and that is why people have lost confidence. host: november 25, 2020, anthony fauci appeared on this program and bill was barely one of the scholars on that program. you can watch it on c-span.org if you want to go back and listen. coming up now, we hope you stick around after this brief pro forma session in the house. it shouldn't be more than a minute or two, that is how long they usually are. we will see you back on the other side of that. washington journal continues. host: martin smith joins us now from new york. is the producer and director of

a new pbs frontline documentary titled "china, u.s., and the riser xi jinping." good morning to you. guest: good morning to you. host: that documentary set to air tonight, 10:00 p.m. eastern. let me give viewers a preview. this is about 30 seconds of what they will see tonight. >> g asian ping wants to restore china to its grandest state. >> the rise of a chinese leader. >> team is not afraid to say we are not giving you freedoms and rights. >> if anyone could stop the chinese rise, it is probably a fantasy. >> he has chosen to go down the route of consolidating power, the route of nationalism. host: martin smith, why is it important for americans in this moment to learn about who xi jinping is? guest: well this is our chief

global rival. when we have a new president or a returning president coming into the white house, it will be foremost on his agenda to figure out how he wants to deal with asian ping -- xi jinping. so we took it upon ourselves to help our audience understand who he is, what shaped him into the man he is today. important because you know, we've been focused on ukraine, we've been focused on our own domestic issues. not enough has been focused on chin ping and china and where we stand vis-a-vis that global superpower. host: where did he come from and what did shape him? guest: he was born into the china of mao zedong. and in the midst of that up people that marked his time in office, g asian ping -- xi

jinping was affected by so much that happened. his own father was a fellow communist revolutionary. he was put into a high office once the resolution -- revolution succeeded in 1949 and not long after that, this happened to many politicians of all stripes, he decided he didn't trust him. he sent him to work in a factory and then he incarcerated him for eight years. that was when he was just a child. and then he himself was subjected to what is called struggle sessions, where you are put in a dunce cap and put in front of thousands of people and humiliated, derided, denounced.

his own mother denounced him. and he was sent into the countryside to do hard labor for seven years from age 15 to 22. all of this was tremendously impactful on him, and instead of turning against all this and all the humiliation he suffered, he embraced mao. he understood that to get ahead in china you had to align yourself with the party. so he emerged from all that saying in an interview that his time in the countryside and all of that was something that was good for him. it was a tremendously stressful time. his own half-sister committed suicide. his father was imprisoned, he was doing hard labor. he tried to escape.

his family sent him back. he lived in a cave in one of the poorest provinces of china. so that was really what cast the die for who he became and how he decided to embrace this very system that had so punished him. host: i want to give viewers the phone numbers to call in. ahead of the airing of the documentary tonight on pbs, go ahead and call in on phone lines as usual by political party. (202) 748-8000 for democrats. (202) 748-8001 for republicans. independent, it is (202) 748-8002. martin smith, bring us to the more recent history. when did he start really climbing the ladder of the chinese communist party and how long has he actually been president of china? guest: he's been president of china since 2013.

he became the chairman of the party in 2012, which is really a more powerful position. he came out of exile. he came out of the countryside. he was 22 years old. he was able to get into a university, but his interest was in politics even though he got a degree i think in chemical engineering. but then he went out into the provinces and was there for several decades working his way up the ladder until he got a big break in that the party brought him into cleanup a corruption scandal in shanghai. and from there, after seven months, the party noticed him and they brought him to beijing and put him on the standing committee and he became one of the most powerful people in china. that was 2008.

host: since then, and specifically since he became president and head of the party in 2012, 2013, have his views on the united states changed, or has he been consistent in how he views the united states as a chief rival? guest: it's an excellent question because he kept his cards very close to the vest. he was a very cautious bureaucrat while he was climbing the ranks in the countryside. once he got to beijing, the party saw him as pliable and they wanted somebody to lead the country. they were looking about at the various candidates. they put him in charge of the 2008 olympics which was a great success. and he sort of passed the test, if you will. he was made the head of the communist party in 2012 and 2013

he becomes the president. but it wasn't really clear. there were clues. one of the things he did before he became the chief was that he was running the central party school, sort of an elite academy that trains communist leaders of the future, and we have an interview with a woman who was a member of the party for many, many years. she was a teacher there. and he was the administrator, and she said that he operated something like a maffei a boss in terms of the way he talked to teachers, told them the limits of their teaching. he said if you want to speak freely, get out of here. and she said that was the harbinger of her for things to come and indeed, once he took office, he really became -- people thought he was going to be something of a moderate when he came in, and he wasn't.

