tv Charlie Rose PBS April 2, 2015 12:00am-1:01am PDT
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>> rose: welcome to the programment we begin this evening with a picture of the new leader in china zi jinping, it was written in "the new yorker" magazine the author of evan osnos. >> some pem say he is the post powerful leader since mao. i don't think that is necessarily what we can say he is the most authoritarian leader most forceful leader no doubt about it he has accumulated official titles head of the military head of state, head of the party oversees the internet the courts, the secret police. but what we don't know is whether, in fact, if there was a moment where he was challenged by somebody in the military an somebody else in the government, is he as strong as he appears today. that is a bit of an open question. >> rose: we conclude this evening with fareed zakaria and his new book is called "in defense of a liberal education" >> if america is going to stay vibrant economically in the 21st century it's not fundamentally going to be
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because we can page cheaper computer chips than the chinese or south koreans am but those are areas they're going to do better at because they have lots more engineers and they can pay the engineers much less. we are going to do better at figuring out the way that human beings use technology how do computers interact with people what is the right, you know the idea of the social network. >> rose: evan osnos and fareed zakaria when we continue. >> funding for charlie rose is provided by the following: additional funding provided by: from
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our studios in new york city this is charlie rose. >> rose: evan osnos is here. he covers politics and foreign affairs for "the new yorker" magazine. he's also the author of age of ambition chasing fortune truth and faith in the new china. it won the fat book award last year. he's been wraing about the country for the last decade and lived there for eight years. his latest report say cover story on china's president xi jinping. it is called china's new authoritarian. i'm pleased to have evan osnos back at this table. welcome. >> thank you very much. >> rose: first question, do you have access to him? >> not yet. >> not yet. >> i have a request in. and stranger things have happened. he hasn't said yes yet. >> rose: how much is known about him in china in terms of the public press and b how much of an effort is there to define him? >> there is a mythology about him. there is a very robust and
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fixed story about him which is as followses. he is the son of the revolutionary. his father was one of the founding heroes of communist china. he the son suffer during the cultural revolution and then eventually rose up through the ranks and became what he is today. and that in itself is to the wrong. that basic skeleton of a story is correct. but the details of how those impact how those experiences impacted him how they shaped his thinking the influences along the way those turn out to be essentially important in understanding who he is. >> rose: draw that part of the portrait for me. >> in a way he has seen the best and the absolute worst of the communist experience. you know, he grew up really at the absolute top of the hierarchy. his father was a vice premier. he was working side-by-side his father had been in the revolution since he was 14 years old. the entire world that xi jinping grew up in was the communist party. it's everything he knows. he is a pure and successful
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product of that system. >> rose: he was a prince ling before he there were prince lipings. >> yeah, there wasn't a term for that when he was a kid. but he knew that all his friends in school their fathers were also senior leaders. he want to the chinese equivalent of going to andover in about 1960. everybody there was a member of an elite family. so they had privileges am but they also had a sense of responsibility. which was that you will grow up to inherit the revolution. and that was an explicit message. they were told that day after day. when you grow up you will inherit the revolution. and then the cultural revolution happened. and the cultural revolution as you know was this period of enormous chaos where everything was kind of thrown up in the air. students attacked their teachers. children attacked their parents an criticized their parents. so all of a sudden all these privileges that he had from being associated to one of these families became a liability. and his life was turned up sid down. >> rose: where did they send him? >> he sent out to a village in zenxi province be very rough place to live. he lived in the chain ease press talks about this all the time. he lived in a cave and
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shoveled manure and when you dig into what he has said over the years though it's actually a little bit more approachable. which is, you know he got out there and he realized i'm not cut out for this. he was a city kid. he gets out to this village. he has noed where how to carry weight or how to farm. and he was rated on a scale of labor. and he was rated a six out of ten which is lower as he said later with some embarrassment, it was lower than the level that women got on their labor score. and he tried to get out of it. he actually fled back to beijing and said all right i want to get back to my old life. and he was arrested and sent back out to the village. the official story is that at that point he was reborn essentially. he became-- he sort of realized what his fate was that he was going to be a communist party hero. and so on and so on and then rose up through the ranks. the reality was it was a bitterly, bitterly difficult period. his father was in jail.
