BILLBOARD
I realized that much of my father's experiences living in China under Mao sort of set the stage for the rule of the Communist Party later in the years I was witnessing it, and then also set the stage for the harder authoritarian turn that Xi Jinping, the current leader, would take as he took control of China starting from 2012.

And all of these were events that I witnessed as a reporter, and so I felt I wanted to write a book that captured these parallels, the parallels between the Mao era as Mao was consolidating power and creating modern China, and then in the Xi Jinping era, which many people describe as kind of a new wave of Mao-style authoritarianism.

FRANCESCA: Edward Wong, welcome to Writer's Voice.

EDWARD WONG: Thanks a lot, Francesca. 
It's great to be here.

FR: This was a really fascinating book, At the Edge of Empire.

It's both a personal story of you exploring your family's history and a history of China, roughly from the Japanese invasion through the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of communist China under Mao, and then ultimately Xi Jinping up to the present, including your own reporting in China for the New York Times.

You write, quote, I marvel at the ways my family story has looped like a Mubia strip around multiple generations and around the history of China.

So I want to start with your family.

Your father, Yukun Wang, was born in Hong Kong in 1932, but was forced to move to his family's home village in southern China after the Japanese army occupied the British colony in 1941.

Now he never talked with you much about his early history.

So what was the spark that first led you to connect your father's untold history with your own reporting on China?

That's a great question, Francesca.

And just to back up a little bit to my younger years, I mean, I was not that interested in exploring my family's Chinese background when I was growing up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia.

My father went to work at a restaurant, worked very long hours.

My mom also worked, you know, a lower middle class job to raise us.

And so I think our family was just one of these struggling immigrant families in the suburbs.

And my sister and I were just focused on our studies and assimilating into, you know, mainstream American culture.

And then in my 20s, I made a trip to China right before grad school, studied Chinese for summer, got very interested in the country, studied Chinese history and politics in grad school.

And then on my trips home to Washington DC, I would ask my father more about his family background and as well as my mother.

And then I learned to my surprise that my father had been a member of Mao's army, had been a soldier in the army in very pivotal years in the 1950s.

And not only that, but he had been stationed all over China, including in the most remote corners in the far northwest.

And so I became much more interested in my family history.

And then as I later on, when I went to China for the New York Times as a reporter, and then later as a bureau chief, I realized that much of my father's experiences living in China under Mao sort of set the stage for the rule of the Communist Party later in the years I was witnessing it.

And then also set the stage for the harder authoritarian turn that Xi Jinping, the current leader, would take as he took control of China starting from 2012.

And all of these were events that I witnessed as a reporter.

And so I felt I wanted to write a book that captured these parallels, the parallels between the Mao era as Mao was consolidating power and creating modern China, and then in the Xi Jinping era, which many people describe as kind of a new wave of Mao-style authoritarianism.

And your father's history, I mean, it really is fascinating because, I mean, having lived in Hong Kong under British rule, then the Japanese came in, then there was the Chinese Civil War, and your father, you know, in his, was he in high school yet?

I'm not, I think he was in middle school at the time, you know, was pro-nationalist.

And then, of course, he embraced the Communist Revolution, as you noted here, but he grew disillusioned later.

So talk about the trajectory that led for him from his embrace to his disillusionment.

Yeah, I think that's a result of several things he witnessed when he was, once he fled Hong Kong, the British colony, with his family to live with his brother and other family members to live in the village, the ancestral village in southern China in Guangdong province, and then later on went to the provincial capital Guangzhou for high school.

I mean, he saw, you know, various events that unfolded under the rule of the nationalists.

And a lot of this came to very sharp relief when he was in high school in Guangzhou.

He would see, for instance, rampant inflation.

He and his family experienced this.

The economic policy of the nationalists couldn't keep inflation under control, and there was still mass poverty throughout China.

He also believed that the nationalists had been ineffective in terms of fighting against the Japanese during the Second World War when Japan occupied both British Hong Kong as well as China.

