This week on the Sinica Podcast, I speak with Jonathan Czin, the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. His new essay in Foreign Affairs, “China Against China: Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success,” challenges the dominant Western narrative of Xi Jinping as either Mao reincarnate or a brittle autocrat presiding over imminent collapse. Instead, Czin argues that Xi’s most illiberal reforms can be understood as attempts to cure the pathologies of China’s own success. We discuss his framing of Xi’s “Counterreformation,” how it helps explain China’s current political direction, and what it reveals about our own analytical blind spots in the West.

7:15 – Xi’s “reformation” and Carl Minzner’s “end of reform and opening”

12:18 – Corruption, decentralization, and the “lost decade” under Hu and Wen

20:12 – Defining “resilience” and what Xi means by “eating bitterness”

29:45 – The “downsides of success”: property, corruption, and governance contradictions

45:30 – Counter-reformation vs. counterrevolution: what Xi wants to preserve and discard

54:20 – The myth of yes-men: triangulation and feedback in Xi’s leadership style

1:07:07 – Cognitive empathy and why most U.S. analysis of Xi falls short

1:15:35 – Systems that can’t course-correct: comparing the U.S. and China

1:22:05 – Cognitive empathy, ideology, and the problem of American exceptionalism

Paying it forward:

Jonathan: Allie Mathias and Dinny McMahon

Recommendations:

Jonathan: The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood; The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

Kaiser: Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

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