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his mother was forced to do hard labor on a farm. and xi jinping made a judgement which was that if he was going to survive in china, he had to be even more red than the reddest person he could see. he was as a friend of his said he had to be redder than red.qw4kdvym pgd that eventually lead to the man we see today who is a true a thorough partisan of the communist party. >> rose: he also seems to have learned about power. >> he absorbed very deply lessons about power. you know, in a way everything that he saw from the time he was a child said to him that powerful people will determine the lives of hundreds of millions of people. this is not a-- this is the no a system in which people play an equal role. there are powerful people and there are-- and there's everybody else. and from a very early point in his life he got the sense that he was destined to be one of these powerful people. >> rose: but the interesting thing is that he's not showing tendencies of someone without is a
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courageous bold leader. he seems to be someone who keeps his head down someone whose's careful, someone who he says turns the water up to a boiling point and then posed more cold water right before it begins to boil. >> absolutely right. >> he understood how to be careful. >> that's absolutely right. he figured out that there are these competing factions within the communist party. some are more progressive some are more liberal minded and some are more conservative. and if he wanted to get anywhere he had to avoid all yent ating anyone. he would do something that would satisfy the liberal. for instance, he would support a private car company by telling the taxi company if you need to buy these private cars. but then at the same time he would recite the classic socialist incantations things like well the private market is an exotic beautiful flower in the socialist economic garden. that's what he said. in a way it worked for him. you know his strategy there is a classic chinese phrase which is to hide your strength and bide your time. and he did that for decades. until he was in the position
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where there was be in around him who is as powerful as he is and now he defines it for himself. >> rose: and when do you think he knew that he wanted to be the top guy if. >> people tell me that he knew that by the time he came back from the village meaning in his early --. the experience of being out there was the first moment in his life where he had been a leader. he had beenym a middling student, his education ended at fifth grade. so he then had ten years off and he want back to college. sow didn't have a conventional childhood in any way. but by the time he came back from the village he had been named the party secretary, so he had already had the experience of being the man in charge.b. and he after all had grown-up around people in charge. and he started to talk about himself in those terms. >> rose: did he have a mentor, someone without guided his career? >> his father absolutely his father. and you know what is interesting he has xi jinping has said for instance, i quote him in this piece as saying his father used to talk about the revolution constantly so much so that he said we used to gel callouses on our ears because he talked about it so much.
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so he grew up in an environment in which the communist party was the most refined machine for the betterment of human experience. that's really what he believed. he was insurance lated from a lot of the thing-- insulated from a lot of the things that were going wrong. for instance, he didn't need to know about the fact that the great leap forward produced a famine that killed more people than world war 1. he is not ignorant of these things. he's a sophisticated person. but he has also seen the number from one angle. >> rose: he became a sophisticated person with a fifth grade education? >> he's a self-taught man. he got into college he got into a great school in beijing because of his political and his ideology merit, not because of his test scores. he likes to talk about his reading habits. he talks about how much he reads. people who know him well say actually his reading habits are more traditional. he reads a lot of chinese classings. he reads an talks aboutñi the old socialist texts. you know, in some ways i think charlie one of the most, for me at least
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important discoveries along this process was realizing he has less foreign experience than deng xiaoping had. he became a revolutionary and went to paris and livedq to paris understood the soviet union, you know. xi jinping never had that experience. a lot of his peers chose to go abroad. at the end of the cultural reluv-- revolution, they when to the u.s. bo got ph.ds or want to hong kong and made a for fortune. he chose not to do that. he said i will survive and second-- succeed by staying in the system. >> rose: he thought that was the best thing to do. the decision by choice as the best way to get ultimate leadership. >> it was the way that-- exactly. it was the way he was going to get to the top. i think also his father played a role in this tra decision. traditionally in chinese families and in other cultures too, one son will go into business the other into politics it is a congenial relationship these two help each other. he had one son that went into business a daughter
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that went into business if hong kong. and xi jinping the son that had just begun to join politics andñi move up in the system, that was the one who wasçó going to continue to move up. his father created opportunities for him, got him some important jobs early on and then he continued to climb the ranks. >> rose: and hisfá >> his wife is fascinating. his wife is a celebrity inym china. much more famous than he was before they got married. she was a sop o an opera star folk singer. and they met xi jinping it was his second marriage. he had been married very soon after college. he marrieded daughter of the chinese ambassador to greati5# and his wife at the time wanted to move to the u.k. and xi jinping said no if i do that pie political career is finished. and they vored. >> rose: so he is a politician true and through. >> through and through completely. >> rose: and then his second wife. >> and thenfá they met later. at the time xi jinping really, he has some hobbies. he likes to play soccer. he likes to watch soccer mostly on tv. he swims and stuff. but he is a political animal completely.
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so when he met his celebrity wife, he really didn't know much about her. shezv: famous people in china but he said tell me what songs you sing. i'm not familiar with them am when she met him she said this guy looks older than his age. he wasñi 33. he was in his mid --. she thought he was kind of dowdy. he spent all this time in the countryside. what he discom/u because his mind was so completely occupied by political questions, how do i get myself into the position to be able to have an impact on a broad basis. and they got married a year after they met. and they lived apart actually for men years. today in china, the story about them, the official story, of course is tha,o they are together all the tim and now that they are the first couple, they are together.nb but for the next 125 years-- 15 years they really weren'ting to very off only. she lived in beijing he lived in his various posts around the country. >> rose: de have to do anything ruthless to get the power. >> you don't get to the top of that system by being gentle. >> rose: so what did he do to get the power.
