PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: One thing I have to do is economically take on China. Because China has been ripping us off for many years.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH:  In American foreign policy, perhaps no relationship is more important or complex than the one between the United States and China.

VICTOR GAO: China is a peer country with the United States today.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: FRONTLINE’s new documentary China, the US, and the Rise of Xi Jinping, examines China’s rise to economic prominence and it investigates China’s policies under President Xi.

LI YUAN: …for many Chinese, Xi Jinping is a name you cannot say.

EDWARD WONG: …He has chosen to go down the route of consolidating power.

ORVILLE SCHELL: You can read his speeches and it’s all there…

RANEY ARONSON-RATH:  Correspondent and director Martin Smith joins me to talk about his newest documentary.

MARTIN SMITH: China is kind of the main event in

my view.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Martin Smith, thank you so much for joining me on The Dispatch.

MARTIN SMITH: Oh, it’s very good to be here.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, let’s talk about the first conversations you and I had about China and what led you on this journey over the last year and a half.

MARTIN SMITH: You know, when we began the project, China was rising in terms of concern over worsening U S relations. I think it was January of 2023 that this odd thing appeared in the sky. This traveled over the U. S. over the course of a week and it was determined that this was potentially a spy balloon, and that raised a lot of concern. There was a lot of debate, if you remember. Should we shoot it down? Oh, no, we shouldn’t shoot it down because it’ll fall on somebody’s head. And it was determined that it was the size of two school buses of cargo underneath a huge balloon. The Chinese were pretty silent, if I recall initially about what was going on. Then they began to deny that it was a spy balloon. The U. S. came out and said, no, it’s definitely surveillance gear in there, and it wasn’t until it was over just off of Myrtle Beach on the East Coast that it was shot down.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right, right. And then we started to talk about the fact that we really haven’t done a big U. S.-China film, right, in the era in which we’ve been working together and you wanted to dive into that. So take me to the next moment. You’re thinking about – well, how would you report on China? And what happened?

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah, so the idea was to take this incident, which had caused a huge uproar in China and in the U. S. and, uh, trips that had been set up by, uh, Secretary of State Blinken and other cabinet secretaries to go to China were all canceled, and the relationship was going south very fast. And so I thought, well, this is a time when we need to be listening to each other. And I knew that I could line up a number of interviews with U. S. based experts on China. And I thought that I had a chance, given this moment and the sensitivity of everything, that the Chinese would want to respond to the kinds of queries and criticisms. And so I arranged to go to China, and I spent three to four weeks going around talking with, in some cases, former officials and a number of academics. And I said, look, I want to talk about the difficult issues.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. Right.

MARTIN SMITH: …and I want your responses.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And what happened?

MARTIN SMITH: So, I was only there on a business visa. So, I couldn’t film. You have to have what’s called a J-2 visa that allows you to film. And so I came back to the U. S. and immediately met with the consulate in New York and put in an application for me, my cameraman, my fellow producer, Marcela Gaviria. And I had some meetings with the people at the consulate. After a number of meetings, our application sat at the consulate, I say for about four months. And I’d say, well, at some point, you know, we have to cut bait here. And so we did. And then the program had to take a different shape. I then tried to get people that had agreed to do zoom interviews so that I wouldn’t have to go to China and I could still talk to people, but as the program changed and it looked like we were going to focus more on Xi Jinping, the president, people got cold feet and people all dropped out.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, tell me why the shift to Xi? You and I spoke at length about this. And then of course, you really told the story of his life. So why was that important to you to tell his story?

MARTIN SMITH: Well, he’s the leader of our chief global rival, and I think a lot about him is not understood. We thought it was important for people to understand who he is, where he came from, what made him into the man he is.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Interesting that once you started to say that you were going to be reporting on Xi, you got a big response. A lot of people pulled out of interviews. Talk to me about what happened.

MARTIN SMITH: You know, a full understanding of this, I’m not sure is easy to get your head around. But there is this sort of unwritten code that you don’t talk about him. At one point in the documentary a Chinese woman – who grew up in China–  now a columnist for the New York Times –  said, you just don’t say his name. That’s not allowed. Well, we had it there boldly in the title, The Rise of Xi Jinping, and that was verboten.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, you decided to tell the history through his story. So, of course, you tell the story of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, but you told it in a particular way. Talk about how you decided to tell the story through his lens.

MARTIN SMITH: Well, he traverses, having been born in 1953, just four years after Mao’s revolution defeated, the U. S.-backed government there. So, his life and the life of China, post revolution, parallel one another. So, it seemed a good idea to tell the history of China, which people want to know about since that time through the eyes of this man as a young boy, as a teenager, throughout his career. It just matches the same timeline.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Tell us about his personal story, what happened to his father and, and his own experience.