He also heard stories of corruption among nationalist officials, both, you know, officials on a local level in Guangzhou, but also, you know, Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader, his family, his allies, his friends.

He heard about corruption in the top ranks of the Nationalist Party.

And so as he learned more and more about Mao's revolution that was taking place across China, as he learned more and more about communist ideology, the promises of equality, the promises of a more powerful, industrialized China, I think he started to believe that the communists were the force that would bring justice to what he saw was an unfair Chinese society and also rejuvenate China because they've been beaten down by first colonial powers, European colonial powers, the United States and Japan in the 19th century and then onwards into the 20th century, and then the national, the misgovernance of the nationalists.

And so he thought that the communists under Mao would help revive and rejuvenate China and make it a great imperial power again, a great empire, something on par with the United States and with Great Britain.

I think any person growing up in China has a sense of China being this great empire and that's partly why I named my book this.

I bring it out in very obvious terms in the title of the book At the Edge of Empire.

And so I think he wanted this rejuvenation of empire in the same way that many other Chinese did during the nationalist era, and they felt that the communists were the right vehicle for that.

Your uncle, your father's brother, had a very different trajectory and very much, I think, probably due to circumstance rather than conscious choice.

I mean, if he had been younger, he might have ended up like your father did.

But talk about the differences and how that posed a kind of counterpoint in your family.

Sure.

And I think you're right, the age difference, the four-year age difference between them did make a difference.

He was four years older than my father.

So they went to the same high school in Guangzhou.

And, you know, their family background was that of a middle class Chinese business family.

Their father owned an herbal medicine shop in Hong Kong, as well as shops selling the same things in Guangzhou.

Their father and his and the grandfather and their mother's side did business as herbal medicine traders with other Chinese in Southeast Asia.

So they were part of this transnational class of Cantonese merchants.

And so it's very much a capitalist bourgeois background that was rooted in a British colony.

And so those were their earliest influences growing up.

And so I don't think it's that surprising that my uncle, four years older, would have somehow gravitated more towards these Western ideals.

When he graduated from high school, the Civil War was still ongoing.

It wasn't clear that the Communists would triumph.

And he took a scholarship offered by the U.S. government to go to America to study in university there.

And for many Chinese, that would have been a very obvious choice because America was a superpower.

China was riven by war.

Hong Kong was a fairly down-at-heels port city controlled by the British.

It wasn't the booming financial center that it became decades later.

And so he took that scholarship.

And so his path diverged dramatically from my father's in that he embraced the West.

He embraced American ideals.

And eventually he would find himself, you know, working for the U.S. military as an engineer, working for the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army after graduating from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. And so in a sense, he ended up on the opposite side of a geopolitical struggle as my father, because my father, you know, eventually joins the Communist Army, is even willing to go to Korea to fight against the Americans during the Korean War, whereas my uncle would eventually work for the American military based out of Washington, D.C. And there is a very striking point in the book, Edward Wong, in At the Edge of Empire, where your father writes to his brother and pleads with him to come back to Communist China to help build the country, to build the land.

That didn't happen.

In fact, it ended up that your father went to the United States.

How did that happen?

Yeah, and this is part of the story of disillusionment that you mentioned.

So my father joined the army in 1950 when he went to Beijing for university.

He decided to, after he marched in a military and civilian parade in front of Mao and the other top communist leaders on October 1st, 1950 in Tiananmen Square, he decided a few weeks later that he would join the army because he wanted to help with the Korean War effort and he wanted to support the Chinese military in their fight against the American forces on the Korean peninsula.

He believed, as Mao was saying, that the Americans would march onward to China if they triumphed in Korea and that they would topple the communists from power and reinstall the nationalists who were then in exile on the island of Taiwan.

So my father really believed in that.

He believed in this threat to the motherland by the Americans.

And, you know, Mao had called this the war, the anti-American imperial war.

And so my father signed up, the military went to training in the Northeast, in Air Force academies to become part of a new unit in the Air Force and go on bomber missions over Korea.