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>> i will give you an example of a story i didn't put into the magazine article. for me its with a very telling one. which is that at a certain point along the way when he was-- about ten years ago and a rival were trying to get ahead. and the rival had done things, for instance to stop xi jinping's allies and proteges from being appointed. xi jinpingxd had done some of the same things to him. and then the moment of opportunity arrived. there was a typhoon and it killed a lot of people in the neighboring province where this rival was in charge. a journalist from xi jinping's command structure was deployed to this guy's province and he wrote a story that questioned the death toll. it said i think the death toll as much larger than has been officially reported that is very dancing in the chinese political system. it shows that he is hiding something. it guy with was rung the province said this is slander. i have been abused. this is competely unwarranted. his career really never recovered. xi jinping continued to rise up through the system. >> rose: de no deng xiaoping
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did they cross at all? >> we have known him. i don't think-- they certainly knew each other. his father worked-- was the heads of a province in the south and was one of the key kind of experiment-- people that oversaw the experiments in the early days. >> rose: his father was -- >> his father was a firebrand, really. his father believed in economic reform. he said we got to go to the free market. that put him very close to deng xiaoping but the difference was, there was a key moment in the mid 1980s when the old line the old guard was pushing back against the economic reformers. and xi jinping's father stepped forward and said what you are doing is wrong. we need to continue on the path that we're going. don't purge the people who are trying to make meaningful progress. they lost that fight. deng xiaoping actually sided against them in that fight and he more or less lived out his career in comfortable obscurity. so on the one hand i think he credits deng with being
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the create economic envisionary on the other hand deng was also responsible for sidelining his father at the end of his ca remembers. >> rose: his father sounds like the crucial relationship. >> his father was essential. and you know in many ways his father was a lifelong devotee of the communist party and i think that is so crucial to understand. if you think about thefá influences that xi jinping received, even though his father suffered he spent 16 areas in one form of confinement or another because of the plut call chaos. >> so he's even more likely to do everything he can to protect the party. >> exactly right. >> rose: and it's control. >> that's exactly it i think there's nothing in his life that suggests to us that he will do something that would depart substantively from where the communist party comes there. the question then becomes if if-- if the survival of the communist party depends on major economic reforms then and in order to achieve those economic reforms you have to take steps that open up society is he willing to take those steps. at the moment he has indicated that he believes you can go ahead with
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economic reform, for instance creating more competition against nationalo enterprises and so on without political openness. that's his-- it's his explicit belief. and i think there's a lot of people who question whether that's possible. is it possible to have a fully formed sophisticated open economy without the kind of concessions to the globalizeed world that we live in. >> rose: was any relationship ever -- >> there was a relationship. xi jinping let li qui-- before he was being des ignite-- designated to run the country. and he came out of the meeting saying this man might be the mandela of china. what he meant by that is this is somebody who went through all the political turbulence an unpleasantness of the '60s and '70s and seems to have moved beyond it. and that was a fascinating insight because he was actually son on some level of course he was right that xi jinping was not hobbled. he was inca pass date-- incapacitated by having sent all these years
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in the countryside. the difference was and i think this is important, is that we might have expected that xi jinping would have ruled by trying to build a concensus-- consensus across as many groups as possible. that is in some sense what the mandela analogy was suggests. so far we haven't seen that. what we have seen is he is consolidating the people he finds most politically reliable. the people he trusts most. that is a different model. it means there are losers in the system at the moment. >> rose: he has consolidated power at the least. >> very effectively. but i should say i mean these days we've started people in the china community now, we say some people say he's the most powerful leader since mao. i don't think that is necessarily what we can say. because he's the most author tearian leader most forceful leader no question about it. he has accumulated the number of officials title. head of the military, head of state head of the party but what we don't know is whether, in fact f there was a moment where he was challenged by somebody in the military or somebody else in the government is he as strong as he appears today? that is a bit of an open
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question. >> rose: he does have more power than his predecessor. >> much, much more power. his predecessor turned out to be i much weaker figure than we knew at the time. his nick name was the woman with bound feet. because he was kept off balance by all of these powerful peers and rivals. >> rose: which raises the question about the corruption campaign. some people believe it is not only to root out core runtion t is also to root out rivals. >> and i think it's both. you know somebody described it to me this way in beijing. they said look if you go into a room and there are ten people there and you know eight of them have core roption in their dossier you are going to go after the first four who are the people who are your political opponents. you need the other four to ep could the system running. and so what we're seeing both is a determined effort to try to bring corruption down to i a manageable level but also doing it in a way where look, this is to the being done by predictable legal principleses. this is being done in a surgical fashion. he goes in and he says these people are coming out. so for the moment it is also being done in services shall. >> these people have been at the top of the national security apparatus.
