November 25th, 2020, Anthony Fauci appeared on this program, and Bill was apparently one of those callers on that program.
Viewers can watch it on our website at c-span.org if you want to go back and you want to listen.
Coming up now, we hope you stick around after this brief pro forma session in the House.
It shouldn't be more than a minute or two.
That's how long they usually are.
That's taking place now, and we'll see you back on the other side of that.
Martin Smith joins us now from New York.
He's the producer and director of the new PBS Frontline documentary titled China, the U.S., and the Rise of Xi Jinping.
Martin Smith, good morning to you.
Good morning to you.
That documentary is set to air tonight on PBS's frontline, 10 p.m. Eastern.
Viewers can watch it in its entirety.
Let me give viewers a preview.
This is about 30 seconds of what they'll see tonight.
Xi Jinping wants to restore China to its grand estate.
The rise of the Chinese leader.
She was not afraid to say, We're not giving you the freedoms and rights.
If anyone believes that they can stop China's steady rise, it's probably indulging in fantasy and the global implications.
He has chosen to go down the route of consolidating power, the route of nationalism.
Premier's Tuesday, November 26th, 10, 9 Central, only on PBS.
Martin Smith, why it's important for Americans in this moment to learn about who Xi Jinping is?
Well, this is our chief global rival.
And we have a new president or a returning president coming into the White House, and it will be foremost on his agenda to figure out how he wants to deal with Xi Jinping.
And so we took it upon ourselves to help our audience understand who he is, where he came from, what shaped him into the man he is today.
And it's important because, you know, we've been focused on Ukraine, we've been focused on our own domestic issues.
Not enough has been focused on Xi Jinping and China and where we stand vis-à-vis that global superpower.
Where did he come from and what did shape him?
He was born into the China of Mao.
And in the midst of that upheaval that marked Mao's time in office, Xi Jinping was affected by so much that happened.
His own father was a fellow communist revolutionary along with Mao.
He was put into a high office once the revolution succeeded in 1949.
And then not long after that, as happened to many politicians of all stripes, Mao decided he didn't trust him.
He sent him to work in a factory and then he incarcerated him for eight years.
That was when Mao was just a child.
I mean, that's when Xi Jinping was just a child.
And then Xi Jinping himself was subjected to what's called struggle sessions, where you're put in a dunce cap and you're put in front of thousands of people and humiliated, derided, denounced.
His own mother denounced him.
Then he was sent into the countryside to do hard labor for seven years from age 15 to 22.
All of this was tremendously impactful on him.
And instead of turning against all this and all the humiliation he suffered, he embraced Mao.
He understood that to get ahead in China, you had to be redder than red, and you had to line yourself up with the party.
So he emerged from all that, saying in an interview that we have a clip of in the program that his time in the countryside and all of that was something that was good for him.
You know, it was a tremendously stressful time.
His own half-sister committed suicide.
You know, his father was in prison.
He was doing hard labor with peasants.
He tried to escape.
His family sent him back.
He lived in a cave in one of the poorest provinces of China.
So that was really what cast the die for who he became and how he decided to embrace the very system that had so punished him.
Let me give viewers the phone numbers to call in Martin Smith with us this morning ahead of the airing of his documentary tonight on PBS at his frontline 10 p.m. Eastern.
Go ahead and call in on phone line split as usual by political party.
202748-8000 for Democrats.
202-748-8001 for Republicans.
Independents, it's 202-748-8002.
Martin Smith, bring us to the more recent history of Xi Jinping.
When did he start really climbing the ladder of the Chinese Communist Party?
And how long has he actually been president of China?
He's been president of China since 2013.
He became the chairman of the party in 2012, which is really a more powerful position.
You know, he came out of exile.
He came out of the countryside.
He was 22 years old.
He was able to get into a university, but his interest was in politics, even though he got a degree, I think, in chemical engineering.
But then he went out into the provinces and was there for several decades, working his way up the ladder until he got a big break in that the party brought him in to clean up a corruption scandal in Shanghai.
And from there, after seven months, the party noticed him and they brought him to Beijing and put him on the standing committee of the Politburo and he became one of the most powerful people in China.
That was 2008.
Since then, and specifically since he became president and head of the party in 2012, 2013, has his views on the United States changed or has he been consistent in how he views the United States as a chief rival?