But instead of being sent to Korea, he was then put into another unit, a unit in the army, and told to go westward.

And this puzzled him.

He didn't know why this was the case, but he thought that it wasn't something good.

And then later on, out in the far Northwest, as he was posted to these very remote stations in the region that we call Xinjiang, near the borders with the Soviet Union back then, and Mongolia, in Soviet Kazakhstan, he would realize that he had been diverted from his dream of serving in the Air Force and fighting Korea because the party didn't trust him.

They didn't trust him because of his family background.

They knew that he came from this capitalist merchant family in the British colony of Hong Kong.

They knew that his brother had gone abroad to study in America, you know, in the land of the enemy.

And so, eventually, he believes that he can win the confidence of the party because of his military service and because he's won support by some higher commanders above him and become a member of the party.

But eventually, after leaving the military and enrolling in a university again, he discovers that the party still doesn't trust him, that they won't admit him to the party, and that instead, they're going to do a further investigation into his background.

So that is a huge blow to him.

It's one of the big factors that leads to disillusionment.

There are some other factors.

When he's at that university in Xi'an, you know, the provincial capital of Shaanxi province, he hears about party fighting in the top ranks, and he realizes that Mao is purging this legendary military commander, Peng Dehuai, from the party.

This is a commander that most soldiers had looked up to, had lionized.

And my father, it started to sow doubts in the mind of my father about what was really going on in the top ranks of the party and how unified it was, and doubts about, frankly, about Mao Zedong and the direction he was taking the country.

And then those doubts were then further reinforced when Mao decided to implement what he called the Great Leap Forward, this mass program of industrialization across China, both in the cities as well as in the countryside.

They collectivized rural areas and people lived on these huge communes, and eventually that economic policy leads to the worst man-made famine in modern history.

Around an estimated 30 to 40 million Chinese die between the years of 1958 and 1961 or so.

And my father is among the many Chinese who, you know, fall victim to starvation.

He gets severely ill while he's on his university campus.

Many of his classmates get ill as well.

They're bedridden for weeks and months at a time.

And my father realizes that this is sort of the true path that Mao is taking the country on.

He's taking the country on a road of self-defeat and disaster.

And he realizes, combined with the fact that he has no future in the party, that he realizes that he has to get out of China.

And so in 1961, he puts in motion a plan to escape China months from then.

And he eventually does so, makes his way back to Hong Kong, and then eventually to America in 1967.

So that's the path of disillusionment that he went down after he realized what was going on with the party, what was going on with Mao, the bleak future that the country faced.

And when the Cultural Revolution came to China in 1966, led by Mao and his hunger for power, my father was grateful that he escaped some years earlier, because he thinks he might have, you know, been persecuted and driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution, as had happened to a cousin of his.

It's quite a story.

You know, it always has struck me how these autocrats, and we're talking here of Mao, but there's also Xi Jinping, there's Donald Trump, there's Vladimir Putin, how there seems to be an inevitable devolvement into megalomania and madness and very, very poor decisions for their own societies.

Have you given any thought to what is this due to?

Is there some kind of, are psychopaths drawn to be these great national leaders, or is there something about being in that position of power that inevitably corrupts?

I think there are different elements.

Obviously, throughout human history, there have been great leaders who've exercised power, but have not become hugely corrupted by that power.

And of course, in America, for a long time, we've had a tradition, let's hope it continues, but we've had a tradition of a peaceful handover of power.

And so I wouldn't say that power necessarily corrupts, but I do think that when there are not enough guardrails within a society, then a demagogue can come to power, and a demagogue can also come to power by stoking populism, by really riding the tiger of nationalism and ethno-nationalism to power.

And so Mao was one of these figures, Putin, as he mentioned, Hitler, obviously.

And I think in today's day and age, in China, Xi Jinping is trying to harness a form of nationalism in order to hold on to power, to consolidate power, and to advance the interests both of himself and of the Communist Party.

