Name: Has Xi Jinping Unified His Own Enemies? | Robert Suettinger
Uploaded: 2026-03-16T17:48:25.000Z
Description: To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”

“There’s no question of the fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.

Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from the CCP’s military brass, on the heels of earlier purges last year. Now, only two of the originally seven members of the Central Military Commission remain. One of them is Xi himself; the other one, General Zhang Shengmin, is a political commander and has, like Xi, no combat experience.

After the January purges, Xi issued an order to the military demanding that everyone acknowledge him as the head of the military commission. “The silence from all those military commands has been deafening and has been noticed by everybody,” Suettinger says.

In the Chinese Communist Party itself, Xi is also facing trouble.

The CCP is not a monolithic party, he told me, but a complex entity with many competing factions: “There’s a Shanghai group, there’s a Shandong group, there’s a Shaanxi group, and they all don’t like each other,” Suettinger says.

Suettinger believes that Xi’s many purges have unified opposition against him not only in the military but also within the Communist Party. “Xi is hated by almost everybody in China,” he said.

Another reason the cracks in the system, as he put it, are beginning to be more evident, is that the Chinese economy hasn’t been doing well in many years: “The Chinese people are very unhappy that their wealth opportunities are disappearing. Graduates coming out of colleges are not able to find good jobs. People who have good jobs are losing them. People who are operating in the gig economy are losing their jobs. The farmers don’t have anything to do when they go back home.”

People outside of China don’t usually know how poor vast numbers of Chinese citizens still are, Suettinger told me. China’s Premier Li Keqiang himself stated in May 2020 during a press conference that 600 million people live below the poverty line and don’t even earn enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.

Where is China’s totalitarian system headed? The system, Suettinger argued, is way more fragile than it looks. “It is brittle, and when it breaks, it tends to break hard, and it tends to melt in ways that are not predictable,” he said.

Notably, the CCP has not come out to meaningfully support its longtime ally, Iran. The CCP has long utilized Iran to distract America and keep its focus on the Middle East, Suettinger says, but now, to Beijing’s chagrin, America is effectively neutralizing this longtime CCP proxy.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Robert Suettinger, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Congratulations on your incredible book, The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer. I have to ask you right away, we’ve had the U.S. engage in two decapitation strikes against major allies of the Chinese Communist Party, Venezuela and most recently, Iran. What is the impact of that on the Chinese Communist Party leadership?

I think it’s probably a matter of considerable concern and discussion and worry that they may have been wrong about Trump all along and that there is more to his policies than they had given him credit for. I think that there has been a level of shock that the United States has not only been able to, but willing to engage in these kinds of operational matters, military on-the-ground matters, against major enemies of ours and friends of theirs that has probably provided them with a lot of cause for concern. What they’re going to do about it, I think, is very difficult to say, but it is going to be a major topic of conversation in the hallways at the National People’s Congress, in the back rooms of Zhongnanhai, and certainly in the discussions that go on within China. Very great concern.

Between these two countries, it’s about 25 to 30 percent of China’s oil imports. Seems kind of like a potential sea change to their reality, and they need that energy badly.

That’s true. I mean, I think they can probably make up a good deal of it from Russia. And I’m certain that the Russians are going to be happy to have the opportunity to provide that oil because it’s been decreasing, I think, in terms of their own income. So that will be something that will maybe breathe new life into a relationship that seems to have been fading in the last few months. As the war has continued to drag on, as Wang Yi, the foreign minister of China, has met with Ukrainian officials and talked about improving relations, I think Russia has been quite unhappy, or Putin has been quite unhappy.

So I think there will be some conversations that will go on. I don’t know how much of a hardship the immediate drop-off in uranium, on top of Venezuelan oil sales to China, will be. But it certainly will have an unwelcome effect on an economy that is already struggling. The Chinese economy is kind of in deep trouble, and a shortage of oil is not going to help.

