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Business Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Business Times
How an agonising relationship with his dad shaped Xi Jinping
The Party's Interests Come First By Joseph Torigian; Stanford University Press; 718 pages; US$50 and £41 BY THE time Xi Zhongxun was in his 70s, his teeth were failing him. Tough, chewy foods were a challenge, so during one family meal, he extracted some half-masticated garlic ribs from his mouth and gave them to his son to finish. Xi Jinping – by then in his mid-30s and a rising star in the Chinese Communist Party – accepted the morsel without hesitation or complaint. He took the remains of the ribs and swallowed them. Xi Jinping was used to leftovers. As a boy, he would wash in his father's bathwater. (The next morning the water would be used for a third time, to launder the family's clothes.) He also understood the importance of deference, for Xi Zhongxun had taught him that children who did not respect their parents were doomed to fail as adults. Every Chinese new year, Xi Jinping would perform the traditional kowtow ritual, prostrating himself before his parent in a display of reverence. If his technique was off, his father would beat him. These stories are recounted in The Party's Interests Come First, a biography of Xi Zhongxun by Joseph Torigian, an American scholar. Torigian draws on a decade of research using Chinese, English and Russian sources, including official documents, newspapers, diaries and interviews. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. As China's unquestioned ruler, possibly for life, Xi Jinping is arguably the most important person in the world. He will be wielding power long after Donald Trump has retired to Mar-a-Lago. Yet information about him is paltry. His every movement is choreographed by a fawning propaganda machine; in the accounts of his life, interesting details are expunged by overbearing censors. The book is valuable not only for its portrait of its subject – who was a major figure in the party's history in his own right – but also for its insights into his progeny, now the supreme leader. There are only a handful of ways to understand Xi Jinping, which involve poring over party records or leaked speeches, learning about key moments in Chinese history that he lived through and studying the people who most influenced him. Few people have shaped Xi Jinping more than his father. Xi Zhongxun's relationship to the party and his thwarted ambitions offer clues as to what his son wants for China. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Like many of his generation, Xi Zhongxun's life was marked by tragedy. Born in 1913 into a family of peasants, he was an ardent believer in communism from a young age. His belief strengthened in his adolescent years, he said, as he witnessed 'the tragic mistreatment of the labouring people'. He took part in violent student protests in 1928 and was imprisoned by the then anti-communist authorities. Xi Zhongxun's parents died when he was a teenager: the result, he thought, of the stress caused by his jailing. Two of his sisters died of hunger. After the civil war, Xi Zhongxun rose fast through the party's ranks and 'entered the very top echelon of the government', Torigian writes. Then, in 1962, he was purged by Mao Zedong for supporting the publication of a novel Mao considered subversive. Four years later, China's paranoid dictator launched the Cultural Revolution, unleashing frenzied gangs who killed between 500,000 and two million people and displaced many more. Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Around 20,000 people were targeted for having supported Xi Zhongxun, the author estimates, and at least 200 'were beaten to death, driven mad or seriously injured'. His family suffered, too. They were forced to denounce Xi Zhongxun; one of his daughters committed suicide. A teenager at the time, Xi Jinping was branded a 'capitalist roader' (essentially, a traitor) because of his father's disgrace. On one occasion, the young Xi Jinping was forced to wear a heavy steel cap and subjected to public humiliation. A crowd ridiculed him, shouting slogans including 'Down with Xi Jinping'. His mother joined in the jeering. Xi Jinping was thrown in prison, where he slept on an icy floor during the winter. 'My entire body was covered in lice,' he wrote. One time, Xi Jinping managed to escape and make his way home. He begged his mother for some food. Not only did she refuse, she also reported him to the authorities, fearful that she would be arrested otherwise. Crying, Xi Jinping ran out into the rain. What doesn't kill you The anguish did not stop there. In 1969, aged 15, Xi Jinping was 'sent down' to the countryside with millions of other young people exiled from the cities. He lived in a cave in a desolate part of the country, where girls were sold into marriage for a dowry calculated by their weight. 'Even if you do not understand, you are forced to understand,' he later recalled of that time. 'It forces you to mature earlier.' Why did both men stay committed to a party that had caused them so much pain? Torigian suggests the answer may lie in What Is to Be Done?, a novel of 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian journalist. In the story, a young man named Rakhme sleeps on a bed of nails to strengthen his will. Xi Jinping imagined that he was Rakhme as he endured those cold floors, lice, rainstorms and blizzards. Both father and son may have been influenced by a Bolshevik political culture that glamorised 'forging' – the idea that suffering strengthens your willpower and dedication to the cause. Throughout his life, Xi Jinping has been loyal to two groups that demand absolute obedience: the family and the party. Both were often 'unfairly' strict, Xi Jinping has said, yet this did not dent his loyalty. Torigian shows how Xi Jinping balances dedication and realism. 