top party official responsible for foreign policy and the foreign minister. And then you didn't have a foreign policy official represented on the Politburo for quite some time until Yang Jiechun took over that position, which was a significant elevation. And so it's interesting. I think some of it reflects the maturing of China's national security apparatus as they've really arrived as a great power and recognizing that you need somebody at the Politburo level and who is empowered. And Yang had that to some extent, but he still had to share foreign policy responsibilities with Wang Yi, right? Because of that fragmentation of authority. So I think what happened for Wang Yi, honestly, it may have just been luck. The fact that Qinggang was ousted and ended up being China's shortest serving foreign minister, which is a pretty remarkable distinction, giving how a fractious Chinese politics can be and how volatile it can be, it ended up benefiting Wang Yi. And in fact, if I had to be a little conspiratorial about it and play the game of Politburo Clue, my suspicion is that, and I don't have evidence for this, is that Wang Yi probably played some kind of role in Qinggang's downfall, right? Because he is the primary beneficiary of it. And I thought it was really interesting because after Qinggang was ousted a couple of summers ago, there was all this chatter that Leo Tianqiao, the head of the international liaison department, that he would possibly take on the foreign minister role that somebody else would take it on because you couldn't possibly combine these two roles. It would be too much. I kind of thought that didn't make sense at the time because, number one, they don't really do additions in the party system. You get the job first and then you demonstrate that you're up to snuff in it. So it didn't really make sense to me that they would have Leo Tianqiao trotting around the world, trying to demonstrate that he couldn't take on the job. And number two, I think Wang Yi personally would not want that. Why would he want his putative successor in the job and breathing down his neck and in effect making him a lame duck? So I think he probably capitalized on what might just been an opportunity by holding all that power in his hands. And of course, now, just within the last month, I had to rewrite this in the piece as it was going to publication, Leo Tianqiao seems to have gone missing as well. And do you put that on Wang Yi as well? I mean, if I had to place my bets, yeah, when you do this kind of work, there's such a fine line between analysis and fan fiction. You have to be careful. But I think that's a real possibility. I think that probably is reflective of how the system works. Think about it from Wang Yi's perspective. Why would you want your air floating around and trying to accrete power into his own hands, especially when you've assumed this position of enhanced authority over China's foreign policy? When you were at the NSC, you spent a lot of time staffing meetings between National Security Advisor at the time, Jack Sullivan and Yang Jiechi, and then later Wang Yi. And in seeing the differences between these two officials, I wonder if you had a sense at the time that Wang Yi's role would go on to be so unique. You know, not necessarily from the interactions with them. And I think this is kind of one of the peculiarities of Chinese politics. It's not necessarily, and most US officials who have to deal with the Chinese probably feel this personally, it's not necessarily the person who's the most charismatic in their system or easiest to deal with that is necessarily going to be the person who's going to have the most wasta inside that system or rise through the ranks. So it's really difficult to discern that based on just those personal interactions. If anything, Wang Yi in his meetings with foreign officials, I would say in the limited instances I had to observe him, he's much smoother and he's much more adept, right? And Yang is actually the more aggressive character. He's very sharp. He's very quick on his feet, but he tends to be barbed and pointed in his comments. He actually, I'll be honest, I had, having followed Yang's career for a while, I had been a little dismissive of him as an observer that he was very bureaucratic or careers, but getting to actually observe him in the room, he actually comes off as much more impressive. You know, as a smart guy who clearly has a strong grasp of English and the subtleties of our language and uses that to try to gain leverage and to push his own advantage when he sees it. So yeah, it doesn't necessarily come through in the personal interactions. It's kind of the exact opposite of our own system where your public persona and your charisma is such an important factor. And whether you make it through the ranks in their system, it's almost the opposite of the person who's more buttoned down, more subtle, tends to do well. I mean, Xi Jinping is kind of the ultimate illustration of that in some ways. That's a great point. So now looking ahead to the next party, Congress in 2027, you note in the piece, there will likely be a major generational turnover to a new crop of leaders born in the 1960s, assuming that Xi sticks with some version of the 7-up, 8-down retirement rule. Remind us how those party retirement rules are supposed to work and how they've actually worked in the Xi era. Yeah. So for people's background, the 7-up, 8-down rule, it goes back to the party Congress in 2002 when Jiang Zemin was exiting the scene. And basically, the way the rule works is it's not a hard and fast retirement age. The way it works is if you happen to