Well, I can’t help but notice that China hasn’t been particularly supportive in really any meaningful way since these strikes to these two ostensibly important allies? I mean, they’re still delivering, I think, to Iran some of their weapons of war and things like this, but there hasn’t been a sea change. There hasn’t been really any meaningful support that I can see or change in that. How do you see that?

It’s sort of a matter of, well, what do we do now? They’ve been expecting, I think, probably, that the United States was going to be bogged down in these different rearrangements of a strategic nature and that therefore they could continue to make money and keep the loose grouping expected to provide support to Hamas and Hezbollah and some of these other troublemakers in the Gulf, and that certainly the Venezuelan oil situation is going to be a change in how they go about their policies in South America and Central America. So they’ve got to do some rethinking.

And at this point, it’s hard to know who’s going to be involved in that process. Wang Yi has been there forever. I don’t think he’s had a new idea in quite a long time. Xi Jinping is distracted by his own problems, probably, and doesn’t necessarily have a key in his own ideology as to what do we do now against an America that suddenly looks stronger and more competent. There are going to be some deep conversations, I’m sure, in Beijing about how to handle this.

One more thing about Iran. I’ve argued for years that part of the CCP’s kind of, I would call it, utilitarian usage of Iran, okay, has been to distract America, to keep the American gaze on the Middle East and the instability there and the problems over there, as opposed to casting that gaze towards the Pacific and actually dealing with their biggest adversary. Your thoughts?

I agree with that entirely. I started working in the White House when there were great concerns about the shipment of weapons of mass destruction and various kinds of steel, miraging steel or something like that, that was going to Iran at very sensitive times. And so this has been a concern of theirs all along. They’ve been happy to rearm Iran, and there was a concern, I think maybe a very strong concern in the United States government about what kinds of missiles are going to be provided to Iran that they could use in local conflicts. We haven’t seen any of the world that are adamantly opposed to the United States and use them to their advantage and to keep the eyes off of the problems in East Asia. They’re, of course, of more immediate concern to them.

You mentioned Xi Jinping’s problems, and this is something that we’ve written and opined about a lot at The Epoch Times. Xi has recently purged the top military brass. There are only two out of seven left in the leadership, and one of them is him, which is just kind of a shocking change, I think unprecedented in the history of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. And you’re someone who could actually opine on this. I think it’s unprecedented in the history of the CCP change. So what are Xi Jinping’s problems in your view?

His immediate problem and probably his most serious problem is how one from the position of chairman of the Central Military Commission seized more careful control of the operations and movements of the People’s Liberation Army [PLA]. They had a system that was in place that did that when they had seven people on the Central Military Commission and they covered all the bases. Now it’s down to two, and the one that is the other one, and neither of the people that are at the head of the Central Military Commission now, either Xi Jinping or Zhang Shengmin, who is the surviving vice-chairman, are really combat commanders.

So if they’re going to engage in any kind of kinetic military activity, they’re going to have to have some people in there who know more about it than those two guys do. So it’s a handicap. I don’t think it’s an impediment to taking action if they see the absolute need to do so. But it’s a roadblock. It’s a problem. And it’s part of Xi Jinping’s persona that is somehow now incomplete.

The Chinese have a term called xi, which is a sort of military bearing, military power, military influence, all rolled into one word. When you become locked in these kinds of battles as to who’s in charge of whom and who gets to appoint whom, it doesn’t add to your overall levels of power. So he now needs to come back if he is to regain his former stature within the People’s Liberation Army. He’s going to have to come back and get them to be more obedient and more responsive to his command.

Right now, there seems to be, I mean, they’ve given out an order after the purges of the two generals in January. They put out a public order saying all military units must respond by supporting the military commission’s action with respect to these two generals and supporting the notion that Xi Jinping is the core and that he is the head of the, and the chairman of the military commission and always should be. The silence from all those military commands has been deafening and has been noticed by everybody. The military is just sort of sitting back and saying, well, what else you got? You know, how are we doing here?

