Dec. 29, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
24:25
EPISODE 354: THE CHINA FILES - RISE OF THE RED EMPEROR
In Part Four of The China Files - Rise of the Red Emperor - Jack Posobiec is directly in his wheelhouse as he breaks down the rise of none other than Chairman Xi. This isn’t just a masterclass on how Xi tamed the Red Dragon, it's a crash course in WHY he rose to power chronicling his upbringing, vendettas during his ascension and exactly where the CCP stands on the world stage today. Join us for the final chapter in the can’t miss China Files series brought to you by Human Events Daily!Here’s...
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to this fourth edition of the China Files.
We call this episode Hong Di Jue Qi, The Rise of the Red Emperor.
Now where we left you at the end of part three was the opening up of China to the world and we talked about how the CCP had made a deal with the West that they were going to provide the slave labor Well, the West provided the capital and the intellectual property for the world.
But that began to change when a new leader arose to take over the CCP.
Xi Jinping was born in 1953.
And interestingly enough, Xi Jinping was not raised in Beijing.
He was not raised in a big city.
Now Xi Jinping's father had himself been a member of Mao's early Chinese Communist Party.
He was one of Mao's closest lieutenants.
In fact, Xi Jinping's father, if you remember all the way back in part one, when I talked about that long march and that they left and then joined up with the communists in the West after being defeated by the nationalists, where they bided their time.
Xi Jinping's father was the one who initially set up that base out in the West that Mao Zedong fled to.
So this was a guy who was in close standing with Mao.
However, during the Cultural Revolution, when all of this went down, and even during the Great Leap Forward, Xi's father had fell out of favor, the same way that so many other communist leaders fell out of favor.
And he and his family, including his 10-year-old son, were sent to the countryside.
He was purged.
And so Xi Jinping didn't grow up in Beijing, didn't grow up as the son of some great leader.
In fact, he grew up in the rural countryside, working as one of the laborers, one of the intellectuals who were sent down.
During the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards came around, he wasn't even allowed to join because of his father's questionable behavior.
So Xi Jinping could have been one of these Red Guards, but no.
In fact, his father had been purged.
The persecution of Xi Jinping's father and his family.
Xi Jinping had been one of seven, by the way.
It was so great that Xi Jinping's older sister even committed suicide.
During the Cultural Revolution and we talked before about how so many people committed suicide during this era because of these persecutions and the struggle sessions.
But it seems though Xi Jinping took a separate kind of guidance and a separate type of highlight away, a different learning from the lessons of the Cultural Revolution.
Because he didn't learn that this is not the way to run a country.
Instead, he learned that the way to gain power was to purge your enemies.
And this is exactly what he would do on his way up the food chain.
Now, when Deng Xiaoping came back into power, one thing that Deng Xiaoping did in order to unify the party was to go back and rehabilitate all of the old cadres that had been kicked out under Mao.
So Xi Jinping's father gets rehabilitated.
He's essentially exonerated of his quote unquote anti-revolutionary stances and crimes and all the other insane struggle session things they put him through.
And Xi Jinping joins the party and full at this point begins moving up the ranks.
And he continues this under Chairman Jiang Zemin through the 1990s and then Chairman Hu Jintao, late 90s, early 2000s.
Thank you.
And at one point, Xi Jinping actually becomes the chairman of Shanghai itself.
One of the major economic cities, one of the major economic drivers in all of southern China.
He becomes chairman of Shanghai, in fact, when I was living in Shanghai.
So I lived in Shanghai from 2007 to 2008.
At that time, the general secretary, which is what they call the chairman of the city, was Xi Jinping.
And at one point in the summer of 2008, right before the Olympics started, I always remember the date for the Olympics, 8-8-0-8, right?
But prior to that, when the Shanghai World Expo was being planned in downtown Shanghai, they had a facility by the river.
Pudong River.
Had the opportunity to visit there.
And there were some American clients I was working with to bring them in, bring in their representation.
And I saw, by the way, every time we brought American clients to China, how much they love the China model.
So we're taking them around, and I'm a young staffer on the project.
And the day that we go over for our meeting, turns out the local party secretary, the local chairman of the city, is also there.
Xi Jinping, with his massive entourage.
So So Xi's there and he stands about six feet tall, which is very tall over in China.
Head and shoulders above everyone in the room.
He was wearing a coat over the shoulder.
And you could see with this massive entourage around him, everybody knew this guy was the boss.
And we were actually told to stay back in one room while the entourage was walking by, but he did take a moment To peek in.
And I remember seeing him and going, man, this guy's like the Chinese Tony Soprano.
You could see the deference to him.
You could see the way that he oozed power throughout the room.
You could see the way that he just floated throughout every interaction with every person making way for him, taking their hand, extending it, We knew that Xi Jinping was going to go far at that point when he was chairman of the party.
And he was in there cleaning up what he called corruption.
What was he really doing?
He was taking out rivals.