It's an excellent question because he kept his cards very close to his vest.
And he was a very cautious bureaucrat while he was climbing the ranks in the countryside.
Once he got to Beijing, the party saw him as pliable and they wanted somebody to lead the country.
They were looking about at the various candidates.
They put him in charge of the 2008 Olympics, which was a great success.
And he sort of passed the test, if you will.
And so he was made the head of the Communist Party in 2012.
In 2013, he becomes the president.
But he was, it wasn't really clear.
There were clues.
One of the things he did before he became the chief was that he was running the Central Party School.
This is sort of an elite academy that trains the communist leaders of the future.
And we have an interview with a woman who was a member of the party for many, many years.
She was a teacher there, and he was the administrator.
And she said that he operated something like a mafia boss in terms of the way he talked to teachers, told them what their limits of their teaching.
He said, if you want to speak freely, get out of here.
And she said that was a harbinger for her of things to come.
And indeed, once he took office, he really became a much, you know, people thought he was going to be something of a moderate when he came in, and he wasn't.
He became a very tough customer.
How long did it take you to make this documentary?
How much access did you have to people, to interviews in China and the people who were willing to talk to you for this documentary?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
We made every effort possible to engage more voices from China.
I traveled to China on a business visa in January of 2024.
I arrived.
I contracted COVID.
I was down for a week.
But I was there for a month, and I had many conversations with many various academics, former party officials, all of whom agreed to participate in a documentary.
I said, look, I'm going to do a film here, and I'm going to have a lot of American experts, and they're going to say they're going to criticize China.
They're going to criticize Xi Jinping specifically on human rights, on his expansionist policies in the South China Sea and Hong Kong, his threats against Taiwan.
I want you to have a chance.
I'm saying this to the various people in China.
I want you to have a chance and take the opportunity to respond and give your point of view.
They all signed up.
I had agreements.
I had letters inviting me back.
I came back to New York and applied formally for a journalist visa.
And they sat on the request.
And my passport and the application sat in the consulate in New York City for several months.
I had several meetings with officials.
And, you know, they didn't say no.
They just never responded.
Finally, after several months, we had to pull the plug on that.
I did find a few people that would speak on behalf of China, people, government advisors or others, unofficial spokespeople who did speak on camera.
And I caught them here when they were visiting the U.S.
But we were, you know, the restrictions on media in China are severe.
International media is heavily restricted.
And so they never let me in.
But we were determined that we would tell this story.
And we did it with U.S. experts, a few China spokespeople, and lots and lots and lots of archival research to find the bits and pieces that we had stitched together to make this film.
If you had somehow gotten the opportunity to ask a question of Xi Jinping himself, what would you ask him?
Boy, there would not be just one question.
There would be many questions.
would want to understand his thinking about where he is taking China.
You know, since he took over, he exerted enormous control.
You know, there are some 600 million surveillance cameras in China.
That's about one for every two citizens.
They have a technocratic way of with AI and other sophisticated tools of monitoring everybody's movements.
He's fired a lot of people, purged a lot of people.
I would want to understand what happened once he got into office.
What did you what were you thinking?
And as he, when he inherited the top job, when he became president, China was at its peak.
The U.S., the West, was in decline.
We'd had an economic collapse in 2008.
Once he becomes president, China is looking very good.
And why he focused so much on control, on expansion, that would be my question.
Because he took a country that under Deng Xiaoping, starting back in the 80s, in the 70s, was opening.
It was called reform and opening.
And that was the policy.
And there were many decades under several U.S. presidents where the relations were quite warm.
Once Xi Jinping comes into office, he turns hostile.
I would want to understand more about the roots of that hostility and what it's getting him.
If you had to guess, what would you say is Xi Jinping's biggest fear today?
I think he's beginning to understand that he can exert control through repression, but that somehow in order for the economy to grow, you have to have foreign investment.
Foreign investment is now fleeing the country.
You need to have the markets in the West.
You need to have friendly relations if you're going to have China healthy.
So I think the problem here is that he's trying to find the balance between sort of a strict control and hostility towards the West with trying to get the economy going again.
And he needs foreign investment.
He needs trade.
And now Trump is coming back into office and just yesterday talked about slapping another 10% on Chinese goods coming into the U.S.