'If I were born in the United States, I would not join the Communist Party of the United States. I would join the Democratic Party or Republican Party,' Xi Jinping once told Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister at the time. Abe concluded that Xi joined the party not because of ideology, but as a way to gain power. After Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, he was put in charge of Guangdong province and began to liberalise the local economy. When Xi Jinping became general secretary of the party in 2012 – the top job in China – many expected him to be an economic reformer like his father. But the assumption that Xi Jinping was any kind of liberal was wrong: he is not interested in creating an open and free country. He believes in restoring China's greatness and thinks that, to this end, the party should use any means necessary. His experience of injustice has not taught him that arbitrary power is undesirable; only that it should be wielded less chaotically than it was under Mao, by someone wise like himself. In a little over a decade, Xi Jinping has become the most autocratic Chinese leader since Mao. His regime ruthlessly represses dissidents at home and activists abroad; it enforces a stifling political conformity, forcing many to study 'Xi Jinping Thought'. Such methods are justified, he thinks, because he sees himself as a man of destiny, with a duty to generations past and future. He often speaks of himself as a protector of Chinese civilisation. 'Whoever throws away those things left behind by our ancestors is a traitor,' he told Ma Ying-jeou, a former president of Taiwan. That attitude is apparent in Xi Jinping's Taiwan policy, which bears his father's influence. Towards the end of his career, Xi Zhongxun was put in charge of unification with Taiwan. The party had ambitious dreams of reclaiming the island, which has been self-governing since China's civil war ended in 1949 and the losing side, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), retreated there. But Xi Zhongxun died in 2002 with this aspiration unfulfilled. His son yearns to fulfil it. Xi Jinping has made it plain he wants to take back Taiwan. Those who rule China must remember that 'the territory left by the ancestors must not shrink', he said in 2012. When or how he may try to seize Taiwan – through war, a blockade or other means – is unclear. What is clear, though, is that his family's suffering has shaped Xi Jinping's dark view of politics. 'For people who rarely encounter power and who are distant from it, they always see these things as very mysterious and fresh,' Xi Jinping once said. 'But what I saw was more than the surface of things. I didn't just see the power, flowers, glory and applause. I also saw the cowsheds (where people were confined during the Cultural Revolution) and the fickleness of the world.' Xi Jinping's formative years made him clear-eyed and cynical, hardened and imperious. The worldview he learned from his father will affect not only 1.4 billion Chinese people, but the whole of humanity. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Asia Times
3 days ago
- General
- Asia Times
A 16th-century Chinese writer's take on workplace burnout
We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has aptly coined the term 'burnout society.' Four centuries ago, late-Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin — brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom. Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic. The cover of The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Stanford University Press). Amid the Wanli Emperor's neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a 'toxic workplace.' Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan's landscapes and literary circles. There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention. Yuan's xiaopin , alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires. The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions. While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China's Jiangnan region — the fertile Yangtze Delta in today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces — flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture. Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633). The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam — once a path to prestige — had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin 's intimate vignettes. Chinese imperial examination candidates gathering around a wall where the results are posted (painting by Qiu Ying, c. 1540). Photo: .National Palace Museum) In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion , editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre's 'flavor beyond flavor, rhythm beyond rhythm' — a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality — rejecting moralizing orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics. Against neo-Confucianism's rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study. Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted that such playful texts flourished among late-Ming literati disillusioned with the era's constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society. Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire's flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati such as Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance. Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the 'crystal clear retreat' that scrubbed the heart of 'worldly grime' and cultivated 'a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.' For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savoring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow. A hanging scroll, ink on paper of a plum blossom branch by Chen Jiu (1558–1639). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery/S. Sidney Kahn, 1959 / Christie's, lot 677, 1983 / Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 1985), CC BY Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a 'leisurely and elegant' esthetic rooted in nature's rhythms. Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess 'poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.' In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals. In the late Ming's burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation. In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it 'lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:' moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes into cosmic echoes. Chen Jiru had study rituals — fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone — and curated what he termed 'incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.' This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American literary scholar Bill Brown's 'thing theory,' in which everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification. The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645) turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance. His xiaopin framed everyday choices — snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff 'like a study adrift' — as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility. Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection. The Garden of the Inept Administrator (Zhuozheng Yuan) by Wen Zhengming, 1551. Wen painted 31 views of the site, each accompanied by a poem and a descriptive note. (Gift of Douglas Dillon, 1979/MET open source collection), CC BY Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today's movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance. In April 2021, China's tang ping ('lying flat') movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: 'Lying flat is justice.' The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance. In a backlash against China's '996' work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms. In the West, the Covid-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The 'Great Resignation' saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And 'quiet quitting' rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labor. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture. As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the 'moral and spiritual damage' inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure. Just like the late-Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today's workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labor yet treat them as disposable. Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays , xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal 'healing' as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic. Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-)optimization. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change but to live as if the system's demands are irrelevant. Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments — on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat's shadow — prove that resistance need not be loud. Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's vision of contemporary literature as 'space of individual recovery,' the genre shelters us from 'hierarchy and efficiency.' Here, time is not spent but reclaimed. To pause in an age of weaponized ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal's vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on — these are not acts of shirking reality but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world. Xiaopin 's revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language — one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard. Jason Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Xiao He is a master's student in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Economic Sanctions Against Iran Are Backfiring
How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez, Stanford University Press, 212 pages, $24 If there's one part of foreign policy where President Donald Trump has been consistent, it's economic sanctions on Iran. During his first presidency, Trump imposed what the State Department called a "super-maximum economic pressure campaign." Throughout the Biden administration, Trump and his supporters complained that Iran had been on the verge of bankruptcy but lax sanctions enforcement was allowing the Iranian economy to rebound. In his third week in office, Trump signed an order calling for renewed sanctions pressure on Iran, although he also expressed willingness to negotiate. Sanctions have undoubtedly made Iran squirm. Iranian oil exports fell to nearly nothing in 2019, leading Iran to harass oil shipping and allegedly attack oil production in neighboring countries. The government couldn't even access its own money abroad, and it had to make complex deals to buy food and medicine. At home, Iran saw increasingly widespread uprisings and crackdowns in 2018, 2019, and 2022. Figures in Trump's orbit have flirted with the idea of full-on regime change. The way sanctions deal out damage—the chain of causation from the president's pen to turmoil in Iran—is less well understood. Even if the issue weren't muddled by heavy propaganda, the process is complicated. How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare presents an easily digestible set of data on sanctions. It's written by anthropologist Narges Bajoghli, economist and former Central Bank of Iran researcher Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and political scientists Vali Nasr and Ali Vaez, both of whom have advised the U.S. government on negotiations. The past few decades in Iran have been a natural experiment in the effect of economic sanctions. Iran has more of a market economy than other targets of U.S. sanctions, such as Cuba and North Korea. It also had normal trade relations with much of the world, which have been cut since the 1990s by waves of Washington's sanctions. Although the United States has the power to seriously disrupt economic life in other countries, the book argues, the consequences don't always serve American interests. Sanctions hurt the prosperity and political standing of Iran's pro-American middle class the most. They also make the government more paranoid and remove important incentives to play nice. Everyone seems worse off. The U.S. has tried to wash its hands of the policy's consequences for ordinary Iranians, blaming their poverty on domestic "corruption and economic mismanagement" rather than on sanctions. But the data are clear. The Iranian economy was booming from 1988, the end of the country's war with Iraq, to 2011, the beginning of former President Barack Obama's intensified sanctions campaign. Obama's innovation was secondary sanctions. As the flow of direct American-Iranian trade shrunk, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control punished companies in other countries that dealt with Iran. The Iranian economy became more or less radioactive, as any bank in the world that handled Iranian money and any shipping company that handled Iranian oil risked the wrath of the U.S. government. Then Obama made a deal, lifting