Jacob Shymanski

But the overall messaging in his self-written biography, The Son of Yellow Earth, which came up, by the way, before he came to power, so this was written on the way up, is that he embraced and accepted the reality of China, life among the peasants, life of the ordinary people.

And you can trace, quite amusingly, the timeline between the years when Xi Jinping is living in a cave, defecating in a wooden communal barrel, living without electricity and reading by lamplight and performing manual labor in the fields and eating peasant food,

And at the very same period, a young Donald Trump is hitting the party scene in Manhattan and making the social pages of the newspapers for the first time.

So you're talking about two men with six years between them.

Xi Jinping is the younger man, but a completely different set of experiences and worldview.

And...

The Xi Jinping message would be that he has been forged by discipline, acceptance, doggedness, hard work, astuteness, constant calculation, survival skills honed in very crude circumstances, has equipped him to defy any foreign challenge and to emerge victorious.

This book sounds fantastic to me.

And one thing it sounds like it does is that it goes beyond the what and answers the why.

But also, it connects the individual Xi Jinping to bigger ideas of, you know, the place of China in the global order, right?

You know, American, British, European, Chinese, we're all just humans after all.

It's kind of funny to see that these scandals often have a similar flavor.

Another really crucial element to good quality fiction

non-fiction and you mentioned it earlier and that's that it kind of has to feel like fiction not in the sense that it feels like a story but in the sense that it should have narrative flow an amateur writer might be tempted to write as clearly and simply as possible but

And that means writing for logic.

You know, this happened, which explains why that happened.

Meanwhile, this happened because that happened.

Therefore, this happened because that happened.

Then this happened, which led to that happening.

You know, that sort of thing.