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>> absolutely. >> these are not small characters. >> he took down a guy named joey-- who was the most senior figure in the security world. which was a bold move. and one that i think surprised a lot of us that he was able to do it bo more disruption. >> rose: and when he did it scared a lot of others. >> absolutesly. when you see somebody of that stature go down what it tells you is that nobody is protected. -- a great novelist chinese thinker told me what is happening right now is that the you know -- the unwritten rules the essential principleses that govern the last 30 years of chinese life have been broken. xi jinping has gone in and broken these rules and we don't know yet exactly what will come but we know he is a much more-- he's made a much more decisive break from the last ten years than we expected. >> tell me about his vision. >> his vision is fundamentalsly about returning china to the position that he believes it deserves, which is that it's no longer a superpower in waiting. he believes that the time has come for china to be a great power on the level of
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the united states. he has said i mean one of the things he says is that it's time for the u.s. to have, as he puts it a new type of great power relation. the u.s. has not endorsed that phrase. the obama administration has basically said we're to the going to do that. what he means by that is treat us as an equal. don't regard our interests as secondary to yours. so for instance, if we say that this territory in the south china sea belongs to us, we want you to take that seriously and to acknowledge our claim. the united states isn't prepared to do that because what it does mean say fundamental reevaluation of our relationship in asia and elsewhere. >> i think at the moment the obama administration people who i talk to there are-- have been surprised by how fast he has sought to reshape this relationship. >> what's the threat to him? >> the threat which -- >> is-- i will tell you the biggest threat, and this is not one that you read about very often but one that came very clear over the course of the reporting on this project, was that his
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bureaucracy his actually capable of foiling what it is he is trying to do. meaning his anti-corruption campaign is basically picked up the plague the chessboard and tipped it over and said all the rules that you thought pertained no longer do. and the bureaucracy which is agency after agency thousands upon thousands millions of people across china, all of their-- all the way they do things, when you are allowed to take a bribe how you are allowed to make decisions all has been thrown up in the air. the way they responded is by slowing down am you hear this from many people trying to get things accomplished. they will say i can't get a permit a of product. they don't want to sign off on something. >> they don't want to do anything that may appear to be corruption. >> they will make themselves vulnerable or vum neverable to their o uponants. >> the bureaucrats. >> are they party members? >> they are in many cases party members but sometimes they're not. this is we're talking about tens of millions of people across the country. an this san ancient pattern
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chinese politics. empire em errors over thiers have tried to challenge the bureaucracy. and the bureaucracy by and large wins. and the question for xi jinping is he pushing too fast, too far. at the moment he has i think at the moment he is managing this he has got this about right. >> but you hear a lot of -- >> when you put a story like this together. they do in the like to be written about as we have found from bloomberg and others. >> right. >> "new york times". >> right. >> specifically. >> and you're going out talking to people at the highest level. i don't-- i mean you are saying i'm doing a piece on xi jinping. >> uh-huh. >> it's been very hard. >> yeah. >> it's harder actually than other stories. almost harder than any other story i have written in china because people who would ordinarily be confident and feel like look i've got the confidence to be able to talk on the record. they say i just can't be talking about the subject because we don't know exactly what he is capable of. meaning if i own a business
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for instance i don't know if that business will be constrained by regulatory pressure or taken away from me if i say something critical. so it's a hard subject to write about. i have to say it was actually even harder than i thought it would be. >> but it was interesting you mentioned one of the chinese scholars. are scholars different or -- >> because they don't have a business to threaten. >> and for them in some cases. >> i will tell you i talk to a lot more scholars than i quote. there are a lot of people who help shape your impressions, so for instance you hear a lot of stories about the way he conducts business or how he deals with people. and then you use that information. of course as you know as a reporter you try and late talk to other people about it, confirm it deny it and get rid of it. there are people who feel that their role is to be an independent intellectual and so for their-- i mean for some of the people i quote in this story their own personal credibility rests on being able to say things that they believe are independent. and that remains. but this is a very hard time
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to be a chinese writer or chinese intellectual, and a foreign writer in china. harder i think than any time in the ten years that i have been doing this. >> two relationships. a putin and xi jinping what's that? >> fascinating relationship. early on, i should say xi jinping has met with vladimir putin more than with anybody else. any other foreign head of state. >> at whose's insistence. >> it seems to be mutual. i should say though xi has gotten the better side of this relationship putin after all has been isolated. increasingly isolated in this period that xi has come to power over the course of the last two and a half areas. so for instance when vladimir putin was looking around the world for friends one of the people who returned his call is xi jinping. >> rose: when sanctions were imposed. >> exactly. >> rose: and he was admiring of what he did in crimea. >> this is one of the interesting things i didn't expect when i went into this. xi jinping has told people around him, i admire what he did in crimea. he got a big piece of territory. >> rose: at no cost. >> at no cost. resources, and it consolidated political
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support at home. his poll numbers improved. over the course of the next year his-- xi's enthusiasm for this cooled a bit and he began to talk about it more critically because it became a complicated operation. and it caused if some ways it caused as much blowback for vladimir putin as it did benefits. >> rose: second relationship barack obama. >> that lipp is occasionally candid which is significant because obama he relationship with you had chin tau was not that way. they have had shirtsleeve summits in california. >> rose: they have somebody there because neither speaks the other language. >> they have an interpreter but xi jinping is just a fundamentally different kind of operator. when you talk to him for instance he often doesn't have notes. he is a more comfortable presence. everybody who spends time with him comes away with the same impression which is that he means what he says and with jintao it seemed he was voicing words that had been prepared for him by consensus. obama and xi's relationship
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though remains basically pretty remote. because they are just-- they have very different ways of doing things. >> . >> rose: happied by different lives. >> if you think about it how profoundly different their life experiences are. think have been thinking if you think about the difference in the way they were shaped. you know obama came up through the system. he came up through-- xi jinping really knows his system and his system only. and they're making an effort. i think one thing is that is very encouraging in a sense about there moment in u.s. china relations is that with all of this free form energy and anxiety about how these two countries are going to deal with each other they're now talking. they're having a conversation. and they are very blunt with how serious the stakes are. if these two countries don't get it right the rise of a superpower has always been disruptive to the existing state of affairs in the world. and they're trying to avoid a conflict. and they're able to have that conversation. as one person put it to me who has been in the room with them a number of times they're able to have these brutally frank exchanges and then continue on.