be 67 or younger at the time of a party Congress, you can continue serving, even though in the following years, you will exceed that age, obviously. If you're 68 or older, then you've got to go. And it's time for you to step down and retire. And so that rule has been more or less followed, I would say, in the subsequent two decades, even as Xi has eviscerated a lot of the norms around transfers of power, but it's a norm. It's not codified anywhere. And I think that's important to remember in Chinese politics. When you look at the Chinese Communist Party Charter, so little is codified or written down, you can mostly figure these things out through inductive methods and observation rather than deductive methods. A couple of the really important exceptions Xi has made in this realm is number one for himself, because she is now into his 70s and has exceeded that norm and seems to be angling for a new position. And number two, for like I mentioned at the outset, for Zhang Yoxia, right, for the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. So it's there and he can break it. But my sense is, as we saw at the last party congress, he might break it in onesies and twosies for particular people, rather than a wholesale evisceration of the rule, just based on what we've seen previously. I think the other point I would make about age norms and how they work in the Chinese system, and I think this is where there's a real contrast between Xi and his predecessors, is that for his predecessors, the argument over norms and how they were reshaped, I always describe them as the cloak behind which the dagger advanced. So the age norms didn't just come out of nowhere. Joseph Smith says, this in his book on Chinese politics, that norm came about so that Zhang Zemin could basically get rid of people he didn't like at the 2002 party congress. And the first round of age norms actually goes back to 1997 in that party congress. And it was the same thing. Zhang declared the age norm, I think at 70 at that point, even though he was over 70 himself, and used to get rid of people on the Politburo standing committee that he didn't like and then made a kind of conspicuous exception for himself. So these things, they do have some stickiness to use the political science term, but they are also tools of power. I think that's important to bear in mind. So yeah, so Xi will probably stick with it, but it is an instrument. And so that bridges well into your thoughts on President Xi's succession. Do you think the next party congress will reveal anything about who might one day replace Xi, especially since he's been so studious in avoiding anything like a hint of who might come next until now? It's possible. And it's really the main thing that I'm on look out for. I'm part of what's on my mind as I was writing the paper and thinking about this is that by the end of Xi's next term, he's going to be 79. And so even if he's not really thinking about these things, people around him and people in the system are going to be thinking about it. And I think he at some level, he has to know that and that he's has to start getting his mind around that possibility. So I think it is a real possibility. And he'll be into his fourth term. And so I think it's possible he starts playing around with this. And I think even though the old rules of the game have kind of been set aside for how you transfer power, I would say they're not totally dead. They're kind of undead at this point. So the traditional markers that we would look at for identifying a putative successor, I think would still hold. So what I would be looking for in terms of identifying somebody would be, is there somebody from the next generation, somebody born in the 1960s, who becomes the ranking member from that generation on the Politburo Standing Committee, and then do they subsequently either at the party congress or in the subsequent couple of years become vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, which is really the key to the kingdom. The PLA is an insular institution. And you really need time to cultivate that relationship with the military if you're going to survive as the heir apparent. The other thing that's been on my mind as I've been thinking through this, and I don't know if this is on Xi's mind necessarily, is that since Xi has undone so many of the informal processes and norms for going about a peaceful transition of power, this is probably going to be bumpy. And what I've noticed is that both Mao and Deng Xiaoping, each had to go through three rinses before they landed on a successor who stuck. And so whoever does get the nod in the first instance is not necessarily who's going to emerge as the actual heir apparent in the Chinese system. Deng had to go through Hu Yabang and then Jiang Xiang before ultimately landing on Jiang Zemin during the Tiananmen crisis. And so we could be in for a bumpy few years. And I think in all likelihood that if I had to guess or if I had to bet, that is probably what's going to happen. Do you think that record of unsuccessful succession inflects Xi's thinking about how he wants to manage his path? One would think so, right? But this is kind of the major riddle in what he's done. This is somebody who obviously genuinely and I think deeply cares about the party and its health. Yet he's kind of purchased his own political power by mortgaging the party's institutional health by overturning so many of these informal norms that allowed them, the Chinese Communist Party, to figure out something that the Soviets never figured out and that other Communist parties never figured out, which is how do you instantiate