Evan not yet. I have a request in but he is not said yes. Charlie how much is known about him in terms of the public press in china . And how much of an effort is there to define him . Evan there is a mythology about him, a robust and fixed story about him. He is the son of a revolutionary, his father was one of the founding heroes of communist china. The sun suffered during the cultural revolution. That in itself is not wrong. That basic skeleton of a story is correct but the details of how those experience impacted him, how they shaped his thinking, those turn out to be essentially important to understanding who he is. Charlie drawback portrait for me. Evan he has seen the best and worst of the communist experience. He grew up at the absolute top of the hierarchy. His father was working sidebyside, and his revolution since he was 14. The entire world the president grew up and was the communist party. Everything he knows, he is a. Successful a and successful product. He knew all of his friends in school, their fathers were also senior leaders. He went to the chinese of koblenz of andover the chinese equivalent of andover. They had privileges and a sense of responsibility, which is that you grow up to an heritage the revolution. They were told that day after day. When you grow up, you inherit the revolution. The cultural revolution was this time of enormous chaos. Students attacked their teachers, children attacked parents. All of a sudden, these privileges he had from being associated with these their movies became a liability these families became a liability. He was sent to a village, a rough place to live. He lived in a cave and shoveled manure and when you dig into what he has said over the years, it is a bit more approachable. He realized, im not cut out for this. He was a city kid. He gets to this village, has no idea how to carry weight or farm and he was rated on a scale of labor, a six out of 10. It was lower than the level that women got on their labor score. He tried to get out of it. He fled to beijing and said he wants to get back to his old life and he was arrested and sent back. At that point, he was reborn essentially. He relie realized he would be a communist party hero. It was a bitterly difficult time. His father was in jail, his mother was forced to do hard labor. Xi jinping made a judgment which was that if he would survive and china, he had to be even more red than the reddest person he could see. That eventually led to the man we see today, a true partisan of the communist party. Charlie he seems to have learned about power. Evan he absorbed deeply lessons about power. Everything he saw from the time he was a child said that powerful people will determine the lives of hundreds of millions of people. This is not a system in which people play an equal role. There are powerful people and everybody else. From an early point, he got the sense he was destined to be a powerful person. Charlie the interesting thing is he is not showing tendencies of someone who is a courageous bold leader. He seems to be someone who keeps his head down, someone who is careful, someone who turns the water to a boiling point and pours more cold water before it begins to boil. He understood how to be careful. Evan he figured out there are these competing factions within the communist party. If he wanted to get anywhere, he had to avoid alienating any of them. What he would do is something that would satisfy the liberals. For instance, he would support a private car company by telling the taxi company they needed to buy these private cars and recite the classic, socialist and ken tatians like the private market socialist incantations. In a way, it worked for him. His strategy is to hide his strength and bite his time. He did that until he was in a position where there was no one as powerful as he is. Charlie wendy think he knew he wanted to be the top guy . When do you think he knew he wanted to be in the top guy . Evan in his early 20s. He had been a student. His education ended at fifth grade. He had 10 years off and went to college. He did not have a conventional childhood. When he came back from the village, he had been named the party secretary. He had the experience. He had grown up around people in charge. He started to talk about himself in those terms. Charlie did he have a mentor . Evan his father. Xi jinping has said his father used to talk about the revolution constantly, so much he said they used to get calluses on their ears. He grew up in an environment in which the communist party was the most refined machine for the betterment of humanity. He was insulated from a lot of the things that were going wrong. He did not need to know about the fact he greatly forward had produced a famine that killed more people than world war i. He is a sophisticated person. But he has always seen the system from one angle. Evan he became a sophisticated person with a fifth grade education. Evan he is a selftaught man. He got into a great school in beijing because of his political and ideological merit, not his test scores. He talks about how much he reads. People who know him well say his reading is traditional, he reads a lot of classics. He talks about the old socialist texts. For me one of the most important discoveries along this process was realizing he has less for an experience then done shopping dun xi ping. At the end of the cultural revolution, they want to the u. S. And got their phds and made a fortune. He explicitly chose not to do that. He said i will survive and succeed by staying in this system. Charlie he thought that was the best thing to do. It was the best way to get where you wanted to go. Evan it was