large, bordering so many countries with so many border disputes, that it needed to reassure the world. winston churchill once said russia was a riddled wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. but china is a cornucopia, vast, teaming land full of contradictions. say anything about china, and you can find it in there and its opposite. will xi be able to control this sprawling country and force it along the lines he wishes? so far he s succeeded at home, but in doing so, he s making life for that average chinese couple less open and one in which their country is less admired. xi has changed china, but in a way that makes its rise on to the world stage far more dangerous. i m fareed zakaria. thanks for watching.
party dogma and take quizzes and they have to report those quizzes to the local party head of their work unit. there s even a game show. how much do you know about xi jinping thought? much of xi jinping thought is communist ideology and the central role he believes it should play in chinese life. but therein lies a central conflict, he s speaking socialism in a country where capitalism has been exploding for decades. socialist economy that was also one of the most ravenous consumers of luxury goods, things like lamborghini and ferraris and rolexes and louis vuitton. the rich had been getting richer, and in some cases, more
and, of course, there is no google, no facebook, no snapchat, no instagram. some of that predated xi, but he has doubled down on a separate chinese tech nos fear. the chinese government said we re actually going to separate. we don t want a world wide web. they have tens of millions of monitors of social media 24/7 watching and taking down th postings like wham amoll. step by step over the course of the years xi jinping has been in power, he s been eating away at the domains of autonomy in chinese life and consolidating them into the hands of the party. in fact, the scholar elizabeth comeny describes xi jinping as embodying the country s third resolution. first came mao, the founder, and
committed suicide. because she was being hounded so much for the family s political problems, and that s a fact that you won t see in the official party history. xi, still just a child, was forced to fight for his life in the streets of beijing. there was nobody at home. there were no parents at home for a very young teenager. and that teenager was trying to survive in the casous of a revolution. the cultural revolution was this implosion of chinese society right down to the family level, as kind of this inferno of all of the bonds and trust of hierarchy that organized society. in his late teens, the party sent xi how to work as a peasant in the countryside. he spent many, many years in a very poor county in northern china basically doing manual labor, being a farmer, feeding
legitimate. it s ironic because no one has suffered more under communism than xi jinping himself. to understand it, we have to go back to tell the dramatic story of xi s childhood. it begins in the 1960s, the chaos of the cultural revolution. chairman mao wanted to reassert his control over the communist party. he accused it of being too liberal. he called for young people to rebel against the elite of their own party. basically turned chinese life upside down. all of the most powerful people found themselves suddenly attacked and criticized, often by some of the least powerful people. and xi jinping was right at the center of the storm.