some kind of smooth transfer of power? Because usually it ends up being a food fight or somebody ends up dying in office and you have to make decisions in a crisis. So given how invested he is in the party's health, one would think he would be thinking through this, but that's not necessarily the case. He could just be thinking, this is a tomorrow problem or something I can deal with further down the line. Or if he's not thinking about it in ways that are obvious to the system, who is the person in the system that's going to say, you know, boss, it's really time for you to start thinking about stepping aside. I mean, we know that is what got Hu Ya Bang in trouble. You know, more so than just about anything else or as much so as anything else was that there was a meeting where Deng said, you know, I'm getting older. I think it's probably time for me to think about really truly retiring and Hu Ya Bang said, you're right. And Deng was unhappy with that. That was the wrong answer. So maybe it's the case because she, unlike Deng, has so many people in the leadership now who are close to him, maybe somebody has that relationship and can kind of pull him aside and have that conversation with him if it's not obvious, but maybe not. You know, and I think the real trick for leaders in the system and why this is so difficult is that at some point you do want to start to groom a successor, right? But you want to give them enough training and enough authority that they're able actually to learn how to do the job. But at some point, especially in a paranoid system like that, you start to worry that they're actually going to be a threat to you. So you want to pull them up just enough that they can learn the job, but not enough that they're starting to accrue their own base of power and that you start to feel like a lame duck. And you mentioned that she's real friends, his real confidants are of his generation or slightly younger. So these are in that next generation from which he might pick a successor even tentatively. There's almost definitionally a lack of trust, is that right? Or do you see anyone that she might actually feel that same level of comfort? Yeah. I mean, if I think about the current Bureau Standing Committee, the person who stands out, honestly to me, is Saichi. Just because he's close to him, Saai has so many jobs, he's running the general office from the Politburo Standing Committee, which is unusual. He's also on the National Security Commission, which theoretically would give him access and an excuse to connect with the security services and even the military potentially, which again, those are really the keys to the kingdom. And so that could give him a potential advantage over others from that generational cohort. But he's also, if they stick by seven up, eight down, Saai will also have to step down at the next party congress. So it's not clear that he'd be the person to get the nod. I think one element that's interesting too, as we talk about this upcoming party congress and the turnover is that she right now can look around when he walks into a Politburo Standing Committee meeting. He's looking at all his buddies, right? Guys he's known for decades. I've kind of glibly called this she's frat house sometimes. These are all of his old friends, but that's not going to be the case if they stick by seven up, eight down, and these guys all retire. I think what'll start to happen, and I think there are some inklings of this already, is that he's going to have to rely on his friends, friends to populate the senior leadership ranks or his protege's protege's. So they're kind of going to be bridge friends and they're going to look like young whippersnappers to him because they'll be a decade younger than him, and it won't necessarily be Saichi. It might be somebody that Saichi likes or somebody that Lisi likes. And so I think this is an important part in the paper is that yes, she has put himself at the center of this political system, but it's not clear to me that everybody who's in his orbit, that they all necessarily like each other and that they are necessarily a cohesive group, in part because she has picked up those relationships at different points in his career. And as an authoritarian leader, he has a vested interest in playing games with them and keeping them divided so that none of them accrues too much power in their own hands. So I think sometimes these rumors that flow around, especially this summer, they really germinated about Xi versus some other kind of grouping in the Chinese Communist Party or in the military. I think that moment probably passed a long time ago. I think the real story to watch right now is cleavages among people who are in Xi's orbit. And especially as the younger generation takes the reign, these are going to be people who are ambitious and are trying to, they're going to be tripping over each other and pushing their colleagues aside to try to ingratiate themselves with the boss so that maybe they do become the heir apparent, or maybe they do get some kind of big promotion and take on a role of more authority in the system. So the fourth plenum will be held in October. Traditionally, the fourth plenum focuses on party building, internal party governance. Will we get any initial hints at the plenum on how Xi is thinking about succession? And what are the tea leaves you'll be trying to read when the plenum kicks off? Yeah, so it's really interesting that you raise the plenum because it seems like what they're going to do, this is another data point about how Xi has reshaped the norms in the political system. Traditionally, the fourth plenum