These policies tend to create inflation here in the U.S. because the cost of these goods coming in goes up and that's passed on to the consumer.
You know, Xi Jinping is saying and repeating to Trump, look, nobody's going to win in a trade war.
But yet that's the direction we're going.
So I think Xi Jinping is really struggling to find how he can open and maintain control.
There's a lot of unhappy people, especially the young.
There's an unemployment rate up to 25%.
I mean, it's not an official figure, but that's the estimate.
So you've got a lot of very unhappy young people in China, and they are protesting and paying the price with jail terms, with beatings.
But it's not, you know, his China is not invincible.
The documentary name again is China, the U.S. and the Rise of Xi Jinping.
It airs tonight, 10 p.m. Eastern on PBS's Frontline, also available to stream on Frontline's website and YouTube and the PBS video app.
And Martin Smith is here to take your phone calls for about the next half hour this morning.
Phone lines again by political party.
We'll start on the independent line, Harry in Bel Air, Maryland, up first for Martin Smith.
Go ahead.
Hi, Mr. Smith.
Wouldn't you say that Kissinger was partly responsible for the rise of China and our cozing up to the Communist Parties all over the world except for Russia and maybe even Russia and the greed that goes along with it.
So I would think that we have been complicit in the rise of China.
That's my question.
Mr. Smith.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the rise of China.
The people in China have every right to have their living standard raised.
Before the revolution, it was one of the poorest countries in the world.
The opening to the West, which you referenced, the visit of Kissinger with Nixon in 1972, this was all going in a fairly good direction until we got to Xi Jinping.
So it wasn't reasonable to think that we should just quash the ambitions of Chinese population.
You know, this is a very sophisticated culture and nation, and it was a good thing that they were able to amass great amounts of wealth.
The problem is the hostility that now exists.
And I can't say that American leaders have stoked that.
I think that you have to look at Xi Jinping and hold him accountable for why he's turned in that direction.
Raymond out of Harper Woods, Michigan, Republican.
Good morning.
You're next.
Hey, what up, Doe?
That's the Michigan State Police line.
How you doing?
Doing well, Raymond.
What's your question on this documentary?
Sure.
Well, I see this is Mr. Smith talking about the president of China, right?
Yep.
Okay.
Well, from what I'm hearing on the inside, I'm a Trump-certified team leader.
Now, Trump's a military man.
He funded all the military and really beats up as much as he could.
And ever since the Saudis dropped the dollar and we had all that inflation, the pandemic happen to us, the whole deal was everybody invested in the United States to go to World War II, baby boom, all that, right, with the oil, that we still have a pretty good amount.
But after the dollar, we've got to somehow take care of it.
Raymond, bring me to your question on Xi Jinping today.
Sure.
China is way overpopulated.
I'm not sure how strong they are, especially on that TikTok app.
I think we've got to stop that.
Thank you, sir.
Martin Smith, social media, TikTok.
I'm not sure what the question is, frankly, but I appreciate the caller.
You know, we don't take on TikTok in this documentary.
There are many things that we couldn't get to.
Our focus is on Xi Jinping and who he is and how he became the man that he is today.
So I have to punt on the question of TikTok and what harm it's causing.
And I think that, you know, we have to find our way back to a reasonable competition with China.
I think that under Xi Jinping, it's going to be difficult.
I don't think that he is really looking for improved relations with the West.
His friends, of course, are Russia, Iran, North Korea.
You know, he's set himself up sort of on the other side of the equation.
This is from Andrew in Texas via our text messaging service.
Xi has already changed the Constitution to stay in power.
Do you believe that Xi will remain in power his entire lifetime?
Well, you know, I don't know what his intentions are, but he did in 2018 revise the Constitution and it was ratified by the People's Congress a few years later.
So it allows him to serve his five-year term and then run again and be elected.
And so as long as he can lead China in a direction that pleases the party, the top-level party officials, he'll remain in power.
He has tremendous ambitions more than any Chinese leader since Mao.
He has a strong vision for how China can be a leader in artificial intelligence.
He's put together the biggest infrastructure program in history with connections around the world, building ports and bridges and train tracks all over the world.
So he's a tremendously ambitious leader.
Martin Smith joining us from New York.
Mary Elizabeth is in New York City as well.