And he sees himself as a sort of, in these messianic terms, as this person who's going to rejuvenate the party, keep the party in power, and expand the party's control over Chinese society.

Because he thinks that Chinese society has become weak in recent years.

He thinks that different centers of power had been emerging in China, including business people, for example, entrepreneurs, the corporate class.

And so he felt that it was time to reassert the dominance of the party.

And he thinks a lot about the downfall of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

And he has said in speeches that, you know, the Soviet Union had strayed from its, the party in the Soviet Union had strayed from its original ideals, had become distanced from its historical origins.

And that he has this phrase that he said that no one was man enough to step up and reassert the strength of the party and hold the country together.

And so he sees himself as the figure in China that is stepping forward now to reassert that.

And of course, as you mentioned in your question, that there is a certain sense of megalomania of power, desire for power in all this.

And I think that that, you know, a lot of liberal Chinese, Chinese who are, had thought the country was progressing more towards an open society are dismayed now by what they're seeing in China under Xi Jinping.

And I would say that I was talking with my father towards the end of the writing of my book.

And I asked him how he thought about the direction that China was going.

And then he told me that it became apparent to him from his time in China that one of the great flaws was that Mao held on to power long after he should have relinquished it.

And that as Mao got older, his senses became dimmed and he became more corrupted by the power.

And he says, unfortunately, what he sees happening now in China is Xi Jinping really going in that direction because, as we know, a few years ago, Xi Jinping decided to change the Chinese constitution to allow himself to stay in power for a third term.

And, you know, many Chinese and many party officials learned after the devastation of the Mao years that what they needed to do was to put a check on that hunger for power and that one, the top of the party had to rule by consensus, that there had to be a certain number of elite officials who came to consensus decision making in governance of the country so that power would not be concentrated in the hands of one person.

And two, that there would be a limit, a time limit on how long the officials at the top of the party could stay in power.

But Xi Jinping has thrown all that aside.

He consolidated power very rapidly after he became the top party official in 2012, in late 2012.

And so he concentrated the power in himself.

And then he never put in place a plan for succession.

And then towards the end of a decade of rule, he decided he was going to hold on to power.

And so this has upended the norms that guided party leadership after the death of Mao.

And people like my father and many other Chinese are skeptical of the direction China will take moving forward.

Now, a lot of people thought that when China opened the door to state capitalism, what would you call China's economy?

I think state capitalism is a good phrase to use.

Okay, state capitalism.

So, you know, a lot of the thought was that would allow more, you know, more freedom-loving thoughts to come into the minds of the Chinese people, that it would open things up culturally.

You talk about the experience of Ai Weiwei, who was one of the world's great artists, and the repression that he went through, and you yourself witnessed this whole devolution to a more repressive and paranoid means of governance in China.

How does capitalism go hand in hand with an authoritarian, highly surveilled state?

I mean, was the idea that capitalism would open things up just a fiction?

Well, just to put some of this in context, the leader who succeeded Mao, Deng Xiaoping, realized that China needed to change its economic system because of how devastated China was at the end of the Mao years.

And so he had aides around him start to do experimentations with capitalism.

Xi Jinping's father, Xi Jinping, who was a senior party official who had been persecuted by Mao, was actually appointed to help with one of these experiments, to help govern this special economic zone called Shenzhen that was started in the South.

And so there were all these different party officials who were experimenting with different ways of guiding China economically.

And they settled on a model that would allow private enterprise to a degree, that would allow entrepreneurship, but that would also still be under the watch of the state and be highly regulated.

And the state would maintain state-owned enterprises that would be in command industries like the defense industries, energy, transportation, and these types of industries would be dominated by several state-owned enterprises.

So this is sort of the mixed model of capitalism that we've seen play out in China over the last several decades.

And then let's go to the West, to America, and think about what American officials as well as, you know, promoters of free market capitalism were thinking throughout the 80s and 90s.