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>> rose: the thing you hope is that they are not misconceptions about each other. the scariest thing is you misjudge the other person. >> and that for a long time was the real risk in this relationship. the u.s. really didn't have a sense of what china's intentions were. were they trying to push us out. >> rose: and likewise they thought we were trying to contain them? >> absolutely. and i think you know i didn't put this in the story but there is credible view that xi jinping to this day doesn't fundamentally trust the united states because he believes when he looks at what we did in the arab world that we had friends in arab leaders an when they begin to wobble as one person said to me it takes about three days before we're cheering on the little guy.< and xi jinping believes that if this happened, we may not actually be there to back him up in a moment of kris is and he may not be wrong about that. and i think for that reason it creates an underlying level of anxiety. >> rose: and it also creates the whyed that if, in fact there is a change the u.s. might react quickly and before the reality had set
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in. >> i also think though that we have at the moment i mean on the other side if you look around the world today there is some of disorder, there's so much-- china is actually one of the few places in the world where the united states can look and say all right, we don't have an immediate crisis on our hands. so there are a lot of really credible reasons why people in washington people in this government want stability and peace. >> rose: but i have read for example that suggest putin has a theory that it was the cia without put the people in the streets of kiev at the time that lead to essentially the overthrow of the government. that the chinese believe the same thing. >> i do think the chinese believe the same thing. i it is a question of were portion. do they believe the cia created this out of nothing or do they believe the cia and other american institutions essentially support these kind of grass roots actions. it's the latter. if you look in china today and they say this very explicitly, in the state-run press. they will say principles that the unrest in hong kong last fall was aided and abetted in effect by american institutions ngos.
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government agencies. they really do believe that we have an interest that we are in a sense institutionally allergic to the persistence of communism and we will do what we can to try to get rid of it. >> rose: the irony of all ironies his daughter he sent it an american university. >> she did. graduating from harvard last spring. studied psychology and has returned to china. i thought one of the most interesting dinner conversations in the world is what she says to her father after four years. >> rose: china's new author tarrian since becoming president two years ago xi jinping has a man'sed power more comprehensively than any other leader since mao. evan osnos brillianly reports from a place he knows well better than most. thank you. back in a moment. far even-- fareed zakaria is here and we'll talk with him about a liberal education. >> fareed jack ar-- zakaria is here, he is the host of cnn cps and whites a quickly
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column for "the washington post". he has win five books. his late cess called in defense of a liberal education. in it he argues that the university is much more than a vocational school. education is much more than pursuit of a vocation. i'm pleased to have fareed zakaria back at this table welcome. >> thank you sir. >> a totally believe in the idea. may small contribution is when people come to me and say, you know what should i major in, that basically say the most important thing you can do is have a sense of the world have a sense of all that has contributed to the society and education we live in and learn how to express yourself. understand a command of the language. and start there. but if you don't have that will you want that. >> and you know that is the distinctively american contribution to higher education. so if you look in the 19th century the germans per tected the apprenticeship program france even britain had all these technical training programs
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whereby 14 or 15 from essentially told why don't you choose what profession you are going to be what trade you will be in for your life. in america, in the 19th century the sense was there are too many opportunities the economy changes too much and people don't want to be stuck in one town. they want to move. and so we're going to give you a broad general education. we're going to give you the skills you need the exposure you need and then you're going to learn on your first job what you need on your first job but on your second job you will have to learn a secretary set of things. what draw faust said about a liberal education is perfect. she said it's not meant to train you for your first sqob but your sixth job. >> rose: the idea of the value of a lib ralt education t has been around for a while. why did you think it was necessary and important now to remind us? >> well what is happening right now is we're living through anxious economic times. so you are seeing people say well, we need to have a sure thing. an education has become expensive. college education is incredibly expensive so people say i want to focus
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in on stem science technology, engineering math because that way i know my son my daughter will have a job. rrz a skill. >> even president president obama gave that famous remark, he said if people were to choose a manufacturing trade they would make more money than if they went into art history, right. new on the republican side it's actually gotten nasty. governors are defunding the liberal arts and humanities in several states florida wisconsin places like that. there's a real move to say we don't need more art-- art historians and anthropologists we want to focus exclusively on stem. and it really misses what is distinctive of the american system, of course science and technology are very important. but as part of this general education. >> rose: you came here from india. >> i did. >> rose: and went to very good schools. did you come because you you wanted a liberal education and because the essential way of educating in india was to teach skills? >> well, it is certainly part of what attracted me.
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look, i grew up in india in the '70s. around the '70s were a tough time in india. very high inflation. there was martial law for two years. so and i was always fascinated by america. so part of my journey was the fascination with america. i watched i love lucy. and fell in love with that. but part of it was-- . >> rose: the culture. >> american culture movies. and my version my version of the american dream charlie, was dallas. we used to watch bootleg copies of dallas. and that opening montage which you you know as-- . >> rose: i lived in dallas at the time they were making that television show t was great. >> those gleaming buildings the helicopters landing on roofs. and men coming out of these cadillacs. and i thought this is america, right. but part of it was exactly that i got a very good rigorous education at tenth grade i had to stream. and i straemed into the sciences. 3éasically the way it used to work was the rich kids streamed into what was called commerce, which was economics. the smart kids streamed into
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science and the girls did humannities in india. that was just how it wod. so i streamed into sciences. and i started hearing more and more about american colleges. and i realized that you could do physics and poetry. you could study film. you could sort of follow your passion. and so i got very interested. and i applied and luckily got a scholarship to yale. i get there and i think i'm going to do all these you know, i took my first year i signed up for fis you cans computer science path and i took one class in international relations history of international relations. and i got hooked. because hi always thought i love this stuff. i always knew i loved it. but i never thought i could make something of it, i could actually use it for a profession. and you know yale made me realize, you know what if you have a passion you follow it. sling work out. >> rose: my version of that is a small town in the south was i wanted to be a doctor. because doctors were imminently admired in the community. and i didn't know any journalists. i didn't know any people, i didn't even know any people from the academy.