Line for Democrats, good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I'm listening to the conversation, and it's always been my opinion that when trade relations began with the Chinese government, there was a question earlier about Kissinger and Nixon and their,
quote, opening up China and the fact that whole American industries moved their businesses and their manufacturing facilities to China to save money and to have greed and more profit.
And it's always been my understanding that all these contracts that were signed were controlled by the People's Liberation Army.
So I wonder what is the relationship with the minister and with the People's Liberation Army, because 51% of the contract was controlled by the PLO, PLA,
and then the 49% was any Western investment in that particular contract, which meant that they would be in control of the contract and the relationships, the trade relationships in that country.
And with the tariffs that the quote, incoming administration is proffering, is what effect is that going to have on American consumers who are buying all of their intangible product have the label made in China.
Well, one of the effects of those tariffs is going to be, at least in the short term, the effect in the long term is a little bit squishy to figure out, but in the short term, and I'm talking several years, it's going to cause a rise in prices.
And it's going to cause, therefore, inflation.
You're quite astute in terms of the investment and the control by the government of China so that Foreign investment comes into the country and then makes agreements with China because they want the cheap labor, they want cheap property, they want benefits.
But China says, look, you got to tell us what your trade secrets are, what's your secret sauce.
And then the government takes that information and gets a Chinese company to manufacture the product using the special sauce, whatever that is, whatever product we're talking about, and then drives the U.S. company out of business.
It's been a very rocky road for many businesses.
They did rush in under Deng Xiaoping in the 70s and into the 80s.
And foreign investment was healthy, but it was struggling.
And many corporate leaders came to the White House to complain about how China was stealing their intellectual property, driving them out of business.
Now, tariffs is a kind of different page in all of this.
But you're quite right that there is a problem with the way in which U.S. companies are able to operate in China.
At this point, many of them are fleeing the country.
Elon Musk is an exception.
He has a huge Tesla factory in Shanghai.
And he's a kind of bridge between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
It'll be interesting to see if he can be effective in bridging that gap.
The question on tariffs coming a day after we found out from the incoming president about plans to slap an additional 10% tariffs on all Chinese products.
I want to give viewers a flavor from your documentary on the trade war and tariffs in particular.
This is about two minutes and 20 seconds from the documentary, China, the U.S., and the rise of Xi Jinping.
Trade war worries igniting after the president signed this order to slap tough tariffs on China.
He started with a 10% tariff on Chinese aluminum, 30% on solar panels and electric vehicles, 25% on steel and nearly everything else made in China.
Surprisingly, China's not happy, already threatening retaliation.
What China did was move its exports to other countries and move its imports from other countries as well.
So it shifted the purchase of soybeans, for example, from the U.S. to Brazil.
So that wasn't a useful policy.
President Trump has just slapped tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese exports.
Uniting the biggest trade war in economic history.
Trump's trade war would consume the remainder of his presidency.
China is now punching back with an equal amount of tariffs on American exports.
After several tit-for-tat tariff increases, the trade war, which continued into the Biden administration, actually increased the trade deficit.
The trade deficit has skyrocketed to $891 billion, the highest ever.
Cost increases also led to a decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Intellectual property theft continued.
And the costs imposed by tariffs were simply passed along to consumers of imported products.
And now, Trump has promised to impose even higher tariffs once he is back in office.
Tariffs were put in place because China's economic policy was hurting U.S. factories and workers.
That's a belief on the part of some people in the U.S., especially by the people of the Trump administration.
The Biden administration has even extended those.
But if you talk in private, many don't agree with such kind of policy.
Why?
Because it hurts the U.S. economy.
There is the argument that has a high inflation.
Where do you get it?
In part because of these tariffs.
The documentary is set to air tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern on PBS.
Martin Smith, what's your expectation of the reaction in China to this latest 10% tariff threat?
The line that they're using, I've heard the spokespeople and I've heard from Xi Jinping himself in various venues that he's spoken in, is that he thinks this is not going to work and everybody is going to be hurt by this.
So I don't know exactly what will be accomplished.
Right now, President Trump is not in office, so this amounts to some saber-rattling.
And he fashions himself a deal maker, and I think he's trying to set the stage and get Xi Jinping's attention and to then try to negotiate something that will not be harmful.