They were thinking that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand and that as China or any other country, countries in Eastern Europe, for example, open up their economies, then they would become inevitably more democratic because capitalism will lead to more desire for choice and not just desire for material choice, but desire for political choices.

And so this is a firm belief that American officials, I think, held for many decades.

And instead, what we've seen is that China can open up big parts of its economy to capitalism, but it doesn't have to move towards democracy.

And in fact, it has rejected Western style democracy very overtly.

That doesn't mean China didn't go through change in those decades.

I mean, China has opened up.

I first went to China in the mid-90s, and it was more closed then than it is now.

You know, many more Chinese have gone overseas since the 80s and early 90s.

Many more people from outside of China have entered China.

There have been many exchanges, but at the same time, overall, the political system has not evolved into Western style democracy.

And I don't think it will anytime soon.

So I think that that was a pretty harsh reality in the minds of these U.S. and Western officials that they had to face.

And for, you know, many Chinese who grew up in that era of opening and reform, when things seemed to be progressing towards a more open society, they become disappointed by this closing of society that's taken place under Xi Jinping.

So I think that we are at this point now where people really acknowledge, you know, people both in China and in the U.S. and in Europe and elsewhere acknowledge that capitalism and, to a certain degree, a level of free market capitalism doesn't lead to inevitably greater political freedoms.

Yeah, I think we're experiencing that now, and maybe becoming a little disabused about the idea that capitalism inevitably leads to democracy in any country.

Right.

Yeah, I think we're experiencing that now, and maybe becoming a little disabused about the idea that capitalism inevitably leads to democracy in any country.

So I'm going to come back to that, but I want to take a little detour here because your father, as you said, was sent to the northwest of China.

This is where the so-called autonomous regions that are not so autonomous, of the Uyghurs, there's also Tibet that you talk about.

Why has, well, first of all, talk a little bit about how your father being sent there was part of setting up a system of control of these regions, and then talk about some of what you learned and experienced reporting on the repression.

Yeah, and I'll start by going back to this idea of empire and that, and China as a modern-day empire.

And essentially what happened, you know, what we're seeing unfolding in China and its consolidation territory goes back to the Qing dynasty, which is the last imperial dynasty of China.

And the Qing were these ethnic Manchus who came from northeast China, you know, Manchuria, bordering Korea, and they swept down with their armies into China, conquered the heartland of China, the area that's occupied by the ethnic Han people.

And then they proceeded, especially under the Emperor Qianlong, to conquer vast territories to the west of the Chinese heartland.

And these were territories that had not been traditionally occupied or ruled by the Han Chinese, but the Manchus wanted to conquer them.

They were similar to the Mongols, this like nomadic to semi-nomadic society that had, you know, great strategies of warfare.

And their armies marched westward and conquered the northwest region in Central Asia, what we call Xinjiang, where many different ethnicities live, including the Uyghurs and the Kazakhs.

And they also eventually imposed their rule on Tibet, which is on a very high plateau immediately south of Xinjiang, and that stretches to India and the Himalayan range.

So they essentially expanded the traditional territory of the Chinese empire by like 50%.

The traditional Chinese empire was small compared to today, except under the Mongols and the Manchus in the Qing era, and maybe a few other conquest dynasties.

And so when the Qing were toppled in 1911 in a revolution, these areas of China that it had cobbled together into this great land empire broke off.

Xinjiang broke off, Tibet broke off, other areas of the West broke off.

The nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek wanted to rule over those areas, but were never able to really do so.

There were warlords and others that pushed back against them.

And then when the communists triumphed in 1949, Mao decided he would conquer those areas.

He wanted to refashion China into a new empire.

He wanted to carry on the legacy of the Qing empire.

And so he sent his armies westward, just as Qianlong had done back in the 18th century.

And so there was, you know, part of the People's Liberation Army went into Tibet and conquered Tibet in the early 50s.

My father was put into a unit of the army that went into the northwest, into Xinjiang.

And he was posted to Xinjiang, different parts of Xinjiang, for around six years.