There is a great deal of stress, I think, at the upper levels of the People’s Liberation Army about what it is that Xi Jinping really wants us to do. Our duty is to support the party, to support the people, and to preserve our national security. We don’t know what some of these orders are going to bring about. We want to wait and see until we’re more confident that Xi Jinping is actually fully in control of himself as well as of the military chain of command before we sort of lean forward and say, oh yeah, boss, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that. So there’s a level of distrust on both sides that is interesting.

But some people describe Xi Jinping as the paramount leader, and you’re talking about some kind of crisis of confidence. That is, well, from everything, I guess we both know about the Chinese Communist Party, that is a very difficult situation for them, I think.

It brings up the question of how control is exercised and how power is exercised within that system. And that’s not an easy question to answer because we simply don’t, and certainly from outside, I used to be inside the government, but even then we didn’t know. When the chairman of the military commission wants an order obeyed, how does he get that done? I mean, I’m certain there’s an expectation that he can just turn to one of his vice chairmen and say, do this, do that, purge them, or move this unit over there.

But somehow or another, that system doesn’t seem to be working very well. There are military units that seem to be operating somewhat independently, and there are commands that have been given to the military that have been disobeyed. The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the newspaper, made it very clear that it is the response expected of every military unit to say, yes, it was right to arrest those two journalists. That hasn’t happened. And that comes down to a perception on the part of some people that there’s disobedience within the military high command.

And that messaging is so important to how this whole system functions. This is something, actually, you talk about in your incredible book. Of course, your book is about Hu Yaobang. And I’m going to get you in a moment to explain to me who he was, because I think many people watching might not even know. Fascinating character. But you describe in there the nature of his purge, okay, and how the party elders, in the process of purging him, broke a lot of these, let’s call them unwritten rules of how things work, right? And you brought some very interesting new material into the whole picture that I wasn’t remotely aware of.

But it reminded me of our own analysis of what Xi Jinping has done recently through his purges, breaking all sorts of unwritten rules, and in a sense, isolating himself. Basically, no one really knows what he’s going to do next. I mean, that’s the sense that that’s our analysis, right? Is there some sort of comparison to be made here?

It is certainly so. The regime has always been, since the time of Mao, based upon power, personal power. It has rules and regulations. It has protocols. It has operational methodologies and so forth. But at the end of the proverbial day, it’s about who has power and how he exercises it. Mao did it in some ways. Mao used ideology, used his personal charisma. He used skullduggery and plotting, and he used Kang Sheng, for example, as his dark force that he used to get the goods on everybody. All of those are still in play, and Xi Jinping is happy to use them.

Just please clarify, what is the dark force exactly?

The dark force is that nobody’s safe. If I dislike you and I take it into my mind that you aren’t helpful to the cause, you’re going to disappear. And even Mao, was not as free with using those kinds of mechanisms as Xi Jinping seems to think he can. I mean, he arrested Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli using non-military party-run and government-run forces.

These are the two generals that were recently asked to step down from the top military commission, just again for the benefit of our viewers. Please continue.

And both of them were very influential and were, as far as we could tell, fairly popular with the troops. And it had to be Xi Jinping who gave the order, probably through Cai Qi, the guy that is in charge of the secret police. It was the secret police in the Ministry of Public Security and in the party’s general office that, according to the information that has become available through the rumor mill, that did that arrest, it wasn’t the military police. It wasn’t the Central Military Discipline Inspection Commission.

But it was people that Xi Jinping knew he could depend upon to get the job done cleanly and get them off the stage. So they’ve disappeared, and they’ve been gone for a month. No word has been heard from them. There was a rumor that indicated that a lot of people thought they’d already been killed. The regime has gone to some lengths to dispel that rumor, but it’s still out there.

So Xi has taken some fairly drastic steps to correct his image problem. Unfortunately for him, those steps have not seemed to work; there’s not this overwhelming support. Oh, Chairman Xi, you’re a wonderful man. We’re so happy that you’re in charge of us. Everybody’s just sort of sitting back and saying, well, what are you going to do next?

