Podcast Exposes ‘Prince’ Xi Jinping’s Rise of ‘World’s Most Powerful’

Even a layman in China-related matters will know that the country has no monarchy or ruling family dynasties. The empire fell long ago, in 1912.

What justifies the name “The Prince” (the prince) of the podcast series that unravels the life and career of leader Xi Jinping is a reference to the methods used by him to get and stay in the position that made him the “most powerful man world”, as the production of the British magazine The Economist defines it.

The eight episodes produced with arduous research expose a leader who fits the definition of “Machiavellian”, which is why the name of the production replicates “The Prince”, a book by Niccolò Machiavelli. Yes, the podcast tells the story of a cunning and cunning leader, but not only that.

In recounting Xi’s origin and journey to power, journalist Sue-Lin Wong portrays details of the life of the man who leads China and scares Western powers. It is like this when remembering the privileged childhood of the biographer, son of a high leader of the Chinese Communist Party, who changes after his father defended reforms in the Mao Tse-tung era.

Patriarch Xi Zhongxun is sent to prison during the Cultural Revolution. The teenage son is also apprehended, but one day he manages to escape. Cold and hungry, the country’s current leader knocks on his mother’s door, who denounces him to be sent back to seclusion.

There is no record of Xi’s resentment towards the party, the regime or Mao for the seven years he did not have a father figure, from childhood to adolescence. One of her brothers tells, in tears, that there was an agreement between them not to cry in front of their father on the way back.

In another moment, the production shows one of the last records of the father, Xi Zhongxun, already elderly, singing a song in praise of the Mao-era regime, which illustrates well the family’s relationship with the regime.

In addition to the tightly packed script and the abundant quantity and quality of interviews, the research work is a highlight of the podcast. It’s hard not to laugh when listening to a confident Bill Clinton, then US president, in 2000, about the Chinese attempt to regulate the internet. “There’s no doubt that China is trying to crack down on the internet,” he says, ironically, “Good luck!” (The phrase is reproduced in an episode that shows how the Chinese regime has structured itself and has been successful in censoring and using the internet to monitor the country’s citizens.)

The US-China relationship is a subject throughout the series, which recalls Xi, a young party official, visiting Iowa in 1985, when he ate popcorn for the first time and stayed with a local family.

Getting to know America doesn’t seem to have changed Xi’s conviction of the superiority of Chinese communism one millimeter. The US influence in the fall of another red giant, the Soviet Union, marked the generation of the leader, who came to power with the mission of not repeating the failure of Moscow, narrator Wong reports.

The journalist manages to describe with didactics the events that led to the arrival of the “most powerful man in the world” to the top. How, for example, does a quiet and competent bureaucrat manage to outrun a charismatic leader in the race for the regime’s top job?

The rise of Xi and the fall of Bo Xilai, a former party leader arrested and expelled accused of corruption, abuse of power and involvement in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, both in 2012, explain the intricacies and power struggles in a regime. not democratic.

The absence of freedoms in the country is exposed in the podcast. In 2021, the presenter reports that she was denied entry into Hong Kong and returned to her native Australia.

The effects of an authoritarian regime go beyond the stories told and are remembered at the end of each episode, in the credits, when Wong thanks the brave interviewees who had to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.