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The title of The Prince, a brand new podcast from The Economist about Chinese language chief Xi Jinping, is a reference to Machiavelli’s management guide, and to what sequence host Sue-Lin Wong calls “a Machiavellian story of energy — the way it’s gained, the way it’s wielded and the way far you’ll be able to fall when it’s taken away”.
It may appear curious that it has taken till now for a podcast to inform Xi’s story. Authoritarian leaders and dictators make for wealthy material with their narratives of troubled childhoods, energy grabs and strong-arm ways. However Xi is a notoriously secretive determine and to know him and his mindset is, says Wong, to “prise open the black field of elite Chinese language politics.”
Early episodes dig into Xi’s background because the son of a high-ranking Communist occasion official who advocated for reform and who was despatched to a labour camp throughout Mao’s purges. Whereas in his teenagers, younger Xi went from a lifetime of privilege to being despatched to a detention facility; the story goes that when he escaped and appeared at residence, freezing and hungry, his mom reported him and had him despatched again.
The sequence goes on to chart his rise by means of the ranks by way of native authorities, his strikes to stamp out corruption (which additionally allowed him to weed out rivals) and the most important world occasions, from the Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath to the autumn of the Soviet Union, that helped form his world view.
There’s a lot to digest right here, and Wong doesn’t patronise us by solely giving us the headline moments. The Prince takes its time, constructing an image of a quietly ruthless determine rising in an unsettled political local weather that appeared to name for agency stewardship. Take heed to any of the current podcasts on Vladimir Putin and also you get the sense of a person who’s more and more divorced from actuality. In contrast right here, and maybe most chilling, is how Xi comes over as cool-headed, intelligent and extremely profitable in exerting management each over his occasion and the Chinese language folks.
As we study from the outstanding testimony of a Uyghur language instructor accused by Chinese language authorities of spying for the CIA, this management has been most cruelly inflicted on the Uyghur inhabitants, 1000’s of whom have been detained and tortured in internment camps.
It’s a grim reminder of the ferocity of the Xi regime that, on the finish of every episode, Wong pays tribute to the “courageous” interviewees who stay nameless for concern of repercussions. This month, Xi will start his third five-year time period as normal secretary of the Chinese language Communist occasion after altering the principles over time period limits. As issues stand, he may very properly be China’s chief for all times.
For additional tales about authoritarian rulers, Actual Dictators supplies in-depth profiles of Pol Pot, Napoleon, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler and extra. Narrated by actor Paul McGann (star of Withnail and I), the sequence yields such peculiar info as Kim Jong-il’s love of lobster and younger Stalin’s early profession as a financial institution robber.
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