the way he would get to the top. I think his father played a role in this decision. In traditional chinese families, one son will go into business and the other will go into politics and it is a congenial relationship. He had one son and business and a daughter in business and xi jinping, that was the one who would continue to move up. His father created some opportunities for him and he continued to climb the ranks. Charlie his wife . Evan his wife is fascinating. He was a celebrity in china. She was an opera star folksinger. It was is second marriage. He married soon after college to the doctor to the they divorced. Charlie he is a politician through and through. Evan he has some hobbies. He likes to play soccer. He is a Political Animal completely. When he met is celebrity wife he did not know much about her. She was one of the most famous people in china but he was not familiar with her songs. She was 33, she and her mid 20s. She thought he was kind of doughty. She discovered his mind was so completely occupied by political questions and they got married a year after the net and lived apart after they met and lived apart for money years. The official story is they are together all of the time. For the next 15 years, they werent together very often. She lived in beijing. Charlie did he have to do anything ruthless to get to power . Evan he dont get to the top of the system by being gentle. Charlie what did he do . Evan i will give you an example of a story i did not put in the article. At a certain point when he was 10 years ago, he and a rival were trying to get ahead and the rival had done things to stop his allies from being appointed. The moment of opportunity arrived, which is there was a typhoon that killed a lot of people in the neighboring province where this arrival was in charge. A journalist was deployed to this province and he wrote a story that questioned the death toll. That is very damaging in the chinese political system. It shows he is hiding something. The rival said this is slander, he has been abused. His career really never recovered. Xi jinping continued to rise. He would have known him. They certainly knew each other. His father was the head of a province in the south end was a and was a key experience. His father was a firebrand. His father believed in economic reform. That put him close. There was a key moment in the 1980s when the old guard was pushing back against economic reformers and xi jinpings stepped forward and said what you are doing is wrong. Dont purge the people who are trying to make meaningful progress. They lost that fight. He more or less lived out his career in comfortable obscurity. Their relationship is obligated. Complicated. His father was essential. In many ways, his father was a lifelong the voting devotee of the communist party. He spent 16 years in one form of confinement or another because of the political chaos. Charlie he is more likely to do whatever he can to protect the party. Evan exactly. There is nothing in his life that suggests he would do something that departs from where the carmens party comes from. The question becomes if the survival of the party depends on Major Economic reform, in order to achieve that reform, you have to take steps that open society. At the moment, he has indicated he believes he can go ahead with economic reform creating more competition against enterprises without political openness. That is his explicit belief. I think there are a lot of people who question and that is possible. Is it possible to have a fully formed, sophisticated, open economy without concessions to the globalized world . There was right at the time he was been does needed to run the country, he met another official. He said this man might be the mandala of china. He met this is someone who has been through all of the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s and has moved beyond it. That was a fascinating insight because he was come on some level, right. Xi jinping was not incapacitated by having spent all of these years in the countryside. The difference is we might have expected that xi jinping would have ruled by trying to build a consensus across as many groups as possible. That is what the analogy was suggesting. What we have seen is that he is consolidating the people he finds most lyrically relight politically reliable. It means there are losers in the system. Charlie he has consolidated power at the least. Evan very effectively. These days, we say some people he is the most harmful leader cents powerful leader since mao. He has accumulated a lot of official titles. He oversees the internet, the courts the secret police. What we dont know is if there was a moment he was challenged by someone in the military. Is he as strong as he appears . That is an open question. Charlie he has more power than his predecessor. Evan much more. His nickname was the woman with bound feet because he was kept off balance. Charlie which raises a question about the corruption. Some people believe it is to root out rivals. Evan someone described it to me this way they said it to go into a room and there are 10 people there and you know eight of them have corruption, you go after the first watcher the first for who are your political opponents. We see a determined effort to bring corruption to a manageable level in a way where it is not being done by predictable legal principles. He says these people are coming out. For the moment charlie these people are happy top of the security apparatus. Evan he took down the most senior figure in the security world. A move i think surprised a lot of us that he was able to do. Charlie it scared a lot of others. Evan when