Dwarkesh Hirani

And many of these individuals, Xi himself, went through periods where the party had extraordinary control over people's life during the Cultural Revolution and so forth.

And they personally and their families suffered as a result of this.

Yeah.

and they're educated people.

Many of them had been in industry, right?

These are not naive people.

So maybe I'm just projecting too much of my Western bias here, but what is the reason that they think it's so crucial that, uh,

You know, the banks are run by the party and the AI is run by the party and nothing escapes the party state.

What is the main difference between him and Stalin in the sort of political maneuvering sense?

Because all of this sounds very similar to—

And if you read the Stalin biography, so many of the – in the early part –

Half the people in the Politburo are later going to end up in the gulags, and then many of the people in the Politburo later have been to the gulag.

I wonder if there's a Trotsky-analogous person in the story, somebody who was a flamboyant speechmaker.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that would be really interesting, actually.

Let's move on to another topic I know you study deeply, which is the –

local government debt situation.

Sure.

What is the newest there?

What is your sense of the situation now?