Latest news with #ThePrince
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, , is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word 'astutia' — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Vox
5 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like The Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgements into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word astutia — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.
LeMonde
20-05-2025
- Business
- LeMonde
'The Art of the Deal' by Donald Trump, or the art of capitalizing on a bestseller
On April 9, journalists at the White House tried to decipher the 90-day pause on tariffs decided by Donald Trump. The young presidential spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, grew frustrated hearing talk of backtracking. "Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal..." Referring to the book as the bible of a president who thinks only in terms of transactions has become a mark of allegiance. Bill Ackman, a billionaire and staunch supporter, praised the tariff backtrack as "textbook, Art of the Deal." Each of the president's strategies, including his reversals, is said to be theorized in this work published in 1987. "It's as if The Art of the Deal has become the modern equivalent of Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Machiavelli's The Prince," joked French journalist Philippe Corbé, an expert of the US, in his newsletter Zeitgeist.
The National
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Review: Matthew Bourne's swans are still flying high
Thanks to its brilliantly bold re-envisioning of the piece – complete with a bevy of glorious and dynamic male swans – the choreography has, deservedly, achieved the status of a classic of modern ballet. The basis of the show's extraordinary success is that it is a ballet constructed from the ground upwards. Of course it keeps Tchaikovsky's magnificent score – and it maintains structural elements of the famous 1895 choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov – but Bourne's choreography is a work of startling originality. From the moment that The Prince is visited in his dreams by a beautiful male swan, we know that we are encountering what was, in 1995, a distinctively new version of the ballet. As in Tchaikovsky's original, The Prince is condemned by his officious mother to select a bride at the forthcoming royal ball. However, in Bourne's choreography, the protagonist's aversion to these arranged nuptials is connected boldly and humorously to the ballet's homo-erotic dimension. In an early scene, for instance, the Prince is observably captivated by an exquisite male nude sculpture (which is represented, back to the audience, by a real-life performer standing on a wheeled dolly). The show sparks constantly with such imaginative innovations, which are assisted always by stunning set and costume designs by Lez Brotherston. One dare not take one's eyes off the show for a moment, lest one miss some delightful detail. The Prince (played with an appropriate sense of distractedness on opening night in Edinburgh by Leonardo McCorkindale) finds himself saddled with the dreadful Sloane known only as The Girlfriend. She, in turn, was danced with marvellous hyper-activity and vulgarity in Edinburgh by Bryony Wood. Brotherston's design work comes into its own when the action shifts to a disreputable nightclub up a backstreet in the Soho district of London. Here, the clubbers come and go in a dazzling array of costumes, while video designer Duncan McLean's projection of a huge, painted advert for Swan Vestas safety matches takes glorious flight. READ MORE: Kathleen MacInnes captures magic of Tradfest in live album recording The great, pioneering German choreographer Pina Bausch famously relegated the significance of traditional pointe ballet shoes. Bourne dispenses with them entirely. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which – in its impressive solo dances, pas de deux and ensemble dances – Bourne's choreography bridges the space between traditional ballet and contemporary dance. Like much great art, this Swan Lake is simultaneously robust and poetic. The ballroom scene towards the end of the ballet is a case in point. The character of The Stranger (danced in Edinburgh with an undeniable, testosterone-fuelled swagger by a leather-clad Rory Macleod) rolls together the characters of the sorcerer Rothbart and his daughter Odile. Here – as The Stranger seduces everyone in the room, including both The Prince and his mother, The Queen – the universal eroticism of Bourne's choreography charts a direct course into the tragic heart of Tchaikovsky's ballet. At His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, May 28-31; and Theatre Royal, Glasgow, June 3-7:
Mint
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
What to read to understand Xi Jinping
(The original article was published in September 2022) Few world leaders are as shrouded in mystery as Xi Jinping. That is no accident. Mr Xi, plausibly the most powerful man in the world, rarely gives interviews or makes public statements. Those closest to him are sworn to secrecy. China's censors vigilantly scrub from the Chinese internet any information about him that deviates from the state's propaganda. While there are official accounts of his thinking, and of his time as a provincial official, plenty of questions remain unanswered. In October he is expected to secure a third term as chief of the Communist Party, cementing his position as the most influential Chinese leader since Mao. For the past nine months The Economist has been charting Mr Xi's rise. You can listen to the fruits of that research in 'The Prince", our new narrative podcast. Here are some of the books that helped us figure out what makes Mr Xi tick. Son of Yellow Earth. By Xi Jinping. Published in the National New Bibliography Magazine Mr Xi was born into a life of privilege in Beijing in 1953. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a party elder and revolutionary hero who had fought alongside Mao in China's civil war. But his comfortable life was torn apart in the years before the Cultural Revolution, as his father was purged and the younger Xi was ostracised at school. His half-sister committed suicide and his own mother denounced him. All this is recalled in 'Son of Yellow Earth", a biographical essay by Mr Xi that was published in a Chinese journal in 2002. At the age of 15, after his father's fall from grace, Mr Xi was sent to work in rural Shaanxi, where he lived in a cave for seven years. He later conceded that had he stayed in Beijing, he 'might not have survived". But his time in the cave was gruelling. 'I had never seen a flea when I lived in the city," he writes, but soon after arriving in the village his 'whole body became swollen from scratching the flea bites". This is Mr Xi's creation myth. Despite starting life with a silver spoon in his mouth, he claims to have first-hand knowledge of the suffering of common people. As he writes in his illuminating essay, 'the knife is sharpened on a grinding stone." Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018. By Alfred Chan. Oxford University Press; 680 pages; $49.95 and £32.99 How did Mr Xi make it from the cave to the top of the Communist Party? The answer, according to Alfred Chan, a professor of political science at Western University in Canada, was a long, hard slog through the provinces. In this meticulous account, Mr Xi is presented as a savvy apparatchik who sticks firmly to the party line. He managed to emerge unscathed from a huge corruption scandal that exploded when he was in charge of Fujian province. In 2007 he was made party secretary of Shanghai, a prestigious post. There he cleaned up another corruption scandal, accelerating his ascent to the Communist Party leadership. Was it cunning politics that helped Mr Xi beat the competition? Mr Chan argues no: he was just in the right place at the right time. In 2008, when Mr Xi was announced as the presumed successor to Hu Jintao as China's leader, the party was in a crisis, not least because of various corruption scandals. Mr Xi seemed like a capable pair of hands. Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China. By Desmond Shum. Scribner; 320 pages; $18.99. Simon & Schuster, £20 Desmond Shum was a high roller. With his now ex-wife, Whitney Duan, he cultivated ties with some of China's most important politicians. Through insider deals on the stockmarket and valuable property deals, the pair became multi-millionaires (they deny they broke any laws). But when Mr Xi came to power in 2012, vowing to stamp out corruption, their empire came crashing down. In 2017 Ms Duan, who had divorced from Mr Shum earlier, was snatched in Beijing and disappeared into the maw of the government's anti-corruption campaign. Mr Shum had already left for Britain. He didn't hear from Ms Duan for years—until she called him days before the release of his tell-all book (which we first reviewed here) about his brush with the upper echelons of Chinese power. Don't publish, she told him. She is still in China, closely monitored by the authorities. Luckily for readers interested in Chinese politics, he ignored her entreaties. His gripping book describes some of the manoeuvres that Mr Xi made to defeat his rivals, many of whom were ensnared by the anti-corruption campaign (certain 'red aristocrats" were spared). According to Mr Shum, Mr Xi was always more interested in power than money. Once, over dinner, Mr Shum tried to take the measure of the future leader of China. Mr Xi sat opposite him, impassive, saying nothing. He wasn't interested in what Mr Shum had to offer. Deadly Quiet City. By Murong New Press; 320 pages; $27.99 In 2019, while at home in Beijing, Hao Qun received a knock on the door. Police officers carted him off to the station to reprimand him for tweets he had sent years earlier, which included cartoons of Mr Xi. From that moment he was considered to be a 'sensitive person". After he published 'Deadly Quiet City", under the pen name Murong Xuecun, he feared the authorities enough to leave China. His account of the covid-19 lockdown in Wuhan put a black mark against his name. Mr Hao's book contains harrowing details of the pandemic's early days. He revealed the anger of people in Wuhan: about the initial cover-up of the novel disease and about the silencing of whistleblowers such as Li Wenliang, the doctor who had raised the alarm before dying of the virus himself. Mr Xi has repeatedly asserted that China's supposed victory over the virus is because of his 'zero-covid" policy. He has staked his political legitimacy on the success of that approach. But Mr Hao's penetrating account is a reminder of the anger and frustration that bubble beneath China's lockdowns. The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping's China. By Kevin Rudd. PublicAffairs; 432 pages; $32 and £25 Kevin Rudd, Australia's former prime minister, has met Mr Xi several times. Nonetheless, Mr Rudd felt that he should get to know China's leader a bit better. So in 2017 he made the unusual decision to pursue a PhD on 'Xi Jinping Thought", Mr Xi's official worldview, at the University of Oxford. This book is the product of that academic journey. It is also a plea for dialogue as policymakers in Beijing and Washington move farther apart. Mr Rudd notes that while Mr Xi's musings can feel like ideological gobbledegook, it is possible to piece together a coherent worldview. Mr Xi sees politics as a zero-sum game, having as a child felt the cost of his father losing power. On the international stage, he has no interest in backing down. Instead he talks of the international system experiencing 'great changes unseen in a century".
