I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
That's Stephen Kotkin, the great Russia scholar and Stalin bagger for.
I sat down with him and the great China scholar,
Orville Schell, for a conversation about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin,
what binds them together, what kind of world they want,
what their partnership means for US foreign policy.
We taped our interview on June 16th and covered so much ground that we decided to bring it to you in two parts.
In this, the second half of our conversation,
we explore how these two leaders see the West and how that worldview will reshape geopolitics.
Orville, I want to talk more about the Cultural Revolution and the great tragedies of Mao's era.
The question of why Xi Jinping treats that history the way he does still seems like kind of a puzzle to me,
given his own personal experience.
In power,
he's tried to scrub that history and really gone out of his way to prevent criticism of Mao and that era.
How does he see that history and why does he feel the need to treat it the way he does?
Well, it's interesting, isn't it, that despite the fact that he comes from a family,
that was really laid low by the Maoist revolution and humiliated, that he still lionizes Mao.
And I think here this gets back to this idea of the sort of yearning for a restoration of greatness.
You know,
the first thing Xi Jinping did when he came to power in 2012 was he took the entire Politburo across Tiananmen Square to an exhibit in the National Museum that was called China's rejuvenation.