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but doctors. and the way to do that was to major in fisks and major in chemistry and get those chemistry requirements and then go on to medical school. somewhere along the line i fell in love with the humannities. and with the theory of civilization and all of those kinds of things. so i went to law school. >> you know what's interesting is i think part of what has changed between then and now is in those days there were other people from fields like the humannities who were kind of famous and celebrities and much admired you know writers, norman mailer and people like that were seen as these larger-than-life figures. today that happens in the stem world. i mean zuckerberg and bezos which is fantastic. but it doesn't quite happen as much in the humannities. and i think that's part of the reason why you know english majors are dropping i think they dropped by 75% in 30 years. history majors have dropped. and it's unfortunate because in a way the humanities is not cool any
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more. >> rose: but engineering is cool. >> engineering is cool. >> rose: and computer sciences. >> if are you passionate about it, you should really do it. you know what is interesting is the data shows that all this drumbeat of talking about jobs and skills and job training it isn't luring people into the sciences. because look not everyone has the apt future-- aptitude for it it's also very hard. what it is doing is making people anxiously forsake english and history and philosophy and instead do kind of to my mind silly preprofessional majors like business studies and communication arts and things like that. which are you know often people are doing because it sounds like it is preprofessional. but they would be better off just following their passion. somebody who has a great training in english or history is just as good as somebody with a business major at business. >> rose: you have to choose in the end. you talked about wanting to study physics and poetry. do you really have to close today? because you can both study science and math. i mean vocational studies is one thing junior colleges are another thing. but if you are going to the
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university for a four-year degree, you can major and minor and get both kinds of educations, i assume. >> yes, in fact was's happening now increasingly are colleges are trying to figure out a way to really incorporate those two things. i was talking to somebody at standford and they were saying they are really trying to explore in a sense, the idea behind steve jobs's famous line where steve jobs said it is in apple's dna that it isn't just technology but technology mar ed to the liberal arts that makes our heart sing. so they're saying why don't you try and come up with majors where that makes sense. music and math. engineering and design. they're trying to find those points of synergy which and as we know real creativity charlie takes place when you bring two disciplines together. and find some intersection. >> not only that being sanford, at the design school, the secret of the design school at stand federal reserve david kelly created is the d school is the fact that they bring people with different disprinciples to focus on one problem.
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and as they look at the way to create a design solution to something it's not just products, it's the way you look at education and might look at process it is a mixture of people with different talents. which brings out the best in results. >> rose: . >> and that's probably going to be our secret of success. if america is being to stay vibrant economically in the 2 iss century it's not fundamentally going to be because we can make cheaper computer chips than the chinese or south koreans am but those are areas they're going to do better at because there are lots more engineers and they can pay the engineers much less. we are going to do better at figuring out the way that human beings use technology how do computers interact with people. what is the right, you know the idea of the social network. i point out that mark zuckerberg was a psychology major at harvard before he dropped out. he says that the core insight of facebook say psychological one. that he realized that before facebook everybody was anonymous on the internet. you didn't have-- and that
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he wanted to create a platform where your actual identity exists so that you can create much greater sense of trust and a much more powerful plat form. and of courses for an advertise ter say gold mine because now you know who these people actually are. >> let me turn to india because you went and interviewed prime minister moti. tell me about india today and tell me what difference he makes. >> india today has all the opportunities and all the challenges of a big democracy. if you think of it-- . >> rose: the biggest democracy. >> china has succeeded because of its government at some level. india is succeeding despite its government. it doesn't have good infrastructure. it doesn't invest. the government you know panders to people hands out subsidies and all that. yet, it has been the second fastest growing large economy in the world for the last 15 years. so there is enormous potential because of the demographics. because of the fact that an old socialist economy has been unshackled. but it still is an old
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socialist economy. and what moti is finding is it's harder to change it than people realize. first of all he doesn't have as much power as people think. upper house of parliament is not in his control. the states are not in his control. so he is chipping away at it. i think that one could be moderately optimistic. but in the long run you have to be impressed by the bottom up power of india which is these companies these entrepreneurs you know, yes, it doesn't have the great infrastructure. it doesn't have the great airports that china has the great rail systems but it has great companies. and it's because the human capital is very strong. and ultimately you have to figure that would make a big difference. >> do you in the long run believe it will outpace china 25 50 years out. >> a lot of my indian friends think that and i always tell them indians are supposed to be good at math. china's economy is now four times the size of india. and it's still growing faster than india. >> china is at 7.4. >> india is at about i think $2 trillion. so it is exactly. and it's still growing at
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about 7.5 to india's six maybe. so you do the math. ed lines don't cross. it would take a catastrophe in china. >> the argue does go because it's a democracy that once it gets deals with corruption and lots of other things down the road it may have more potential. but ir's saying notwithstanding that, the math is against it. >> the math is against it. >> at this point, you know would you have to have miracles take place. but being the second fastest growing large economy in the world isn't bad. if they can do six.five percent seven percent remember the amount of economic activity you are unleashing when you are talking about 1.2 billion people growing at 6.5 or 7 percent. >> you create a middle class and it creates a demand for the thing it will cause your manufacturing sector to explode. >> and there is one problem that china has. the great thing about a dictatorship is it effectively implements every policy. and it has effectively implemented the one child policy. which is going to cause a