In this case, it was rivals who were loyal to Jiang Zemin, who had been the earlier leader of the Shanghai faction of the party.
CCP split into two factions, Beijing and Shanghai.
Doesn't necessarily mean, though, that if you are the Shanghai chairman, That you're always going to be loyal to Shanghai.
And that's what happened with Xi Jinping.
He was there cleaning up rivals.
He was there purging people.
And to the populace, to the Laobai Xing, he says, well, I'm cleaning up corruption.
I'm helping China.
And he made sure that every single person that he purged, every single official that was taken down, that their crimes were broadcast throughout the entire city.
They hung newspapers up at local parks showing headlines, showing the arrests, showing all of it.
You see, because Xi Jinping had learned from what had happened to his father.
He learned that by taking down your enemies, you can build more power for yourself.
So Xi Jinping had learned that from an early age, purging your enemies was a path to power.
He was taught that lesson by Chairman Mao himself.
Chairman Mao used it to solidify power during the Cultural Revolution.
He used it to Xi's own family.
Sister committed suicide.
Father had been purged.
He himself was forced to work in the countryside.
And so a hallmark of Xi's rule over the CCP has been what he calls anti-corruption campaigns.
Not just during his time in Shanghai, but even during his time as chairman.
And he has systematically gone after so many rivals and purged so many potential detractors from this Jiang Zemin faction, from the Shanghai faction, the faction that could have possibly have opposed him.
He's actually created a reality TV show of it so that these purges, the trials, the incriminations, well, they're not done in front of stadiums anymore because you don't need that.
Now you've got TV.
Now you don't need a massive stadium.
You can put it right on CCTV and broadcast it to the entire country.
And guess what?
It's now the number one show in China.
And it's been that way for years.
The anti-corruption show hosted by Xi Jinping.
And so these officials go on and admit their own crimes, but there's no greater takedown.
There's been no greater purge of Xi Jinping's career.
Then that of Bo Xilai.
And who was Bo Xilai?
Well, if you don't know, it's because Xi Jinping and his guys stopped him.
At one point, Bo Xilai was poised to be the next leader of the party.
He was running an economic powerhouse in central China called Chongqing.
He oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, one of the biggest super projects, mega projects in all of China.
Actually damming and building a hydroelectric plant on the Yangtze River.
And then Bo Xilai had started his own cult of personality.
He started dressing like Chairman Mao.
He started bringing back the old communist songs.
People were falling in love with him.
But the problem for Bo Xilai was that Xi Jinping and his faction wanted to find out what was going on and stop him.
Because he had been close to Jiang Zemin and they didn't want him anywhere near the halls of power, whether in Beijing and certainly not as the next party chairman.
And so they did whatever they could to find dirt on Bo Xilai.
And it turns out that it wasn't just typical corruption.
It wasn't just your typical bribery.
Most elites of the CCP were involved in that.
They were all getting rich.
But no, there was another problem with Bo Xilai because he flew a little bit too close to his son.
And in fact, not just he flew too close to his son, his wife did.
On the morning of November 14th, 2011, a British citizen named Neil Heywood was found dead in a hotel room in Chongqing.
Yeah, that's right.
The same Chongqing where Bo Xilai was leader.
Now we were told at one point that he died from alcohol overconsumption.
People die all the time.
All sorts of accidents happen in China, right?
It is what it is.
Drinking a little too much, a bit of a bender.
But here's the thing.
It turns out that Neil Heywood had been in a, shall we say, close relationship with Bo Xilai's wife, Gu Kailai.
He had helped their son earn admission to a school in England.
Fancy boarding school.
He had also helped the family launder money.
Huge, massive sums of money.
Hundreds of millions of dollars outside of the country.
Now, there was a business dispute.
I'm not exactly sure what it was, but he wanted more money.
He wanted more Then they were willing to give.
And so what happened?
Gu Kailai, the wife, she poisons Neil Heywood.
She kills him.
Now, normally, if some party member does this, their wife does this, it gets cleaned up.
The party takes care of things like this.
But why do we know about this one?
Well, because here's the problem with all of that.
You see, because the police chief of Chongqing, the guy whose job it was to clean up the murders, he himself was under surveillance.
He himself was surveilling Bo Xilai and wife Gu Kailai.
So he went and took the tapes.
And he had tapes of the entire thing.
And he had receipts on Bo Xilai.
Now he first tried to bring this to the U.S.
Consulate.
This is when Barack Obama was in power.
The U.S.
Consulate didn't really do anything for him.
However, those tapes then found their way into the higher levels of the party And into the supporters of Xi Jinping.
Bo Xilai and his wife were arrested, were removed from every position that they held.
Bo Xilai himself sentenced to life in prison.
His wife, who they later determined had actually put poison in this British businessman's drink, was sentenced to death.
And believe me, the death penalty is still very, very much in favor in communist China, even to this day.
Xi Jinping orchestrated the receipt collection, the takedown, and the public disgracing of his largest possible rival.
