Xi Jinping is in the United States this week for talks with President Trump, and Sasha Gong brings a view of him almost no American analyst has. She spent a year in a Chinese jail as a young dissident and was released by Xi's own father, who told her group he had spent sixteen years in a communist jail, five of them in shackles. She grew up in the same Cultural Revolution generation as Xi, knows people who have known him for decades, and reads the Chinese press every day.
Her advice to Jenny Beth Martin is two sentences long. Give Xi face: a presidential greeting at the airport costs America nothing and means everything in Beijing, to a man whose insecurity she traces back to a childhood in the Cultural Revolution. Do not give him an inch: not on trade, not on the industrial base, and not on artificial intelligence, which she calls the new industrial revolution and the fight that decides who controls everyday life.
Guest: Sasha Gong, former China director at Voice of America, former political prisoner in China, former China expert at the AFL-CIO, Harvard PhD, and writer for American Greatness.
Key talking points:
• China wanted its trade truce extended to the end of President Trump's term and, by Scott Bessent's account, got a truce to January
• Why a one-hour trip to the airport costs nothing and a trade agreement costs plenty
• Xi has purged every top leader of China's military: a sign of insecurity, not strength
• Xi's childhood: a father jailed for sixteen years, a boy paraded at 13 while his mother watched, then sent back by her
• The illusion of power, and why Trump the businessman is giving it to him
• China's world AI organization in Shanghai drew 26 countries; America must lead its own table
• China's economy: almost 19 percent youth unemployment, 300 million who need a job, imports to the U.S. down 25 to 30 percent
• Is China helping Iran? Gong says not much, and that Beijing would abandon Tehran the day it became useless
• How a reporter who did not like Trump came to back his industrial policy: "Now America is his company"
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00:00 — Cold open: Sasha Gong on Xi Jinping's visit to America
01:31 — Who Sasha Gong is: former political prisoner, Harvard PhD, Voice of America
02:28 — Three years of school, sent to the countryside at nine
04:20 — Why the visit matters: Bessent says China did not get the deal it wanted
06:05 — Why not to surrender: the industrial base and AI
07:31 — Why AI has to be built in America: "you better own it"
09:10 — China's world AI organization in Shanghai: 26 countries
09:37 — American values in the technology standards
11:44 — Quantum computing and the limits of imagination
13:44 — Give Xi face, do not give an inch
14:29 — Xi has purged every top leader of the military
15:39 — Brezhnev, the last Ming emperor, and a dictator with no challenger
17:05 — Why meeting Xi at the airport costs nothing
17:44 — Xi's father: sixteen years in a communist jail, five in shackles
19:25 — Xi's childhood: bullied, detained at 13 for a Russian love song
21:54 — His mother sent him back
23:43 — Five years of schooling: "the elementary school graduate"
25:18 — Pretending to be humble
26:21 — When your own family turns on you
27:34 — Stalin, Mao and the purged: "you only have survivors"
29:47 — What Xi wants from America: the illusion of power
31:26 — What Trump wants: a ceasefire in the economic fight
33:12 — Is China helping Iran?
34:42 — What her contacts in China say; Jimmy Lai
35:33 — China's economy: 19 percent youth unemployment, 300 million flexibly employed
37:53 — Imports from China down 25 to 30 percent; the factories left
39:39 — Ripe to take out the leader? Two million robots
40:33 — The CIA and the Soviet archives: does Xi know?
42:22 — What Americans should take from the visit
42:34 — How Trump won over a skeptic: "Now America is his company"
44:47 — Time to take it back; close
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