the sanctions in 2015 in exchange for restrictions on Iran's nuclear program. Trade resumed and foreign investment flowed back in—until Trump reimposed sanctions in 2018. (Despite Trump's claims to the contrary, former President Joe Biden continued to enforce the same sanctions.) Iran has since come closer to building a nuclear bomb, and it has had more confrontations with the U.S. military. While it hasn't collapsed, Iran has gone through a nationwide belt-tightening that makes life more miserable. Cutting oil exports has meant there is less capital for new investments, so growth has stagnated. Cutting off access to foreign banks has made importing anything more complicated and expensive, leading to heavy inflation. Employment has stayed steady, and the non-oil economy has actually grown: The loss of foreign imports led to a growth in domestic Iranian industry. For this reason, some hawkish Iranian nationalists argue Iran's political isolation is a good thing. But the tradeoff hasn't been worth it for ordinary citizens: By every statistic the authors review, from consumer spending indexes to the number of calories eaten per day, Iranians have lower living standards. During the economic boom times of the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Iranian middle class grew from 20 percent of the population to more than 50 percent, almost entirely due to the poor getting richer. The millions of Iranians newly exposed to higher education and foreign culture became a base for reformist political blocs such as the Green Movement, which called for liberal domestic policy and diplomacy with the outside world. Under sanctions, the trend has reversed, with millions of middle-class Iranians falling back into poverty. The authors interview many liberal Iranians who, despite waves of protests, are not optimistic about changing their country's government. With their own lives getting worse, they have shrunken from public life. "The problems seem so much bigger than what we can solve. Everything seems absurd. So one day I just said, I'm done. I'm done with all of it," says Ali, a middle-aged chemist who has joined a hippie back-to-nature group. The Iranian government has also become more paranoid and less eager to compromise, whether internally or externally. The power of sanctions, the authors argue, "ultimately lies in lifting them." Tehran agreed to the nuclear deal in 2015 because it believed that compromise on its part would lead to compromise from the other side. Years of maximum pressure have convinced many of the Islamic Republic's support base there's no point in trying to negotiate. Reza, a university professor close to the government, tells the authors that "as long as Iran is a state that believes in national sovereignty and will not kowtow to outside forces, we will continue to be on the brunt end of destructive U.S. policy. If it's not the nuclear issue, it's our ballistic missiles. If it's not our ballistic missiles, it'll be human rights. If it's not human rights, they'll find another reason." To some degree, he's right. Beyond presidential sanctions orders, U.S. trade law has essentially been rewritten around isolating Iran. (The Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 even banned NASA from making payments on the International Space Station unless the president certified that Russia was not cooperating with Iran on missile production.) The sanctions machine is on autopilot, and turning it off is a heavy political lift. Look at what happened to Obama's deal. Although sanctions relief was a passive concession—the U.S. simply stopped preventing Iran from trading with third parties—opponents of diplomacy successfully cast it as a taxpayer giveaway to the Iranian government. The 2015 deal took a lot of political capital to push through Congress, and it was easily undone by Obama's successor. Without massive legislative changes, the next deal will be just as vulnerable. Maybe the architects of sanctions just weren't honest about their intentions. If the goal is to avoid war and make Iran a freer country, sanctions policy has obviously failed. But if the goal is to prolong conflict and weaken Iranian society, the sanctions are working just fine. The chaos and suffering may be features, not bugs. U.S. officials know what's happening. They have access to the same information that the authors of How Sanctions Work have. In 2018, frustrated Iranian father Nader Shokoufi fired off an angry tweet at Richard Nephew, a former Obama administration official who wrote The Art of Sanctions. "My son was 1yo. He had fever. I went through 16 pharmacies to find the paracetamol suitable for his age. I hope you experience it once and then tell me how 'moral' that feels," Shokoufi wrote. Rather than ignoring the message, Nephew wrote back, "I am sorry that happened." He can plead remorse, but not ignorance. Others are less shy. Mark Dubowitz, head of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, complained when Iran elected a "more soft-spoken, cosmopolitan, and diplomatic president" in 2013. During the Trump administration, when the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was a key architect of the maximum pressure campaign, Dubowitz openly stated that the Islamic Republic "will turn their guns on their own people" under pressure. In December 2024, shortly after How Sanctions Work was published, the government of Syria—another sanctions target—collapsed. The Syrian sanctions failed on their own stated terms. They did not empower what the Obama administration called the "moderate opposition." They did not push the Syrian government to reform. In fact, the opposite happened; the Syrian government grew more corrupt and repressive, then fell to rebels whom the United States considers terrorists. But that seemed to suit officials just fine. Then-President Joe Biden bragged about the "historic opportunity" that came with the fall of a U.S. enemy. If the new regime turns out to be hostile, after all, it can be sanctioned, just as the old one was. Sanctions "work" by making the world a poorer, less connected, and more dangerous place. They strangle the human spirit. Peaceful exchange between nations is a win-win proposition. When those things are cut off, everyone is worse off. The post Why Economic Sanctions Against Iran Are Backfiring appeared first on