And then one year later, stands up at the Chinese National Congress and is announced that he will be the undisputed next chairman of the CCP.
be.
And that's 2012.
By 2015, a few years into his rule, he decided to go ahead back to, to old goo, to the old wife and say, you know what?
I'm going to go ahead and commute your sentence.
We're not going to carry this out.
We're not going to execute you anymore.
We're going to give you life in prison where you and your husband can watch me live out the life that you thought that you were going to have.
And we're going to fill this prison with every single friend and ally you thought you had in the party across the entire country.
That's how Xi Jinping came to power.
So at this point, Fast forward, it's 10 years later, Xi Jinping, undisputed chairman of the CCP, changes the internal party constitution, does away with those pesky 10-year deals.
No.
He's going to be a leader for life.
He then begins purging every leader of the military that's not loyal to him, every leader of the judiciary, the legal system.
He takes over.
And he completely takes over the party.
And here's something that you need to understand that's very different.
between China and the United States is that the military itself, the People's Liberation Army, is directly subservient to the Chinese Communist Party, to the CCP and the Central Military Commission.
The generals, the admirals, they all work directly for Xi Jinping, not the other way around.
There's no democratic rule or anything like that, like you might see in the West.
Not at all.
And Xi Jinping showed an ambition that you haven't seen from chairman of the party really since Mao.
But Xi's ambition was not communist in the doctrinal sense.
He came up with a new strategy.
New strategy for rule across not just China, But for the rise of the CCP because he was focused like a laser on 2049.
The 100 year leap forward of China.
And he came up with a new strategy.
He called it Yi Dai Yi Lu.
One belt, one road.
And began working diligently with countries all around the world.
Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa South America He began going around making deals It's called debt trap diplomacy With third world nations and saying we'll give you loans.
We'll build you roads.
We'll build you railroads.
We'll build you airports We'll build you military facilities You just have to let us use them.
You just have to give us your rare earth elements He's currently now making deals with Saudi Arabia with Iran for oil People may have heard of the massive concentration camps and lockdowns in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region.
But you have to look at this on the map to understand the importance of it.
Because what is directly across the Xinjiang region?
Xinjiang is just north of Tibet, another area subjugated by the CCP.
But Xinjiang directly borders the Middle East.
And the CCP is building roads, pipelines and railroads down through Pakistan, they call it the economic corridor, all the way to the Persian Gulf so that they can get their oil.
They're building more roads and pipelines through Burma so that they can get to the Indian Ocean.
And in fact, they're encircling their one major adversary, In Asia, India, the only country in the world that has a military that could be strong enough to actually face off against China.
They're encircling them, making deals with the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Thailand.
They know what they're doing.
They're building bases in Sri Lanka.
They're building bases in the Maldives.
They're building bases in Djibouti.
They're building bases in Africa, naval bases on the Atlantic coast of Africa.
They're working in Venezuela.
They're doing everything they can to become the alternative to the United States in the world financial system.
They don't want to be the junior partner anymore.
Xi Jinping isn't going to settle for being the junior partner.
Because the rival he's looking to purge now, it's not just some of the other communists in Shanghai.
It's not just Bo Xilai of Chongqing.
No, no, no.
It's the United States.
It's us.
It's our politicians and our elites.
If you're not on board, he'll get rid of you.
If you stand in his way, He'll take you down.
Now, if you've got family members that want to get rich, like, I don't know, a son of a vice president who wants to come over and take millions of dollars in investment, work on some special deals, he's more than happy.
More than happy to compromise on his way up.
Because he's building an empire.
Hong Di, the Red Emperor.
This is how he sees himself.
Now he views what he's doing as the rise of China, the strengthening of China, the return of China, Zhong Guo, to its initial place among the world.
Zhong Guo means central kingdom.
The kingdom that's at the center of the globe.
The kingdom that all others bow down to.
If you know anything about Asian history and ancient China, that was true.
They ruled Vietnam with an iron fist for over a thousand years.
Every country in all of Asia paid tribute to the emperors of China.
And this is what he wants again.
But the problem for the United States is an old Athenian generals quote.
And that was General Thucydides.
It's now referred to as the Thucydides Trap.
And this idea is that when there is a rival power and emerging power, those trajectories eventually come to a point which leads to conflict and the outbreak of war.
Harvard University's Belfer Center ran a study that showed among 16 historical instances of the Thucydides Trap, Twelve ended and erupted in war.
A 75% chance.
I've been focused on China for 15 years of my life.
I lived there for two years.
I studied Mandarin.
I joined the United States Navy and became a linguist in Mandarin to understand what was going on with the rise of China.
When you look at the way things are escalating with Taiwan, Things are escalating with Korea, with Hong Kong, what you saw with the crackdown of the protesters across China just recently, just a few weeks ago.
And even John Mearsheimer has come out and said, we are on a collision course with China that will erupt into a world conflict.
Are we ready for that?
Is the United States ready for that?
And what will happen when we go toe-to-toe with the Red Emperor?