you see someone of that stature go down it tells you no one is protected. A great chinese novelist told you what is happening now is the unwritten rules, the essential principles that govern the last 30 years, have been broken. Xi jinping has broken these rules. We dont know what will convert we know he is a much that we charlie his vision. Evan he believes china is no longer a superpower in waiting. He believes it is time for china to be on the level of the u. S. One of the things he says is it is time for the u. S. To have a new type of great power relations. The Obama Administration has basically said we will not do that. What he means by that is treated as as an equal dont regard our interest as secondary to yours. If we say this territory in the South China Sea belongs to us, take that seriously. The u. S. Is prepared to do that not prepared to do that. I think at the moment, the Obama Administration who i talked to, they are surprised out how fast he has thought to reshape the relationship. Charlie what is the threat to him . Evan this is not one you read about very often. The threat is his bureaucracy is actually capable of four leg what he is trying to do. His Anticorruption Campaign has picked up the chessboard and tipped it over and said all of the rules you thought obtained no longer do. The bureaucracy all the way they do things, how you make decisions, that has been thrown in the air. They have responded by slowing down. You hear this from many people in china. Everyone is afraid. They dont want to sign off on something because they dont want to do anything that makes them appear corrupt. They have charlie are they Party Members . Evan in many cases but sometimes not. This is an agent pattern ancient pattern in chinese politics. Emperors have tried to challenge the bureaucracy. The question for xi jinping is is he pushing too fast too far . At the moment, he is managing. Charlie you put a story like this together. They dont like to be written about as we have found. You are going out, talking to people at the highest level. You say you are doing a piece on xi jinping. Evan it has been very hard. Harder than other stories. People who would ordinarily be confident and feel they have the confidence to talk on the record, they say i cannot be talking about this subject because we dont know what he is capable of meaning if i own a business, i dont know if the business will be constrained i regulatory pressure or taken away if i Say Something critical. It is a hard subject to write about. It was harder than i thought it would be. Charlie you mention one of the chinese scholars. Our scholars different . Are scholars different . Evan there are a lot of people who helped shape your impressions. Your a lot of stories about how he conducts business and you use that information. You talk to other people about it confirm or deny it. There are people who feel that their role is to be an independent intellectual. For some of the people i quote their own personal credibility rests on seeing things they believe are independent. This is a hard time to be a chinese writer or intellectual. Harder than any other time in 10 years. Charlie Vladimir Putin and xi jinping. Evan a fascinating relationship. He has met with Vladimir Putin than anyone else. It seems to be mutual. Xi jinping has gotten the better side of this relationship. Vladimir putin has become increasingly isolated. For instance when Vladimir Putin was looking around the world for friends, one of the people who returned his call was xi jinping. Charlie he was admiring what he did with crime the of. Evan crimea. Evan resources, it consolidated political improvement at home. His enthusiasm for this c ooled. It became a complicated operation. It caused as much blowback for Vladimir Putin. Charlie with barack obama . Evan that relationship is occasionally candid, which is significant. They can actually have a conversation. They have tried. Charlie neither speaks the other language. Evan xi jinping is a different kind of operator. While you talk to him, he often doesnt have notes. Everyone comes away with the same impression which is that he means what he says. Their relationship remains pretty remote because they have very different ways of doing things. Charlie different lives. Evan if you think about how profoundly different their experiences are. The differences in the ways they were shaped. Obama came through the system. Xi jinping really knows his system only. It are making an effort. An encouraging thing is with all of this energy and big site he about how these countries will deal with each other, they are talking. They are very blunt about how serious the stakes are. If they dont get it right, the rise of a superpower as always been disruptive. They are able to have that conversation. One person told me they are able to have these brutally frank exchanges and continue on. Charlie you hope there are not misconceptions about each other. Evan that was the real risk. The u. S. Did not have any sense of what chinas intentions were. Charlie and they thought we were trying to contain them. Evan there is a credible view that xi jinping to this date is not fundamentally trust the u. S. Because he believes what he looks at what we did in the arab world, that we had friends and arab leaders and when they begin to wobble it takes three days before we are cheering on the little guy. Xi jinping believes we would not veto to back him up in a crisis and he might not be wrong. That creates an underlying level of excited anxiety. Charlie evan osnos reports a place he knows no better than most. Thank you. Evan thank you. Charlie stay with us. Back in a moment. Fareed zakaria