he became a very tough customer. host: how long did it take you to make this documentary, how much access did you have to people, to interviews in china and the people who were willing to talk to you for the documentary? guest: i'm glad you asked. we made every effort possible to engage more voices from china. i traveled to china on a business visa in january of 2024. i arrived, i contracted covid, i was down for a week. but i was there for a month and i had many conversations with many various academics, former party officials, all of whom agreed to participate in the documentary. i said look, i'm going to do a film here and i'm going to have a lot of american experts and they are going to criticize china. they are going to criticize xi jinping specifically on human rights, on his expansionist

policies in the south china sea and hong kong, his threats against taiwan. i want you to have a chance -- i'm saying this to the various people in china -- i want you to have a chance, and i will take the opportunity to respond and give your point of view. they all signed up. i had agreements, i had letters inviting me back. i came back to new york and applied formally for a journalist visa, and they sat on the request. and my passport and the application sat in the consulate in new york city for several months. i had several meetings with officials. they didn't say no, they just never responded. finally after several months, we had to pull the plug on that. i did find a few people that would speak on behalf of china, government advisors or others,

unofficial spokespeople who did speak on camera, and i caught them here when they were visiting the u.s. but the restrictions on media in china are severe. international media is heavily restrictive. and so they never let me in. but we were determined that we would tell this story, and we did it with u.s. experts , a few chinese spokespeople, and lots and lots and lots of archival research defined bits and pieces that we had to stitched together to make this film. host: if you had somehow gotten the opportunity to ask a question of xi jinping himself, what would you ask him? guest: it would not be just one question, it would be many questions. i would want to understand is thinking about where he is taking china.

since he took over, he exerted enormous control. there are some 600 million surveillance cameras in china, that is about one for every two citizens. they have a technocratic way with ai and other sophisticated tools of monitoring everybody's movements. he has fired a lot of people, purged a lot of people. i would want to understand what happened once he got into office. what were you thinking? and when he inherited the top job, when he became president, china was at its peak. the u.s., the west was in decline. we had an economic collapse in 2008. once he becomes president, china is looking very good.

why he focused so much on control, on expansion, that would be my question. he took a country that starting back in the 80's, in the 70's was opening. it was called reform and opening and that with the policy, and there were many decades under several u.s. presidents where the relations were quite warm. when he comes into office, he turns hostile. i would want to understand more about the roots of that hostility and what it is getting him. host: if you had to guess, what would you say is his biggest fear today? >> i think he's beginning to understand that he can exert control through repression. but that somehow in order for the economy to grow, you have to have foreign investment.

foreign investment is now fleeing the country. you need to have the markets in the west. you need to have friendly relations if you're going to have china healthy. so i think the problem here is that he is trying to find the balance between a strict control and hostility toward the west with trying to get the economy going again, and he needs foreign investment. he needs trade. and now trump is coming back into office and just yesterday, he talked about slapping another 10% on chinese goods coming into the u.s. these policies tend to create inflation here in the u.s. because the cost of these goods coming in goes up, and that is passed on to the consumer. xi xinping is saying and

repeating to trump, look, nobody is going to win in a trade war, but yet that is the direction we are going. i think he is really struggling to find how he can open and maintain control. there's a lot of unhappy people, especially the young. there is an unemployment rate up to 25%. it's not an official figure, but that of the estimate. so you've got a lot of very unhappy young people in china, and they are protesting and paying the price. his china is not invincible. host: it airs tonight on pbs's frontline, also available to stream on their website and the pbs video app and martin smith is here to take your phone calls

for about the next half hour this morning. we will start on the independent line. harry in maryland up next. caller: wouldn't you say that kissinger was partly responsible for the rise of china and our cozying up to the communist parties all over the world except for russia? and maybe even russia and the greed that goes along with it. i would think that we have been complicit in the rise of china. that is my question. guest: i don't think there's anything wrong with the rise of china. the people in china have every right to have their living standard raised. before the revolution it was one of the poorest countries in the world. the opening to the west, which

you referenced the visit of kissinger with nixon in 1972, this was all going in a fairly good direction until we got to xi xinping. so it wasn't reasonable to think that we should just squash the ambitions of the chinese population. this is a very sophisticated culture and nation and it was a good thing that they were able to amass great amounts of wealth. the problem is the hostility that now exists. and i can't say that american leaders have stoked that. i think that you have to look at xi xinping and hold him accountable for why he has turned in that direction. host: raymond out of michigan, republican. you are next. caller: hey, what is up.