He was put out into an area called Altai, which is very heavily Kazakh.

And his mission at the time was to help break up Kazakh militias so that they could pose no challenge to the People's Liberation Army, to help integrate these militias into the People's Liberation Army and to indoctrinate them into communist ideology.

And then he was posted into what's known as the Yili Valley, where he actually roomed with a Uyghur soldier for a year.

And his final posting was in an area called Wenchuan, or Hot Springs, right on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan at the time.

And in that capacity, he was put into one of the very first military agricultural garrisons set up out there in the Northwest.

He was on what was essentially a ranch where he had to help raise sheep and herd sheep and horses with other soldiers in order to, you know, help raise, get livestock, get meat, get wool for the maintenance of the army, of the occupying army that was out there in the Northwest.

And that system, that garrison system, will eventually expand to become a very powerful force in the Northwest and essentially be part of a settler and military colonialism project that planted its roots in every part of the region of Xinjiang and is still very powerful today.

So he was in one of the very first garrisons that was part of that project.

And so I wanted to tell a story of China and its imperial ambitions.

And I found that I could do it very easily through my father's narrative because he was part of this military occupation that sought to reconsolidate the empire under communism.

As I mentioned before, these were supposed to be autonomous regions.

They're anything but.

But there was some thought originally to pursue a kind of policy of accommodation that instead turned into a policy of, you know, you could almost say cultural ethnic cleansing that is going on there and draconian repression.

Why did that happen?

I mean, that's a very complicated story and it's there's no like uniform path that we can trace because I think during the Mao era, at least in the early years, including the years of my father's post in Xinjiang, there was debate within the top levels of the party and which included Mao about what to do about these regions.

I think there were people who really advocated for greater autonomy.

Mao at one point, I think, did entertain some ideas of granting independence to these regions, but of course he quickly cast those ideas aside and there were questions of how hard the military occupation should be in those areas.

And of course there were these, just like in many other parts of China, there were efforts by the party to seize land, to take land away from, for example, everyone from herders, Kazakh herders out there, to religious institutions.

You know, mosques in the Muslim areas, Buddhist temples in Buddhist areas like in Tibet.

And so there were debates over these types of policies.

And Xi Jinping's father, Xi Jinping, was actually placed in charge of the entire northwest of China at the time.

He was the senior political official governing the northwest and he helped implement policies there.

And at times he actually advocated for a softer line in Xinjiang, saying we need to convince the people out there, the ethnic, non-Han ethnic leaders, to, we need to convince them that they should embrace our cause, embrace us as the ruling national government, and embrace communism.

And so we can't alienate them, we can't go hard against them.

He would sometimes argue for that, and sometimes he would implement harder line policies.

And so my father witnessed some of the ups and downs of these policies.

For example, there was one year he told me about when he was posted out there in the Yili Valley that year that he roomed with the Uyghur soldier, when he said they were told not to do anything outside of their military base.

They were not supposed to go and interact with the local population because the communist officials above them didn't want there to be greater friction between the ethnic Han soldiers and the locals.

At this time, the party wanted to go on to adopt policies of softening towards the local people out there.

And so they didn't want the military to come into contact with the locals.

And so that was an example of what my father went through that one year when they had that change in policy or attitude.

So there was debate early on in communist rule about what to do with these regions and how to approach the people there.

And the policy has gone through lots of ups and downs.

I would say that under the late Hu Jintao era, which is, he was the predecessor of Xi Jinping, under Xi Jinping, himself under Xi, the party and the top leaders have adopted a much harder line attitude towards the area, towards Xinjiang, towards Tibet.

And what they seek to do now, what Xi Jinping seeks to do, is to do forceful assimilation of the cultures and the people out there into mainstream Han culture.

And what that means is trying to eliminate many of the distinctive cultural markers that make those people different than ethnic Han people in interior China.

You and others might have seen headlines about these mass internment camps that the party set up in Xinjiang, and this is part of the project of assimilation.