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demographic nightmare for china. >> let me go to the middle east today. and the negotiations that are going on now with respect to iran. and-- from having nuclear power. what say good deal for the united states? >> i think that the one way to think about this is to remember what the alternative is. suppose you don't do a deal with iran and you say we're going to keep sanctions on. these sanctions are tougher than the old ones but in 2005. we turned down a deal with the iranians, that time cat hami was president rowannish was the chief nuclear negotiator. they offered to cap at 164 centrifuges. the bush administration said no. the french said no. even the british said no. iran went from 164 centrifuges to 20,000 centrifuge under sanctions. because remember, even under sanctions it's an oil-rich country. it makes 50 billion dollars a year. so that's the problem if you don't do the deal. >> rose: . >> the other option is of course, a major military attack. it's important to understand
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we're tacking about weeks of sortees to destroy iran's capability so i would say any deal-- . >> rose: the question is also can they destroy it or simply delay it. >> exactly. because what do you do, if you play through that scenario, you unify the country behind a regime because any-- i have a simple theory. any regime that gets bombed by foreigners the government tends to get popular. >> absolutely. >> and the people become nationalistic. >> right. >> the sanctions regime breaks down because at this point iran is the victim of international aggression. the chinese and the russians are not going to keep with the sanctions. and as you say within two years three years they're able to rebuild the program. they have 2,000 scientists now working on this. you can't get rid of it. >> so the deal are you looking for is a deal that says we're going to have the most intrusive monitoring process we've ever had. and we're going to try to create as long a lead time for you to go from being a civilian power to a military nuclear power. and what does that mean? it means very, very low
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levels of enriched uranium that are stockpiled. and if they exist they are put under seals or diluted in ways or shipped to russia. and the second is limited number of centrifuges because the more you have the quicker you can enrich uranium. it seems to me those are the key things am i think technically it's possible to get a deal. the problem is honestly, there are hard-liners on both sides. in iran and in the united states. >> you know the president is that he look to this as sort of his foreign policy legacy? >> i think he believes that this would be the most significant strategic move that he could take as president. because it would-- it has the possibility of stabilizing or adding some stability to the middle east which is currently the most unstable part of the world. and really the only part of the world that is significantly unstable. if you look at latin america things are going well. if you look at asia things are going well am so if you could bring some order to this, and why would that be
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possible because the iranians want a greater degree of integration into the world. it's a very interesting sign that even iran. >> rose: all iranians or just -- >> younger iranians the reformers. look, there are clearly groups within iran who are very anti-american. and if they win out there won't be a deal. >> rose: is there an argue or does the administration sort of believe that somehow if they have a ten or a europeans would like it to be 25 in terms of the period in which this agreement would last i assume it will be a minimum of ten. do they believe somehow there will be regime change taking place inside of iran so that when they get to the ten-ier period when it ends which is what the israelis fear that government will be vastly different government and will not want nuclear weapons like the ayatollah may? >> you know on that issue i'm a skeptic. i think we shouldn't believe too much in this kind of wishful thinking. there are a few things to
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noticement one, this regime has been powerfully enduring and it has been enduring because it's not quite as repressive as people make it out. it has accommodated itself to public sentiments often. it has these escape valves like can a slightly phoney but also not entirely rigged elections, you know they have various mechanisms that allow for some debate in pluralism. there is also the reality of a shi'a country where religious authority is respected. and finally remember the green movement when those leaders were campaigning against ahmadinejad they #) nuclear program from the right. >> rose: i know they did. >> they were arguing he was being too soft in his negotiations. the nuclear program the civilian nuclear program say nationalistic program very popular in iran. >> rose: moving to the general middle east and the notion of this president as i said, and how he feels and where he is come you now see the rise of isis. you see this push against
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them moving towards mosul. you see in respect to yemen the saudis are now you know making air strikes. the egyptians are saying we'll send troops if necessary. there is this morning or yesterday talk of building a middle eastern quick strike force. the president doesn't seem under any circumstances to want to send american boots on the ground other than advisors or special forces what is your take on what this country should be doing now about isis and the spread of whether it's islamic terrorism or whatever brand of remembertism it is around the world. >> i think first you have to ask why this is happening. and i come back to this idea that you know what's happened in this whole territory is that the regimes have fractured. civil society doesn't exist. the countries don't exist. and so what you have is this
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great churning a kind of sectarian sorting out where the shi'a and sunni and kurs and arabs are figuring out can we live together. can we not. it's a bloody process. it's something very similar to what europe went through at various points when they had, you know intermingled populations. and for the most part in europe, tb+z:á ethnic cleansing. people forget after world war ii six million ger pans were ethnically cleansed. they were thrown out of russia, poland, ukraine into germany. that is how europe solved this problem. it's not unlikely that something similar is happening in the middle east. where if you look at iraq it has essentially turn mood three countries. there were many mixed areas there are not so many. in the midst of all that, i think that for the united states to believe that by a few air strikes here or sending in some special forces there we're going to stabilize all this is crazy. so i think the president is correct in being fairly disciplined and saying we have to keep our eye on the ball. what out of all of this is a threat to american national interests.