this is the michigan state police line. host: what is your question on this documentary? caller: well, this is mr. smith talking about the president of china, right? from what i'm hearing on the inside, i am a trump certified team leader. trump is a military man. and ever since the saudi's dropped the dollar and we had all of that inflation, the pandemic happened to us, the whole deal was everybody invest in the united states for world war ii and all that with the oil, we still had pretty good amounts. but after the dollar -- host: bring us to your question on xi xinping today. caller: sure. china is way overpopulated. i'm not sure how strong they are especially on the tiktok app. i think we've got to stop that. thank you, sir. host: social media, tiktok.

guest: i'm not sure what the question is, frankly, but i appreciate the caller. we don't take on tiktok in this documentary. there are many things that we couldn't get to. our focus is on xi xinping and who he is, how he became the man that he is today. i have to punt on the question of tiktok and what harm it is causing. we have to find a way back to a reasonable competition with china. i think that under xi xinping, it's going to be difficult. i don't think that he is really looking for improved relations with the west. his friends of course are russia, iran, north korea. he set himself up sort of on the

other of the equation. host: this is froanew in texas, our text messaging service. xi xinpi has already change the constitution to stay in power. do you believe that he will remain in power his entire lifetime? guest: i don't know what his intentions are but he did in a 2018 revise the constitution and it was ratified by the people's congress a few years later, so it allows him to serve his five-year term and then run again and be elected. so as long as he can lead china in a direction that pleases the party, the top-level party officials, he will remain in power. he has tremendous ambitions. more than any chinese leader since mao. he has a strong vision for how china can be a leader in artificial intelligence.

he has put together the biggest infrastructure program in history with connections around the world, building ports and bridges and train tracks all over the world. he is a tremendously ambitious leader. host: line for democrats, new york city, good morning. caller: good morning, thank you for taking my call. i'm listening to the conversation and it has always been my opinion that when trade relations began with the chinese government when there was a question earlier, industries move their businesses and their manufacturing facilities to china to save money and to have

more profits. and it has always been my understanding that all these contracts that were signed were controlled by the people's army. but i wonder what is the relationship with the minister, because 51% of the contract was controlled by the pla, and 49% was in the western investment in that particular contract, which meant that they would be in control of the contracts, the trade relationships in that country. and what with the tariff that the incoming administration is proper in is what effect is that going to have on american consumers who are buying all of

their intangible products to have the label made in china? guest: well one of the effects of those tariffs is going to be, at least in the short term, the effect in the long-term is a little bit squishy to figure out, but in the short-term, i'm talking several years, it is going to cause a rise in prices. and it is going to cause, therefore, inflation. you are quite astute in terms of the investment and the control by the government of china so that a foreign investment comes into the country and then makes agreements with china because they want the cheap labor, they want cheap property, they want benefits, but china says you've got to tell us what your trade secrets are, what is your secret sauce? and then the government takes that information and gets a chinese company to manufacture the product using the special

sauce, whatever that is, whatever product we are talking about. and then drives the u.s. company out of business. it has been a very rocky road for many businesses. in the 70's and into the 80's, and foreign investment was healthy, but it was struggling. many corporate leaders came to the white house to complain about how china was stealing their intellectual property, driving them out of business. now, tariffs are a kind of different page and all of this, but you are quite right that there is a problem with the way in which u.s. companies are able to operate in china. at this point, many of them are fleeing the country. elon musk is an exception. he has a huge tesla factory in

shanghai and he is a kind of bridge between xi xinping and donald trump. it will be interesting to see if he can be effective in bridging that gap. host: the question coming a day after we found out from the incoming president about plans to drop an additional 10% tariff on all chinese products. what are your views on the trade war and tariffs in particular? this is about two minutes 20 seconds from the documentary, china, the u.s. and the rise of xi xinping. >> trade war worries igniting after the president signed this order to slap tough tariffs on china. >> he started with a 10% tariff on chinese aluminum. 30% on solar panels and electric vehicles. 25% on steel and nearly everything else made in china. >> china not happy, already

threatening retaliation. >> what china did was move its exports to other countries and move its imports from other countries as well, so it shifted the purchase of soybeans, for example, from the u.s. to brazil. so that wasn't a useful policy. >> president trump has just slapped tariffs on another 200 billion of chinese exports. >> the biggest trade war and economic history. >> trumps trade war would consume the remainder of his presidency. >> china is now punching back with an equal amount of tariffs on american exports. >> after several tit-for-tat tariff increases, the trade war which continued into the biden administration actually increased the trade deficit. >> the trade deficit has skyrocketed to $891 billion, the highest ever.