would focus on party building and party governance, which is obviously a topic that's near and dear to Xi's heart. But it seems like actually what they're going to focus on on this party plenum is going to be the next five-year plan. And so this is something I was wondering about for the last 18 months or so. There should have been a third plenum back in 2023. That was obviously postponed until last summer where they held a third plenum focused primarily on economic issues. So Xi has kind of broken the political calendar. And so that was one of the things I was looking out for this year, where they have tried to jam in some kind of fourth plenum in between to focus on party building because it is so close to Xi's heart. But they haven't done that. And so I think it's just another data point about Xi's reshaping of the system. In terms of the plenum itself, I think it is probably likely that they'll end up focusing on the next five-year plan. But the plenum is also the place where they can also make adjustments to the top party leadership as well. Again, if you go back to the Chinese Communist Party, it's technically the central committee that can appoint people or remove people from those top positions. So people from the central committee who've been ousted from office and have been tried already, they could be formally purged from the party at this meeting. And then similarly, there's been a noticeable depopulation over the last couple of years of the Central Military Commission where half the uniform members are gone. And it is the central committee that could install new people. So that's something I'm on the lookout for is, do they tap somebody to be a new vice chairman of the Central Military Commission or to take over the political work department? Right, which I think is actually, that's one of the positions they actually have to fill, right? You can have one vice chairman theoretically, they usually have two, but there's not necessarily an ex-officio need to have somebody in that position. So I think those are going to be the two big things that I'm looking for in addition to kind of the signals they're sending about the economy and what's going to be coming down the pike in the next five-year plan. So if we move ahead through time, after the 2027 party congress, when we reached she's fourth term, you've assessed that we will probably see an increasingly tumultuous political situation contrasted with relative stability on policy. Tell us why. I think part of that is, in some ways, and I don't want to do a straight line analysis here, but that has been the story of Xi Jinping's third term, right? The big policy initiatives happened, I think, during the first decade of Xi's term in office. And there have been adjustments, there have been important ones, right? But I think a lot of what the big muscle movements he's had to do have been in response to exogenous shocks, either dealing with the trade war or things like COVID, obviously. But I do get the sense, and I think you see signals from this from the Chinese side, that there is, for a lot of the big domestic issues, I think there's going to be relative continuity. So on the economy, for instance, even though they've given nominal priority to consumption and enhancing consumption as a driver of economic growth, so much of what they're doing still seems to be focused on techno industrial development and ensuring China's predominance in manufacturing and high tech sector. So I don't see those things as necessarily about to change. But for the reasons I outlined earlier, the succession politicking in particular, I think it is going to feed a more fractious politics, right? Because that is going to be the really net problem issue that is going to be hard to figure out. And I don't think that's necessarily been a driver of politics in Xi's third term. And look how tumultuous that's been. You've had so many members from the high command and so many top-level people purged. So much to look forward to. Well, turning to the US-China relationship, of course, President Trump has expressed a very strong interest in meeting with President Xi possibly in China. And you played a critical role in preparing President Biden for his calls and meetings with President Xi and keeping in mind all of these really important political dynamics that we've discussed. What advice would you offer to President Trump for his potential trip? So I would offer a few potential pieces of advice here. I think number one is just from the personal standpoint. I don't think that she is somebody who's really focused on personal relationships. And I think that's very much the proclivity not just of President Trump, but of US politicians and policymakers in general that you try to form or forge some kind of personal bond. I think as Xi's willingness to dispose of people that he doesn't have a decades-long relationship demonstrates. It's a very clear side. He doesn't put the same kind of premium on developing those personal relationships. And he is going to be very, you know, to use the popular phrase these days, he is very transactional. And I think when you engage with him, he's very much looking to gauge where he can probe, where there's give on the US side and trying to size up the situation and see what he can get in the follow-on. So that is one piece of advice, right? That's just, I think, at odds with the way a lot of policymakers in our own system function. I think number two related to that is that I think there's a real question about what you use these engagements for, right? And how you use them and what kind of leverage they afford you in the run-up