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and when you see that you try to figure out what you need to do about it. and isis potentially is a threat to american national interests. remember, isis is desperately trying to get the united states involved. all those gruesome videos this is bait. they are trying to draw the united states in. because they want to be the-- the world's great islamic terrorist organization fighting the great satan. >> we should recognize that that is not-- we shouldn't play their game. we should play our game. >> so is the president right on arguing for a choice of ran gauge and how he described it. >> you know, i think he's being a politician this is the way i will put it. obviously he is wrong as an intellectual matter. this is islamic extremism. but he's not an idiot. he knows that. what he is trying to say is i'm not going to give you that mantle. i'm to the going to allow you to wrap yourself, you know, with a mantle of islam. a land is interesting is i interviewed the king of jordan. and i asked him do you agree with the president. he said absolutely please don't call them islamic.
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they're not islam anything anyway. again the king of jordan knows that they come out of the muslim community. but what he is saying is let's delegitimize them. >> so i think it's a political game and i think it's an intelligent one. >> the king said a similar thing to me earlier when he came to washington. and what is interesting about that is that you are seeing, for a long time we have asked this colt ups and in terms of political leaders for muslim leaders to stand up and speak out both political leaders and religious leaders. it's beginning to happen and gaining some storm. sisi is leading that charge as well. >> it's beginning to happen. it's beginning to happen from clerics. it's leaders like sisi the king of jordan. but what's also important to notice. >> and on that issue even the president of iran. >> yes absolutely. what the iranians have actually always hated sunni fundamentalism. but what is interesting is you are also seeing the
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saudis come forward militarily. the uae come forward. and i think again it's important for them to get involved. and the easiest way for them to not be involved if the united states leaps towards says we'll take care of this problem, a lot of what happens in the world is people free ride on the united states. if the united states says we'll jump in there and take care of this everyone says great. we don't have to deal with the awkwardness of explaining to our people where we're doing this. they need to get in there. they need to explain to the people why this is their struggle. >> since i just came back from damascus tell me what we should do about -- >> look when hilt letter-- hitler invaded the soft yent union winston churchill said if hitler had invaded hell, i would have been glad to make an appliance with the devil. i think you have to say what is the greatest-- greater threat. there is no question the greater threat to the united states and the west is the isis and the rise of isis. >> brennan says it clapper says, it rice says. >> the logical core larry of
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that is you are therefore going to have to focus on that and not focus on unseating the a saad government. that has to take a backseat. >> rose: so why did kerry have to walk back his sense that we need to negotiate with a saad. was it because of pressure from sunni nations-- because his nation is sunni bus he is aloe white. >> i think it may be that -- allow quite think it is actually mostly that they got pressure from washington because the president had said had announced a policy of regime change as it were. i always thought that was a bad idea. the president shouldn't be opining on weather leaders should stay in poer with. i can do that as-- if he says assad shouldn't be president of syria he has to have a policy that does something about it and people will notice there is no policy backup to that. >> rose: but then you get into a problem with reformers all around the world that he didn't speakf--out that was the choice he had to make with president to mubarak in egypt.
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many people argued that he should have supported the reformers much more at the time. >> right. the challenge in syria is that what you have here is the third great minority regime in the middle east that is being unseated. so you have the first one was lebanon the cristiance. and you had this mass uprising, 15 year civil war. and they finally sorted it out. then iraq. minority sunni regime. we unseated. it's been a ten year civil regard an at the-- war and they are still shorting it out. essentially iraq has been ethnically cleansed in three different, syria is the most difficult because the minorities are the smallest. the alloiters are only 15% and yet they rule over this vast group of people. >> rose: and have passed it from family-- from within the family. >> from within the family. and yet the christians in syria as far as we can tell are still somewhat supportive of the allowite regime because they worry that a sunni majority government will come in and what happened to the christians of iraq will happen to the christians of
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syria. so it's going to be-- the stakes are very high. people who say why don't everybody go to geneva and negotiate this. the allowites know if they lose they will not be in syria, they will be ethnically cleansed or massacred. they are fighting foretheir life. in that circumstance i this think the whole idea that we can weave from the outside a few air strikes pressure nice conference, you know nice hot nell geneva and it will all be done i don't think so. this is-- going to sort itself out on the battlefield. >> rose: makes it interest for people who do what you and i do. >> the world has been more as if naturing fast moving and changing this last year than almost any period i can remember. >> rose: thank you for coming, great to see you. >> as always. >> the book is called in defense of a liberal education. fareed zakaria thanks for joining us. see you next time. >> for more on this program visit us yen line at pbs.org and charlie rose.com.
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this is "nightly busines sue herera. big miss. job growth in the private sector slows sharply last month and afte of weak data should investors be concerned? close the spigot as the drought worsens. unprecedented, statewide water restrictions and the impact on business could be big. hefty tolls. thousands of bridges are in need of repair but where's the money to fix them? all that and more tonight on "nightly business report" for wednesday, april 1st. >> good evening, everyone and welcome. we told you it could happen and today, it did. business slowed its pace of hiring in march. today's weak report from the private payroll processer, adp,
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