They've been over several years before the pandemic, they herded Uyghurs and Kazakhs and other Muslims into these camps, by some estimates around a million people into these camps, which were set up in different buildings in villages and cities, like schools, for instance.

And the people would have to live there for many, many months or years and renounce certain aspects of Islam.

They would have to do things like eat pork, speak less in the Uyghur language, recite party slogans in Mandarin.

They had to do all this in order to distance themselves from their Muslim identity.

And so it's what you were saying about notions of ethnic cleansing.

There have been efforts to sterilize parts of the Uyghur population.

And so there has been this whole program there.

And the same with Tibet, in the Tibetan region as well.

And so I think that we're in an era where we're seeing much harder line policy take place in those areas imposed by Xi Jinping and party elders.

And we're not in one of these periods of debate over the policy right now.

You write that China has been the most successful authoritarian state of the last 75 years.

A lot of people think that authoritarianism contains the seeds of its own collapse.

But you say China is very adaptable, resilient.

Do you think that China is vulnerable to finally fall to the contradictions of authoritarianism?

Or do you think what is the kind of resilience and adaptation that China can bring to bear to deal with these contradictions?

I mean, obviously, authoritarian systems have many weaknesses.

And we've talked about some of them on this program.

We talked about consolidation of power in one person, the corruption that results from that, the megalomania, bad decision making.

The top leaders surround themselves only with yes people around them, usually men.

And all this can lead to weaknesses, to overreach, and to collapse.

But the interesting thing about China is we've seen that happen in China.

We saw what happened during the Mao era.

And yet party leaders afterwards took extraordinary steps to then change around their economic system, I should say, in order to rejuvenate China, which they did very successfully, created greater confidence in the party, helped eradicate poverty for many parts of China, since China had been brought to such a low level under Mao, and then also make China a hugely influential economic power on the world stage, second only to America, and now probably challenging America for the top position.

So I think that all those changes that we've seen leads me to conclude, as you mentioned, that China is the most successful authoritarian state of almost a century.

And I don't even think there's any question about that.

There's no other country that can even claim to contest that.

And so I don't necessarily think the country will collapse soon, or the party will collapse soon.

I think that there is a potential for adaptation.

I see right now under Xi Jinping that there seems to be more rigid decision making within the party.

But also, even in some instances, we do get glimpses of Xi's ability to change policies drastically on a dime.

And one example is what we call his zero COVID policy.

So when the pandemic broke out, you know, it seems to have broken out in central China first, the country went to lockdown.

Xi Jinping started this very rigid policy, very strict policy of saying we're going to eliminate COVID from the country and make sure that no one with COVID can move around, no one with COVID can come into the country.

There were massive lockdowns across the country.

For a couple years or a year and a half, that was successful in keeping the virus out.

But then when it mutated into the Omicron variation, it was impossible to keep the virus from spreading throughout China.

And so it was spreading Chinese cities very rapidly.

Xi tried to stay ahead of it by telling the party to impose lockdowns across the country in places like Urumqi in the Northwest, Shanghai.

And that created a lot of discontent and a lot of anxiety among Chinese citizens.

And you saw these protests erupt, really shocking protests called the white paper protests, where people took to the streets in major cities to say, we can't live like this.

Xi has to stop this.

He has to change.

And then what Xi Jinping did was he realized the economy is faltering because of the zero COVID policy.

He realized that people were upset, and he actually did away with the zero COVID policy, which many observers, many analysts had said that Xi Jinping would stick by that policy because it was a very personal policy of his.

He believes strongly in it.

His own image or legacy was tied to the zero COVID policy.

But instead, once he saw the threat, I think, to his legitimacy, to the party, to governance, then he immediately pivoted and ended the zero COVID policy.

Instead, they went in the opposite direction and told the population, oh, you can get COVID.

COVID's not that bad.

Their messaging was the exact opposite of what it had been in the year to two years before that.

Of course, they hadn't developed an effective vaccine yet, and so many people died when COVID spread throughout the population.

So there was a huge cost to his reversal.