to them. You know, I think one of the things that I was always mindful of is that when you're on the road to one of these meetings, what it does in kind of this almost mysterious way is it unlocks a lot of positive vibes in the Chinese system. By definition, the fact that you're going to have this meeting means that you're going to have a positive meeting, right? Because for the people who are staffing this on the Chinese side, the last thing they want is a bad meeting, right? Because that's perilous for them. So I think that gives the US side leverage, right? And I think you can do things vis-a-vis China that are less of a response than they otherwise would. And I think we saw that, you know, a few times during the Biden administration, right? Like, I'm very struck the fact that we dropped the first big export controls in October of 2022, right before the two presidents met in Bali just the following month. And there was very little Chinese reaction at the time. And I think that's one of the things that I've worried about watching the trajectory of the Trump administration over the last nine months or so is that they came in very hard with the competitive actions and the tariffs at the outset of the administration without much diplomacy going on with the Chinese side. And I think what's happened in the last few months, since Geneva in particular, is that they've pivoted now toward, you know, I think trying to to modify China in some ways in the run-up to a potential meeting and getting China to back off the countermeasures that they took in response to the United States, right? So I think we shifted from a model where the kind of operative paradigm was that we should be balancing these two things and we should be using the diplomacy to ensure that we could compete with China and take the actions we needed to defend our national security with minimal risk of blowback or, you know, something like the export controls on rare earth magnets to a model where we've kind of seesawed. We've gone from very intense, aggressive actions where we've in effect put an embargo on China to now we're in the run-up to a summit and we're pulling back on a lot of those competitive actions like the export controls or like the reports about turning off engagements with Taiwan. So I think there's room as we go into a potential summit to try to recalibrate that. And we've also heard that Secretary Hexhaf, a Pentagon may have a call with his Chinese counterpart soon. Perhaps the call will have happened by the time this episode airs about two weeks after we're speaking. But when it comes to military communication between the United States and China in light of the purges at the most senior levels of the PLA and also the political pressures that the PLA is facing, what advice would you give Secretary Hexhaf and the Pentagon on how to think about military to military communication in this moment? Yeah. So as a former staffer, I will start with the good news first. I think the fact that we do have a likely presidential summit in train will give the US side a little bit of leverage going into this, to try to reinvigorate the military to military relationship. I think the Chinese side understands that especially in this moment, President Trump is really running our China policy. So I think to the extent to which Secretary Hexhaf can invoke that and say our military to military relationship is a presidential priority. And so this is something we need to get on course in the run-up to a summit. And this is going to be something that he's focused on and raised. I think that is potentially quite useful. And I think, like I said, because these summits tend to unlock positive vibes in the Chinese system, you know, relatively, I think that that could be an effective approach. I think the bad news for Secretary Hexhaf is going to be two-fold. The number one, as you all know, Henrietta, when you're talking about mill mill relations between the US and China, you should always have as low expectations as possible, right? It's going to be fit fall. It's usually the first casualty whenever there's friction in the relationship or tension. So I think that that's going to be the same story here potentially. And don't expect it to be especially substantive. He's going to be highly scripted. The PLA doesn't necessarily like dealing with their US counterparts. I feel like a lot of times they end up getting dragged into this or they only do this because there's been some kind of presidential guidance on their side. Like, no, you've actually got to go pick up the phone and talk to your counterpart. And so it's not just the case that it won't be especially satisfying from a substance perspective in all honesty, but also institutionally given what we've talked about with the turnover in the PLA. One of the things that's happened just in the last few years, but it's an acceleration of a dynamic that's been going on, I would say since the 90s has been the diminution of the Secretary of Defense's counterpart, the Minister of National Defense. I mean, if you go back to the 1990s, this used to be somebody who was a major figure with a lot of clout inside the PLA, like Churhao Tian, who was dual-headed at the same time as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. So somebody who had a lot of clout, a lot of prestige in the military and was basically in the sunset years of their career, and they had this opportunity to engage more broadly with the outside world. What we've seen subsequently is that it's just the diminishment of that position, where it just became one among many on the Central Military Commission. And then I