>> cost increases also lead to a decline in u.s. manufacturing jobs. intellectual property theft continued, and the cost imposed by tariffs were simply passed along to consumers of imported products. and now, trump has promised to impose even higher tariffs when he is back in office. >> tariffs were put in place because china's economic policy was hurting u.s. factories and workers. >> that is a belief of some people in the u.s., especially people of the trump administration. >> the biden administration even extended those. >> they don't agree with such kind of policy. why? because it hurts the u.s. economy. the high inflation. where do you get it? in part because of these

tariffs. host: the documentary set to air tonight. what is your expectation of the reaction in china to this latest 10% tariff threat? guest: the line that they are using, i've heard the spokespeople and i've heard from xi xinping himself in various venues that he has spoken in, that he thinks this is not going to work and everybody is going to be hurt by this. i don't know exactly what will be accomplished. right now, president trump is not in office, so this amounts to some saber rattling. he fashions himself a dealmaker and i think he is trying to set the stage and get xi xinping's

attention to try to negotiate something that will not be harmful. we are bound together. they need our market, we need their investment. so it is very hard to decouple. and that has been the phrase of late, that we are decoupling from china. but it hasn't really benefited anybody at this point in time, and i don't know if the rattling we are seeing is going to play out once trump is in office. that remains to be seen. it's very hard to predict what donald trump is going to do tomorrow. host: less than 15 minutes left with martin smith this morning. diane is waiting in kansas. republican, good morning. guest: thanks for taking my call. thinking about the way he grew up, it almost sounds like he had an attitude if you can't beat

them, join them. but anyways, my question is with regard to his relationship with trump and especially china's aggressive attitude toward taiwan and the philippines. i think that they are both survivors. xi xinping is a survivor, donald trump is also a survivor coming back a second time. and i just wonder how do you think this influences both of their reactions to the other with regard to, especially aggressive policies in taiwan, etc.? thank you. guest: it's a very good question. i think donald trump admires strong leaders. he is in fact envious of the way a leader like xi xinping can

control what happens in his nation, in his country. so i think there is some admiration that goes on there. with xi xinping, it is hard to say. it is relatively opaque and hard to determine how he sees donald trump. i think he is sort of cautiously circling right now and trying to figure it out and figure out what is next. i think xi xinping has focused very much on his domestic enemies, on repression, and then on his threats against taiwan and the philippines, the moves to build military outposts off of coral reefs in the middle of the ocean. i think he has been focused there.

but now he needs to focus on the economy, and i think that is something he has, in the words of one of our interviewees, taken for granted, that the economy was in very good shape when he took over, not such good shape now, and that he needs to focus on that. i think the coming of donald trump will force him to focus on that even more. during the covid lockdown, there were demonstrations across china against the restrictions on movement of people, and they were the largest demonstrations since the tiananmen square protests in 1989. the pla and the state security didn't shoot people in the streets, but what you saw was a lot of people arrested and given prison terms and i think it portended trouble ahead because there is this sort of undercurrent of resentment of

protest, of unhappiness, especially among 20-year-old and 30-year-old people in china. and so he's got to manage that with his toolbox of repression and at the same time get the economy moving again. so he's got a big challenge there. host: is the pla any match for the u.s. military? guest: we don't know. i've talked to a number of military officials when i was in china, and they say well, our army is not experienced. we haven't fought wars. the united states has fought several wars. we haven't really won them, but there is experience in the u.s. and the pentagon that they lack and i think there is a certain amount of insecurity. i think xi xinping would see taiwan as an opportunity for his military to learn and get some

experience. i don't know if that is enough to push them to pull the lever, but are we a match for one another? they have a bigger navy, they have more ships. they are turning them out very quickly. but it is really hard to say. it is a massive army. i had a conversation, it is in the film with the admiral who is the head of the indo pacific command, all soldiers in the indo pacific. it is a huge responsibility. he says look, if there is a war over taiwan, it will dwarf the second world war, it will lead to a depression, it will b catastrophic if that happens. host: florida, independent, ian. caller: good morning, guys. thank you for taking my call.