But nevertheless, he did decide to do away with the zero COVID policy.

And so I say that only to illustrate that there is still this capacity for adaptation in Xi Jinping and in the top ranks of the party.

That did lead to an economic slowdown.

I mean, not just the policies within China, but of course COVID did in general.

I spoke a number of years ago with Michael Clare, who's an energy security scholar and author, and he's written a lot about China.

He said then that he felt that while the US government was freaking out over China's greater powers, and this was under, it might have even been under Obama, or I think in the early years of the first Trump administration, but he thought that China was going to ultimately be brought down because of the impact of pollution and climate disasters.

I wonder if you could talk about those kinds of pressures on the Chinese economy.

On the one hand, China is building out, I think they're building a new vast solar farm.

It's more like a solar plantation every day, every eight hours.

On the other hand, it's still burning more coal than anybody else in the world.

So talk about the impact of climate on the economy of China.

And where do you think that's going in Xi Jinping's mind?

Well, I think that there are different aspects to this.

So in terms of green technology, I think you're absolutely right.

China is becoming the world leader in green technology.

It is innovating green technology faster than any other country, including the U.S. It has much more capacity for green technology, is expanding that rapidly at a time when Donald Trump and his aides are trying to reverse American gains in green technology.

And China is also exporting that.

It is exporting electric cars, electric batteries, solar panels around the world.

And of course, some of it has caused anxiety among some countries to see it as sort of predatory exports, subsidized exports.

And so there is some debate about, you know, how this is affecting economies and industries outside of China.

But nevertheless, China has created this huge capacity for green technologies, exporting it.

And that's a positive thing in general, if you're thinking about climate change and climate disasters.

At the same time, it remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

It overtook the U.S. in that some years ago, but both China and the U.S. are the top two emitters.

It is not slowing its use of coal fast enough to help avert what scientists consider a climate disaster.

And it still has huge coal capacity.

I think that the party officials see that green technology is likely the direction of the future in terms of energy.

And that's why they've invested so much.

Plus, they know that China, because of its growth, just needs a huge amount of energy.

And that energy can come from coal or it can come from green technology.

They don't have this ideological animus towards green technology the same way that Trump and many people in the Republican Party do today.

And they also don't have the skepticism of an oncoming climate crisis or a current climate crisis in the same way that Trump and the Republicans do.

So they're behaving differently because of that.

They're not wedded to that ideological belief against the realities of climate change.

But there are these contradictions, as you point out.

And I think that much of the world is watching to see whether China will dramatically decrease its coal use as more and more green technology comes online in the country.

There is also an internal political and domestic element to all this, which is when I was living in China, I saw there be outcries among citizens living in places like Beijing, where I lived, Shanghai and other cities over the amount of air pollution that was being caused by the industrial coal burning all around the cities.

And this led to the party deciding right around 2014 or so to really ramp down the use of coal around Beijing, for example.

And so, you know, they had other coal factories ramped up production elsewhere in the country, but around Beijing, in the province around Beijing, the coal factories ramped down production.

And so Beijing's air has improved in the years since I lived in China.

And when we confronted things like what we call the air apocalypse in China, when the pollution was so bad, people did not leave their homes that day.

And so I think that the party has tried to move to address some of the domestic anxieties that they saw citizens expressing in urban areas.

And again, that shows that the party tries to adapt when it feels its legitimacy is being compromised because of decisions that are made earlier.

And so I think that we're going to see China continue to move in this direction of increasing green technology.

But the big question is whether they'll also decrease coal use and the emissions of greenhouse gases fast enough.

Well, there is so much more to this book.

We haven't even talked about Hong Kong, which of course is central to the story.

But I think we have run out of time, so our listeners will just have to get the book.

It's a terrific read.

It's just, I learned so much from it.

And I've learned so much from this conversation as well.

So thank you so much, Edward Wong, for talking with us about At the Edge of Empire, A Family's Reckoning with China.

Thanks, Francesca.

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today.