Xi's China

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As it recovers from Covid more quickly than other nations, China appears to be stronger than ever. But the world’s next superpower faces enormous challenges of its own. Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College and one of the world’s leading China experts, has spent years writing about them. Behind the country's façade of invincibility, he argues, lies “a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay”. In this week's conversation,Yascha Mounk and Minxin Pei trace the country's political evolution since the 1980s and debate whether Xi Jinping is cementing the party's power--or may unwittingly be seeding the roots of its own demise. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. Email: goodfightpod@gmail.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the last 40 years, the Communist Party enjoyed one of the most benign international environments for a right for a rising superpower.
0:15.2	Now it has created an existential enemy, the U.S.
0:20.4	because the U.S. will not rest until it destroys the comes back.
0:26.0	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:31.0	At the beginning of this pandemic there were a lot of projections that this would show the weakness of capitalism.
0:39.0	When there was a few weeks in which everybody bought a ridiculous amount of toilet paper and it was a little harder to find toilet paper rolls at your local supermarket, there was jokes and memes, but actually capitalism turns out to be like socialism of all of those production shortages.
0:54.0	This was supposed to be the year according to many which definitively shows and proves
0:59.6	the shortcomings of capitalism.
1:03.0	Well I think in many ways we have overlooked as we always do the dark that didn't bark.
1:10.0	You know there has been real economic suffering this year, There have been a lot of people who have been unemployed. There's some food scarcity for people who have lost economic income.
1:20.0	But on the whole, I think this has been a story of astounding economic resilience.
1:26.0	And this is the biggest public health crisis that developed democracies have faced in essentially.
1:31.0	It is the most global public health crisis that we have collectively
1:34.7	faced probably in a number of centuries.
1:37.8	And yet, water, electricity, internet, food, all continued to be plentifully available.
1:47.0	And a lot of the suffering has been alleviated
1:51.6	by sensible actions from states, including welfare benefits, stimulus checks, and so on and so forth.
2:01.0	All of this, I think, is a vote of confidence for not the ideological
2:04.9	version of our economic system but our economic system as it actually exists.
2:09.7	An incredibly inventive free market society that Buffett's suffering through the welfare state.
2:18.6	It's important to make this argument because when we forget about the resiliency of our economic system we can actually
2:26.0	go badly wrong and there was an important example of that in this year as well. All through the early part of 2020 public health officials in the United States
	...

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