Look, we're bound together.
They need our market.
We need their investment.
So it's very hard to decouple.
And that's been the phrase of late, that we're decoupling from China.
But it hasn't really benefited anybody at this point in time.
And I don't know if this saber rattling that we're seeing is going to play out once Trump is in office.
That remains to be seen.
It's very hard to predict what Donald Trump is going to do tomorrow.
Less than 15 minutes left with Martin Smith this morning.
Diane's waiting in DeSoto, Kansas.
Republican, good morning.
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
In thinking about Xi Jinping and the way he grew up, it almost sounds like he had an attitude of if you can't beat him, join him.
But anyways, my question is with regard to his relationship with Trump and especially China's aggressive attitude towards Taiwan and the Philippines, etc.
I think that they're both survivors.
Xi Jinping is a survivor and he made his path as a result of that.
Donald Trump is also a survivor coming back a second time.
And I just wonder, how do you think this influences both of their reactions to the other with regard to especially aggressive policies with Taiwan, et cetera?
Thank you.
Diane, thanks for the question.
That's a very good question.
I think Donald Trump admires strong leaders.
I think he's, in fact, envious of the way in which a leader like Xi Jinping can control what happens in his nation, in his country.
So I think there's some admiration that goes on there.
With Xi Jinping, it's hard to say how he—it's relatively opaque and hard to determine how he sees Donald Trump.
I think he's cautiously sort of circling right now and trying to figure it out and figure out what's next.
I think Xi Jinping has focused very much on his domestic enemies, on repression, and then on his, as you mentioned, threats against Taiwan, against the Philippines, the moves in the South China Sea to build military outposts off of coral reefs in the middle of the ocean.
I think he's been focused there.
But now he needs to focus on the economy, and I think that's something he has, in the words of one of our interviewees, taken for granted, that the economy was in very good shape when he took over, not such good shape now, and that he needs to focus on that.
And I think the coming of Donald Trump will force him to focus on that even more.
You know, during the COVID lockdown, there were demonstrations across China against the restrictions on movement of people, and they were the largest demonstrations since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
The PLA and the state security didn't shoot people on the streets, but what you saw was a lot of people arrested and given prison terms.
And I think it portended trouble ahead because there is this sort of undercurrent of resentment, of protest, of unhappiness, especially among 20 and 30-year-old people in China.
And so he's got to manage that with his toolbox of repression and at the same time get the economy moving again.
So he's got a big challenge there.
Is the PLA any match for the U.S. military?
We don't know.
The Chinese, I think, I talked to a number of military officials when I was in China.
And, you know, they say, well, you know, our army is not experienced.
We haven't fought wars.
The United States has fought several wars.
We haven't really won them.
But there is experience in the U.S., in the Pentagon, that they lack.
And I think that there's a certain amount of insecurity.
I think Xi Jinping would see Taiwan as an opportunity for his military to learn and get some experience.
I don't know if that's enough to push him to pull the lever, but is the PLA, are we a match for one another?
They have a bigger navy.
They have more ships.
They're turning them out very quickly.
But it's really hard to say.
It's a massive army.
And I had a conversation, it's in the film with Admiral Paparo, Sam Paparo, who is the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, all the soldiers in the Indo-Pacific.
It's a huge responsibility.
He says, look, if there's a war over Taiwan, it will dwarf the Second World War.
It will lead to a depression.
It will be catastrophic if that happens.
To Winter Park, Florida Independent, this is Ian.
Thanks for waiting.
Hi, good morning, guys.
I just wanted to thank C-SPAN for taking my call.
Before my question, I just also wanted to say I had not heard of this film before today's segment.
And throughout, just hearing you speak about it and the couple of clips that have been played, I'm really looking forward to watching it.
Unfortunately, it seems to air at one in the morning for me, so I won't be watching it today.
But let me say that it will be available online in perpetuity.
You've already found the website and everything.
So it's free there and you can watch it on your own time.
Yeah, so the question I had was throughout the making of this entire film, were there any moments in particular that were memorable for you?
And if so, which one was the most memorable?
There is a theme that came up throughout the documentary, from the Cultural Revolution to Chianan Square to the battle for Hong Kong, where the and the crackdown in Xinjiang against Muslims, the minority there that's been resisting Chinese rule.