I liked how you said the silence was deafening because that silence is unbelievably important messaging that might not be noticed by someone who’s not initiated into how the system works. And this is something actually, reading your book, it gave me a newfound appreciation for your own understanding of how the mind of the CCP, like how this whole, I’ll just say, twisted system actually works, right? Because I think this is lost on a lot of people.

Another thing I wanted to mention, as you were talking about the rumor mill, right, is the unbelievable value of, let’s call it, you know, the Chinese diaspora YouTube, or, you know, just basically all sorts of pundits, really, because everything that officially comes out from China is propaganda, whether it’s statistics or anything else; I think hopefully most of our viewers are completely aware of that aspect. You can kind of, you have to kind of read the tea leaves, but you have to understand that it has a purpose, right? First and foremost, it’s not actual information for its own sake.

But then you have this whole kind of rumor mill, slash, you know, people getting in some cases, like, very fascinating information that’s not publicly available and revealing it. And in many cases, you just don’t really know. But then there are certain people, certain users, who seem to be right on the money a lot more often, and you tend to follow them. Tell me a bit about this space, because just like studying, you know, at Epoch, we’ve been studying, you know, trying to explain to America how this whole thing works, what’s really happening.

We were able to, for example, predict that Zhu Yongkang, one of the most powerful people back in the day, was going to get deposed. And no one saw that, but we saw it precisely through looking through these sorts of networks and reading the tea leaves and so forth. So how do you use this system to try to understand and how important is it in understanding what’s really going on over there?

Well, I have, even going back to my days as a government analyst, I found it very useful to kind of keep some feelers out, to hear what’s called the small alleyway gossip. And when Hong Kong was flourishing, there were several political magazines. They were sometimes called political literature just because they you know, you didn’t know whether it was true or not. But they sometimes had some fairly fantastic stories. But other times they had it right. And information circulates within China because it’s such a closed system. The rumor mill becomes more important for getting information.

And even among some of the things that I discovered as I was doing my research was that even inside the system, the people that were supposedly at the center didn’t really know what was going on and were not aware of some of the things that actually turned out happening to them. So it’s a system that prizes its secretiveness; it’s a system that relies on the control of information in order to control people. So when you have these diaspora media, they are able to find sources that are willing to talk. And what kinds of controls they exercise over them, what kinds of verification methodologies they use, I don’t know.

And I evaluate this information on the basis of whether or not it makes sense from what I know from elsewhere. I mean, we can read the People’s Daily every day, and we can see that there was a Politburo meeting, and we can get, you know, the kind of the on-the-ground pictures of people sitting there, you know, ramrod straight and listening to Xi Jinping mumble on. But what actually was happening there might come from somebody who got a report from inside. Is it reliable? Do you want to go to the president and say, here’s what’s going on in China, boss, I know what’s going on? No. But does it matter? Yes.

And one of the reasons that it matters is because it’s now more widely received inside the PRC than it used to be. The Great Firewall is, in some ways, a myth and is certainly not without holes or leaks. And so, I think people are taking advantage of that to try and find out, well, what does this really mean? For analysts to ignore that information because it’s in Chinese is no longer appropriate. You can get that stuff translated. You can transcribe that guy’s commentary, put it through your computer, and five minutes later you’ve got a transcript.

AI has been invaluable. I wish I’d had it early on in my research for this book. But the fact of the matter is that language is no longer a complete obstacle to understanding what’s being said. And some of these people, some of these commentators, are very sophisticated. They have staff that do research for them. They know who was the commander of this unit and that unit. They know who has been the vice chairman of this or the vice minister of that. And they bring that to bear on their analysis, and it gives it a certain degree of credibility that it might not otherwise have.

These are just not rumors that somebody picked up out of the street or made up with an AI program. They are information that needs to be better understood. I wish I could get somebody to do more studies of that stuff. But<a href="http://x.com"> x.com</a> has now become a goldmine for information about China because many people inside the PRC are using it to post their opinions. And those opinions are of value, and we need to pay attention.

