Victor Shih

You know, if Xi Jinping expresses a preference over a policy direction, that is a direction you have to go toward no matter what.

Because if he observes that you're dragging your feet or that you're pursuing a slightly different agenda, you will be perched.

And we've seen cases of that.

Yeah.

So if you look at what he does day to day, he spends a lot of time in meetings.

Yeah.

And it's astonishing.

I mean there's no – this is one thing.

It's like there's the Chinese leadership.

They're not going to play golf three days out of a week.

I mean Xi Jinping and his colleagues are having meetings about policies.

almost every, you know, like 270 days out of the year.

So I've talked to some people who have lectured, you know, to the Politburo.

I think they're somewhat real because they don't know exactly what questions will be asked.

Like I'm talking about the speakers, right?

So I think the, you know, Xi Jinping and other leaders, they know what the speaker would say in the main remarks.

But then there's a Q&A portion of it, which actually is real.

Like it's not staged.

So that's pretty scary.

You know, if you're some professor, Xi Jinping asks you to come in and ask you a bunch of random questions.