for my question, i just want to also say i have not heard of this film before today's segment, and throughout hearing you speak about it and a couple of clips that have been played, i'm really looking forward to watching it. unfortunately, it airs at 1:00 in the morning for me, so i won't be watching it today. guest: let me say that it will be available online. caller: i'm looking forward to that. guest: it is free there, you can watch it on your own time. caller: so the question i had was throughout the making of this entire film, was there any moments in particular that were memorable for you, and if so, which one with the most memorable? guest: there is a scene that came up throughout the documentary from the cultural revolution to tiananmen square to the battle for hong kong and the crackdown against muslims,

the minority there that has been resisting chinese rule. and that is when they take a dissident and put them in jail, they often then pressure family members to testify against their offspring, their siblings, whatever. and this theme is repeated. they seem to be saying that look, your loyalty has to be to the party, not to your family. and i found it extremely moving to listen to some of these people who have fled the country and talk about how they were turned against them. and this is a tactic that repeats itself over and over again throughout the documentary, just extremely moving and heart wrenching to

watch. you will see it in the documentary, especially one woman that fought against the uprising in hong kong. there is a bounty on her head and she says look, at the end of the day, this is about fighting for the people that you love. but they cut you off, she is not able to talk to her mother and father who are still in hong kong and she resists crying in the documentary. she was very moving. host: gaithersburg, maryland, republican. good morning. caller: thanks for taking my call. i'm excited to hear the topic. i'm a first generation immigrant from china, so i think i wanted to add some of my perspectives. i think i got really interested when i heard about the part

where you were trying to shoot this documentary in china and he was basically kind of like -- and that is so typical. how do you think, and i want to say i left the country more than 20 years ago. back then it was quite open and much, much more open than. -- open then nowadays. i was shocked looking back myself and realizing that, you know, how the country has gone backwards, and i believe xi wants to be mao number two, which i really detest. the worst part about him is that he treated the people of china like trash. and so he does not care about the people. he was basically riding the coattails of others, but he's ruining the country.

i feel so sad about the people of china and they are suffering under the communist party, even though the economic condition was better before, now it is kind of like coming down. i want to say i always laugh when i hear about people calling trump a dictator. they have not seen a dictator yet. and they also laugh when people talk about fox. if it were not for them, this country would be just like communist propaganda because it is all the same thing. that is just my two cents. thank you. guest: i appreciate your thoughts, and i think they are quite cogent in terms of xi jinping and the turn to a sort of mao-ist autocracy.

i've talked to many chinese. i welcome you to america, i'm glad you are able to speak freely and make a phone call and speak on the air about these things. you couldn't do that in china. chinese censorship, it prevents any free speech, freedom of assembly, all these things are threatened. human rights, ultimately. so i appreciate your call. host: i wanted to end on a column in today's washington times. a senior fellow, director of the china center at the hudson institute. he spoke on what you and i talked about, xi xinping and his biggest fear right now. he said the demand for noninterference of democracy and human rights issues reflects the regime's deepest fear.

it is not defense of sovereignty, but indictment of his repression from the tiananmen square massacre to the balancing of hong kong's road democracy movement and the internment of millions of uighurs. the record is one of systematic oppression. his paranoia stems from a well-founded fear of his own people. the stifling censorship to the absence of basic freedoms by branding democracy and human rights as foreign impositions. he seeks to delegitimize the universal principles ensuring that his regime remains unchallenged. he writes this tactic, however, is failing. the world increasingly sees china not as a sovereign defender, but as a regime desperate to silence the voices of its own people. would you agree? guest: i have to agree and i think if you watch the documentary, you will see what this author is saying played out in pictures and in witness

testimony, in many cases very painful testimony given in the documentary. so you will see this play out. i think one of the things that you have to understand about xi xinping is that he watched the fall of the soviet union and he became very afraid that that could happen, and that peripheral states would split off from china just like they did in the soviet union. in the soviet union you have the baltic states, you have georgia, all these countries under the control of the soviet union. gorbachev came in and all of this began to unravel. xi xinping sees this and his attitude is that the russians were not man enough to really keep control. so xi xinping speaks of a chinese dream where he is going

to maintain his china including mongolia, taiwan, without -- the south china sea. that is his dream, to keep all of that under his control. he's running into trouble. his economy is faltering. for economies to succeed, they need to open themselves to foreign markets. they need people to feel free to express themselves, to innovate, to create. and all of that is stifled in china, so he is running into a cul-de-sac. we don't know what is going to happen. it does seem to be quite dangerous when you consider what could happen over taiwan, for instance. we've already seen the fall of hong kong. the future is not that bright. host: "china, the u.s.,