Two things. I’m going to definitely ask you about the firewall being a myth. I don’t believe it’s a myth because I know we have, we use firewall-busting technology to painstakingly help Chinese to kind of read The Epoch Times, and frankly, just the general internet at all. But I’m going to get your comment on that. But just as a little shout-out, one of these commentators, as an example that we both discussed before we started today, was Lei’s Real Talk. This is one that also, you said you’re getting more interest in that channel. I’m also getting more interest in that channel. She’s done some great analysis, right? And that’s just kind of an example of the type of, I guess we’d call it, right, diaspora.

The U.S. government analytical community has always been very confident in their judgments, and when somebody doesn’t have access to the classified data that they have, they tend to just sort of dismiss them as being just rumor mongers. Well, some of the rumor mongers have been right in the past, and some of them are right now, and we ought not to be so quick to dismiss them because—and I don’t know any longer. I no longer have any clearances and don’t want them. I don’t know whether the information that they’re getting is reliable enough for them to make these kinds of judgments or not. But the fact is they aren’t giving them out to the public.

And so those in the public who are interested in these kinds of issues—and there are many people who are and should be interested in Chinese politics—have no other alternative than to read this stuff and look at it and be informed by it. And there’s a community out there. They quote each other. They argue with each other. They fight with each other. And in the process, they air out the data. They’re getting to the truth. There’s no question that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago. And the process that has been undergone has been one that we don’t fully understand, but it’s there and visible.

And I can’t help but think there are people in the CCP right now at senior levels who are looking at Venezuela and looking at Iran, and they’re saying to Xi, you did this.

Right? And that’s not a good position for him to be in.

Well, one of the things that Xi has done, and you have to understand that this very complex party that is not monolithic, that there are varying opinions in different places, among different groups, among different, let’s call them factions. Although a faction is technically illegal, they still exist. So if you divide the leadership into a Xi faction, then there is a princeling faction, and then there is an elder faction that may be part of the princelings, but may not be.

There’s a Shanghai group, there’s a Shandong group, there’s a Shaanxi group, and they all don’t all like each other, and they don’t all agree that Xi Jinping is the best thing that’s ever happened to China. So they conspire and plot among themselves. And when there’s an opportunity to stick a knife in somebody’s back, oh, did I do that? And the answer is yes. They don’t all believe that Marxism-Leninism is and always will be what Xi Jinping says it is.

So it is a leadership that has historically—and I demonstrate this, I think, in the book—that has been, what’s the word, vociferous. It is prone to fissures and factions and breaks, and always has been. Mao had problems with this. Deng Xiaoping had problems with this. Xi Jinping has problems with it. We just haven’t been paying attention to them because it looked like he beat them, and he hasn’t.

Absolutely fascinating. And just two thoughts about this, about your view of the Great Firewall, because I can tell you it’s not a myth.

No, if I conveyed that it is, that was a mistake. It’s there and it’s powerful, but it’s breaking down. And technology is helping to break it down. There are ways to get through it. And I don’t know them because I don’t have to do this. But I think that information is getting out, and it is reliable information. It is information we should pay attention to because people are going to great lengths and great risks in some cases to get that information out.

You know, it’s something that I think a lot about because we’ve been using these various tools to help the Chinese basically hop that firewall for decades now, basically since it was stood up in the first place, essentially. And we started, we were big enough to do that. But we also have traffic that comes from outside the firewall, kind of to your point. There’s some, I would interpret this as being, you know, people that are above the firewall, too important to be subject to it in mass quantities actually coming to read The Epoch Times in Chinese, which I find fascinating.

Of course, it also makes perfect sense given everything we’ve just been talking about. They can’t even trust their own information, right? So sometimes it’s extremely helpful to go outside and see what everybody else is thinking outside of what was leaked to us or to perhaps some diaspora pundit or whatever, right? That itself is a fascinating issue.

And just on the topic of propaganda, and I don’t want to belabor it too much, one of the things that really comes through in your book to me is the incredible importance of propaganda as, I guess, a central feature of how this whole system functions, right, the censorship is one side; the propaganda is the other side, but the information control is, I don’t know, paramount, right?

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