Eyck Freymann

Well, I mean, he's not a man who's given a whole lot of interviews.

So in his biography, you can read the tea leaves and come up with your own psychoanalytical profile.

We don't.

We do know that when he was – I mean, Joseph Terrigian, my former Hoover colleague, has a wonderful biography of his father.

And Joseph went to all of these former archives in the post-Soviet world.

But what you see is a portrait of a young man who was raised as much of a princeling as a princeling can be.

And he has everything ripped away from him.

He has everything ripped away.

And he's sent down to the countryside to be reeducated by pig farmers.

And his education is disrupted.

So he has to get essentially fake degrees later on.

And his sister kills herself because of the harassment.

This is a deeply traumatic moment.

And his conclusion is he's going to join the party, become redder than red.

But it's a deeply traumatic experience in his young life, which shows him that no matter how much security and status and fame you have,

It can come apart very quickly.

And I think what we know about him, Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, speaks beautiful Chinese and has spent time with him.

Rudd recalls in his book, you know, sitting with Xi Jinping by a bonfire and talking with him about the world and just being taken by how afraid he is of color revolutions and all these things that could tear China apart.

So I think if you're Xi Jinping and you look at this Taiwan question, you're deeply concerned

skeptical about your your forces when your generals say no we can do this i think um i think you look at this and you say there's a whole lot of ways that this could go wrong that the americans could use this issue uh against me and i think you are not in a hurry i think he does want to be the guy who gets it done but i think he's he's very happy to do this through a diplomatic solution