And that is when they take a dissident and put them in jail, they often then pressure family members to testify against their offspring, their siblings, whatever.
And this theme is repeated.
And they seem to be saying that, look, your loyalty has to be to the party, not to your family.
And I found it extremely moving to listen to some of these people who have fled the country and talk about how their families were turned against them.
And this is a tactic that repeats itself over and over again throughout the documentary.
It's extremely moving and heart-wrenching to watch.
You'll see it in the documentary, especially one woman that fought against during the uprising in Hong Kong.
She's in the U.S., there's a bounty on her head, and she says, look, at the end of the day, this is about fighting for the people you love, but they cut you off.
She's not able to talk to her mother or father, who are still in Hong Kong.
And, you know, she resists crying in the documentary.
She was very moving.
Lily Gaithersburg, Maryland, Republican.
Good morning.
Hey, good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
I'm excited to hear this topic.
I'm a first-generation immigrant from China.
So I think I wanted to add some of my perspectives.
I think I got really interested when I heard about the part when your guest was trying to shoot this documentary in China, and he was basically kind of like a stonewalled.
And that's so typical of how they do things.
And I want to say that, you know, I left the country more than 20 years ago.
Back then, it was quite open and, you know, much, much more open than nowadays.
I was shocked myself looking back and realizing that, you know, how the country has gone backwards.
And I believe she wants to be Mao number two, which, you know, I really detest Mao because I think the worst part about him is that he treated the people of China like trash.
And so she does not care about the people.
And he was basically writing the coattails of the economic boom, you know, from Teng Xiaoping and others.
But he's ruining the country.
And I feel so sad about the people of China and they're suffering under the Communist Party, even though obviously economic condition was better before, but now it's kind of like coming down too.
And I also wanted to say that I always laugh when I hear about people here calling Trump a dictator.
They have not seen a dictator yet.
And I also laugh when people talk about, you know, rant about Fox.
If it's not for Fox and some of the right-wing, I mean, you know, they don't get everything right.
But if it were not for them, this country would be just like communist propaganda because it's all the same thing.
So that's my just two cents.
Thank you.
Martin Smith.
Well, I appreciate your thoughts.
And I think you're quite cogent in terms of Xi Jinping and the turn to a sort of Maoist autocracy.
And it's, you know, I've talked to many Chinese.
I welcome you to America.
I'm glad you're able to speak freely and make a phone call and speak on the air about these things.
You couldn't do that in China.
Chinese censorship is prevents any, you know, free speech, freedom of assembly, all these things are threatened and human rights ultimately.
So I appreciate your call.
Final two minutes.
I wanted to end on Miles Yu's column in today's Washington Times, senior fellow director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute.
He touches on what you and I talked about earlier on Xi Jinping and his biggest fear right now.
I just wanted to read this to you and get your reaction.
He writes that Mr. Xi's demand for non-interference in democracy and human rights issues reflects the regime's deepest fear.
It is not a defense of sovereignty, but an indictment of his regime's repression.
From the Tiananmen Square massacre to the silencing of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement and the internment of millions of Uyghurs, the Communist Party's record is one of systematic oppression.
Mr. Xi's paranoia stems from a well-founded fear of his own people.
The party knows it governs a nation brimming with discontent, from the stifling censorship to the internet to the absence of basic freedoms by branding democracy and human rights as foreign impositions.
Mr. Xi seeks to delegitimize these universal principles, ensuring that his regime's iron grip remains unchallenged.
He writes, this tactic, however, is failing.
The world increasingly sees China not as a sovereign defender, but as a regime desperate to silence the voices of his own people.
Would you agree?
I have to agree.
And I think if you watch the documentary, you'll see what this author is saying played out in pictures and in witness testimony.
In many cases, very painful testimonies are given in the documentary.
So you'll see this play out.
I think one of the things that you have to understand about Xi is that he watched the fall of the Soviet Union, and he became very afraid that that could happen and that peripheral states would split off from China just like they did in the Soviet Union.
So in the Soviet Union, you have the Baltic states, you have Georgia, you have Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
All these countries were under the control of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev came in and all this began to unravel.
Xi Jinping sees this, and his attitude is that the Russians were not men enough, man enough, to really see, you know, keep control.