is here. We talked to him about a liberal education. Charlie Fareed Zakaria is here. He was a weekly column for the washington post. He has written five books. His latest is called in defense of a liberal education. He argues the university is much more than a vocational school. Education is more than pursuit of a vocation. I am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome. I totally believe in the idea. When people come to me and say what should i major in, i say the most important thing you can do is have a sense of the world and all that has interpreted to these aside contributed to the society we live in and learn how to express myself. Learn a command of the language. Fareed that is the distinctly american contribution to higher education. In the 19 century, the germans perfected the apprenticeship program. Even britain had these Technical Training programs. A student was told, why dont you choose what profession you will be for life will start for your life. In america, the economy changes too much and people dont want to be stuck, they want to move. So we will give you a broad, general education, the exposure you need and you will learn on your first job what you need but on your second job youll learn a different set of things. It has been said, it is not meant to train you for your first job, it is meant to train you for your six job. Charlie the idea of a liberal education has been around for a while. Why do you feel the need to remind us . Evan we are living through anxious economic times. You see people say we need to have a sure thing. A College Education is expensive. People say, i want to focus on science, technology engineering. That way, i know my child will have a job. President obama said if people were to choose a manufacturing trade, they would make more money than in art history. On the republican set, governors are defunding the liberal arts and humanities in several states. There is a real move to say we dont need more artists and anthropologists. It really misses what is distinctive about the american system. Science and technology is important. But this is a general education. Charlie you came from india and went to very good schools. Did you come because you wanted a liberal education and because the way of educating and india is to teach skills . Fareed it is part of what attracted me. He 70s were a tough the 70s were a tough time in india. I was always fascinated by america. Part of my journey was a fascination with america. I watched i love lucy and fell in love with that. Charlie american culture. Fareed my version of the American Dream was dallas. We used to watch the lead good length bootleg copies. Charlie i lived there at the time. Fareed i thought, this is america, right . Part of it was that i got a good rigorous education. I streamed into the sciences. The rich kids streamed into commerce. The smart kids streamed to do science, and the girls did humanities. That is how it worked. I started hearing more and more about american colleges and realized you could do physics and poetry. You could study film, follow your passion. I got very interested and i applied and got a scholarship to yield. Yale. My first year, i signed up for physics, computer science, math. I take one class in international relations. I always knew i loved it but i never thought i could make something of it, use it as a profession. Yale made me realize if you follow your passion, something will work out. Charlie i wanted to be a doctor. Doctors were admired in the community and i did not know any journalists. The way to do that was major in physics and chemistry and go on to medical school. Somewhere, i fell in love with humanities and the theory of civilization. I went to law school. Fareed i think part of what has changed between then and now is in those days, a lot of people from the humanities who were kind of famous and much admired writers were seen as largerthanlife figures. Today, that happens in the stem world. Zuckerberg and bezos. That is part of the reason why english majors are dropping by 75 in 30 years. History majors have dropped. It is unfortunate. In a way, humanities is not cool anymore. Charlie but engineering is cool. Fareed if youre passionate about it, you should really do it. A data shows all of this drumbeat about jobs and skills is not luring people into the sciences. Not everybody has the aptitude for it. What it is doing is making people anxiously forsake english, history, philosophy and do instead preprofessional majors like Business Studies and communication arts. People do it because it sounds like it is preprofessional but they will better off following their passion. Someone who has a great training in english or history is just as good as someone in a business major. Charlie you have to choose in the end. Do you really have to choose today . You can study science and map. Vocational schools is one thing junior colleges another. At the university, you can major and minor and get both educations. Fareed what is happening now increasingly colleges attractive figure out a way to incorporate those things. I was talking to someone at stanford and they said they are trying to explore the idea behind steve jobsfamous line where he said it is an apples dna a Technology Merit to the liberal arts that makes our heart sing. Why dont we come up with majors where that makes sense . Music and math, engineering and design. Through creativity takes place when you bring to disciplines together. Two disciplines together. Charlie the Design School at stanford, they bring people with different disciplines to focus on one problem. They look at a way to create a design solution to something. It