think one of the interesting things that's happened since the Minister of Defense Li Xiangfu was ousted a couple years ago is that they didn't put Dong Jun his replacement on the Central Military Commission. And not only did they not put him on the Central Military Commission, the Minister of Defense had also been a state counselor on the state side, which is kind of one step up from being a minister in their Byzantine organization. So you're just dealing with another minister, whereas the Secretary of Defense is number two in the chain of command right after the commander-in-chief in our system. So you're dealing with a counterpart who is really not truly your counterpart. And there had been an attempt to try to remedy that and get the US Secretary of Defense engaging with their counterpart who is in the operational chain of command, which their Minister of Defense is also not. And even going back to the Obama days, there was a channel between the US Secretary of Defense and the CMC, Vice Chairman, but perhaps that's impossible now. It's challenging. It's very challenging, right? And this is something that I thought a lot about when I was at the NSC. And I think part of the reality you're up against is that you can't really pick your counterpart on the Chinese side. You could try to, but the risk of that is that you just end up alienating the person who has been tapped as your counterpart. So what's already going to be a difficult and challenging conversation, probably filled with quite long diatribes from the Chinese side, you probably just bought yourself something that's a little bit longer and a little bit more tense and unpleasant and more consuming on your calendar. It's a real quandary for our side, because you're not dealing with somebody who's necessarily empowered in the same way on the Chinese side. Well, I wish we had more time, but I want to close with just one final question, since you are one of a small handful of US officials who have had time with President Xi, face-to-face, at the Bali meeting that you mentioned before with President Biden, and also as someone who has studied Xi so intently. I wonder what your impressions were of Xi himself in that meeting. Did anything surprise you about his demeanor or his priorities? I don't want to claim prescience, but I did walk out of those engagements with Xi. It reaffirmed my understanding of him in many ways. And I would say, especially during that in-person meeting in Bali in November 2022, Xi was just coming out of the party congress where, as we discussed, he had stacked the Politburo Standing Committee with his buddies. And so he did exude this kind of confidence. This is a guy who I think was already used to being large and in charge, but if you will, he was already larger and even more in charge than he had been just a few weeks earlier going into that meeting. That came through, and I think in his demeanor and his disposition and the way he talks, it was very similar to the way you see him on TV, where he knows he's the center of attention and he talks in this very unhurried kind of way, because he knows everybody is listening to him. The other thing I would say observing him too in these engagements is that he is a princeling and he's somebody who's very deeply rooted and conscious of the Chinese Communist Party's history. And that comes through in the way he talks and the way he tries to embellish his points. And that really stood out to me that he was reaching back to moments in the party's history that even for a China expert are a little bit esoteric, but they're top of mind for him. And he's just reaching for those as reference points in the course of some of these conversations and has an easy fluidity with it. The other thing I would say too is that he's clearly working from a script or talking points, but the way he delivers them, it doesn't come across that way. It doesn't come across as like an automaton, somebody who's just delivering the talking points that are in front of them. He does it with a little bit of verb, and I think this kind of encapsulates his personality in some ways. He's a true believer. He's not just reading the talking points. He's a true believer in those talking points. He says it with conviction. And that seems real. And I think that came through in some of those meetings because you can tell in these meetings when somebody's looking down at their notes, versus when they're just talking. So it seemed like he was sticking to the points, but he was delivering them without really looking down at the paper. And you can tell when he would kind of get momentum and he felt like rhetorically he had the wind at his back as he was delivering some of those messages. So very much comported with how I would have thought Xi Jinping would act at that point in his career. John, thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Henrietta. To learn more about John's thinking on Chinese politics, I hope you'll read his recent piece in the China Leadership Monitor, plotting the course to Xi's fourth term, preparations, predictions, and possibilities, as well as his recent foreign affairs piece, why Xi still doesn't have the military he wants, which is co-authored with John Culver. And lastly, John has a great piece up on the Brookings website on China's regional engagement. To our listeners, we'd love to hear what you thought of the show and which guests you'd like to see on peckingology in the future. You can send your ideas to peckingology.csis.org. If you're new here, we hope you'll subscribe and we'll be back in your feed in two weeks. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.