is the way you look at education and the process. It is a mixture of people with different talents, which brings out the best result. Fareed that will probably be our secret to success. If america is going to stay vibrant economically, it is not fundamentally because we can make cheaper computer chips. Those are areas they will do better at. They had a lot more engineers and they can pay them less. We will do better at figuring out the way that human beings use technology. How do computers and rapid people . Interact with people . Mike zuckerberg was a psychology major at stanford before he dropped out and stop dropped out. He realized before facebook, everyone was anonymous on the internet. He wanted to create a platform where your identity exists so you can create a greater sense of trust and a powerful platform. As an advertiser, it is a gold mine. Charlie let me turn to india. Tell me about india today and tell me what difference professor moody makes today. Fareed india has all of the opportunities and challenges of a democracy. China has succeeded because of its government at. India does not invest in the government it panders to people. It has been a secondfastest growing large economy in the world for the last 15 years. There is potential because of the demographics because an old socialist economy has been unshackled. What moody is finding is it is harder to change. The states, the upper house of parliament is not in his control. One can be moderately optimistic but in the long run, you have to be impressed by the bottomup power of india. These countries come entrepreneur is, it does not have the great infrastructure but it has great companies. It is because the Human Capital is very strong and ultimately, you have to figure that will make a big difference. Charlie do believe that we will outpace china . Fareed a lot of my indian friends think that. Chinas economy is four times the size of indias. Charlie john is at 7. 4. Fareed india is 2 trillion. It is still growing. You do the math. The lines dont cross. It would take a catastrophe in china. Charlie it is a democracy. Down the road, it may have more potential. You are saying notwithstanding the math is against it. Fareed at this point, you would have to have miracles take place. Being the secondfastest growing large economy in the world is not bad. Remember the amount of Economic Activity unleashing when youre talking about 1. 2 billion people growing at 6. 5 . Charlie you create a middle class which creates demand for things. Fareed there is one problem china has. The great thing about a dictatorship is it effectively implements every policy and it has effectively and lamented the one child policy which effectively implemented the one child policy. Charlie let me go to the middle east today and the negotiations going on now with respect toiran and representation iran and weaponization. Fareed suppose you dont do a deal with iran. These sanctions are tougher than the old ones but in 2005, we turned down a deal with the iranians. They offered to cap at 164 centrifuges. The Bush Administration said no the french said no, the british. Iran went from 1604 to 20,000. It is an oilrich country. It makes 50 billion a year. That is a problem if you dont do the deal. The other option is a Major Military attack. Were talking about weeks it would take to destroy their capability. Charlie the question is can they destroy it or delay it. Fareed if you play through that scenario, unify the country behind a regime. Any regime that gets bombed by foreigners, the government tends to get popular. Charlie people become nationalistic. Fareed the section sanctions regime breaks down. The chinese and russians will not keep with the sanctions. Within two years, they are able to rebuild the program. They have 2000 scientists working on this. The deal you are looking for is a deal that says we will have the most intrusive monitoring process we have ever had and we are going to try to create as long a leap time to go from being a civilian power to a military nuclear power. It means very, very low levels of enriched uranium stockpiled. If they exist, they are put under seals or diluted or shipped. The more centrifuges you have the quicker you can enrich uranium. Those are the key things. Technically, it is possible to get a deal. The problem is there are hard lines on both sides. Charlie the president do you think he looks at this as his foreignpolicy legacy . Fareed i think he believes this would be the most significant, strategic move he could take because it has the possibility of stabilizing or adding some stability to the middle east currently the most unstable part of the world. The only part of the world significantly unstable. In austin america, asia, things are going well. If you could bring a border to this why would that be possible because the iranians want a greater degree of integration into the world. Charlie all iranians . Fareed younger iranians, the reformers. There are clearly groups within iran that are very antiamerican and if they win charlie does the Administration Believe somehow they are a fan or would europeans like it to be a 25 they are a 10. When they get to the 10 year time when it ends, which is what the israelis fear, the government will be a vastly different government and will not want Nuclear Weapons . Fareed i am a skeptic on that issue. We should not believe too much into this wishful thinking. This regime has been powerfully endearing because and during enduring. It has accommodated itself to Public Sentiments often. It has these escape valves. They have various mechanisms that allow for some debate. There is also the reality of a country where religious authority is respected. Remember the Green Movement when those leaders were campaigning, they criticized the Nuclear Program from the right. The Nuclear Program is a nationalistic program. Charlie moving to the general middle east and the notion of this president and how he feels and where he has come, you now see the rise of isis, this push against them. You see in respect to yemen, the saudis are now making airstrikes. Egyptians are saying they will send troops. Yesterday, there was talk of building a middle eastern quick strike force. The president doesnt seem to want to send american boots on the ground other than advisers or special forces. What is your take on what this country should be doing now about isis and the spread whether it is islamic terrorism or whatever brand of terrorism it is around the world . Fareed you have to ask why this is happening. What has happened in this territory is that the regimes are fractured, Civil Society does not exist, the countrys dont exist. You have this great churning. Theyre figuring out if they can live together. It is a bloody process, something similar to what europe want throughout various points when they had intermingled populations and for the most part in europe the solution was ethnic cleansing. After world war ii, 6 million germans were ethically cleansed. That is how europe solve this problem. It is not unlikely something similar is happening in the middle east. In iraq, it is essentially three countries. In the midst of that, i think for the u. S. To believe that by a few airstrikes or sending special forces, we will stabilize this is crazy. The president is correct in saying we have to keep our eye on the ball. What is the threat to American National interest . He tried to figure out what you need to do about it. Isis potentially is a threat to American National interests. All of those gruesome videos, theyre trying to draw the u. S. In because they want to be the worlds great islamic terrorist organization. We should recognize we should not play their game. Charlie is the president right on arguing for a choice on language and how we describe it . Fareed i think he is being a politician. This is islamic extremism. He is trying to say he will not give them that mantle, allow them to wrap themselves with the mantle of islam. I interviewed the king of jordan and asked him if he agreed with the president. He said absolutely. Dont call them islamic. He knows that come out of the muslim communities but what he is saying is lets delegitimize them. I think it is a political game. Charlie you are seeing for a long time charlie , we have asked for Muslim Leaders to stand out. It is beginning to happen. It is gathering some storm. Charlie fareed it is beginning to happen. What is important charlie even the president of iran. Fareed you also see the saudis come for militarily. I think it important for them to get involved. If United States leaps forward and says they will take care of this problem people free ride on the u. S. Everyone says, great, we dont have to deal with the awkwardness of explaining to our people why we are doing this. They need to explain to the people why this is their struggle. Charlie tell me what we should do about assad. Fareed when hitler invaded the soviet union, Winston Churchill said if hitler invaded hell, i would gladly make an alliance with the devil. There is no greater threat to the u. S. Than the rise of isis. The logical corollary of that is you will have to focus on that and not on unseating the assad government. Charlie why did kerry have to walk back . Was it because of the pressure from sunni nations . Fareed i think it may be that. It is actually mostly that they got pressure from washington because the president had announced a policy of regime change, which is what i always thought was a bad idea. The president , if he says assad should not be president , he has to have a policy that does something about it. People notice there is not a policy back up to that. Charlie they get into problems with reformers all around the world. Fareed it is a tough one. Charlie money people argued he should have supported the reformers much more at the time. Fareed the challenge in syria is have a third rate minority regime in the middle east. The first one was lebanon, the christians. You had a mass uprising every finally sorted it out. Then, iraq. A 10 year civil war there still sorting out. Syria is the most difficult because the minorities are the smallest. There are only 14 of the population at most and they rule over this vast group of people. Yet, the christians in syria are still somewhat supportive of the regime because they worry that a sunni majority area government majority government will come in. The stakes are very high. People who say why doesnt everybody go to geneva and negotiate . If they lose, they will be ethnically cleansed or massacred so they are fighting for their lives. I think the whole idea that we can somehow stay from the outside a few airstrikes and it will be done, i dont think so. This will sort itself out on the battlefield. Charlie makes it interesting for people who do what we do doesnt it . Fareed the world has been more fascinating, fastmoving this last year than almost any time i can remember. Charlie thank you. Great to see you. His book is called in defense of a liberal education. Fareed zakaria. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Mark i mark halperin. John and im john heilemann. We think this is a pretty good deal. Mark [laughs] happy negotiation tonight. Today, the president announced the United States what only the smartest contestants say to how to howie mandell