MARTIN SMITH: So, in the fifties, when he’s growing up, he’s a privileged youth because his father had fought alongside Mao. And after the revolution became a top official in the government, the communist government. But as it turned out, by 1962, Mao had turned on many of his friends and, and compatriots, including Xi’s father. Uh, and he sent Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun off to work in a factory and then incarcerated him for eight years. All of this while, Xi is a is a young lad. And then there was this phenomenon of sending young boys off to work and do hard labor in the countryside because Mao somehow determined that that would be good for them, and good for the country. And so, uh, Xi, Xi Jinping, at the age of 15 became a sent down youth sent to the countryside, worked in a very poor province, lived in the back of a cave, um, where he was sent. There were a lot of cave homes. And even before he was sent down, I should mention that he was subjected to the same humiliations that his father was. He was made to wear a dunce cap. It’s rather incredible. And he was denounced by his own mother And it was such a hard time that his own half sister committed suicide because of the, because of the strain.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, how does he then become such a believer in the cause?

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah, well, there was no other person to follow. And if you weren’t a believer in the party, if you weren’t a believer in Mao, you were pretty much closed out of any advancement. And I think Xi grasped this and realized that he had to be redder than red, as the expression goes. And so he, to this day– and in interviews, and we have a rare clip in the film where he says it was good for me. Um, you know, it was a time when I was working in the countryside, a reformation for me. So, you know, China has not had the experience of Russia where they rejected Stalin at one point or another, and they’ve just embraced Mao. And even though up to 45 million people were killed as a result of Mao’s policies and purges, people that are wanting to get ahead, like the young Xi, embrace him. It’s just, it’s, it’s a remarkable thing. And, and as Orville Schell, who served as our consultant on the project and who is a, uh, esteemed expert on China said that, um, his experience there in the Cultural Revolution, uh, shaped him and that from that day on, the die was cast.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, I want to talk about China in 2024. It’s completely unrecognizable in so many ways to those days, right?

MARTIN SMITH: Totally.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So how did things begin to change?

MARTIN SMITH: They began to change very quickly after Mao’s death in 1976. Uh, so he passes, and the man who emerges is Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping himself was twice purged under Mao. And he understood that in order for China’s economy to grow, you couldn’t just force people to do things that Mao was doing. They were disastrous policies under Mao. That you needed to open the country up to the West and you needed to introduce some element of capitalism and bang, China starts to grow by leaps and bounds through the rest of the seventies into the eighties and nineties. And you know,  I can remember traveling around China back in 2007, and I would land in these cities I’d never heard of, and they were all bigger than Los Angeles.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right.

MARTIN SMITH: So, the people… it unleashed the creativity. Certain freedoms are necessary for enterprises to get off the ground, and the government was tolerant, and it was, it was never a democracy, but by comparison with the Mao years, it was incredibly more open, and that led to China’s burgeoning growth.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. So then Xi… let’s talk about him emerging as a party leader.  Tell us what you know about that.

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah, he worked for many years, several decades in the provinces after he came out of the countryside, gaining a reputation for fighting corruption and he gets the notice of the party elders and they bring him into Shanghai where there had been this scandal over the stealing of pension funds. He’s there for a short bit and and cracks down and then they bring him to Beijing and they put him on the standing committee of the Politburo, which is, you know, at that time it was the top. It’s a handful of nine men and, um, he emerges as the sort of choice then over the next few years. This is–  we’re talking, 2008 2009 – as the heir apparent to taking over both the party and the presidency. So, Xi takes over China when it is at its peak, its economy is roaring along, it’s passing European economies, it’s becoming closer and closer to the U.S. in many regards, economically, and he inherits this and becomes the chairman of the Communist Party in 2012 and a few months later is made president. But since that time, and especially in recent years, China’s economy has not been doing so well. So it peaked at a time, uh, one could say when the West was in decline. Um, you know, they famously hosted the 2008 Olympics at the same time that the U. S. was descending into the global economic crisis that all began in the U. S., uh, in 2007, 2008. And so this was a time when the Chinese felt like, oh, our system works better than the one you have in the West.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, let’s talk about Xi’s vision. Can you just tell me what the so-called China dream is?

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah. Um,  it’s Xi’s vision for China’s reclaim of dominance in the region, and even beyond that with the Belt and Road Initiative into Africa and South America and beyond. But he has this core idea after becoming chairman of the Communist Party in 2012, that these regions that surround China, whether it be Tibet, or Xinjiang, the dream was that he was going to reclaim China at its, its grandest state, uh, as Orville Schell says in the program. And this involved aggressive moves in the South China Sea, where he was building islands off of coral reefs and putting runways for fighter jets and deep water harbors for warships and missile batteries on these what were coral reefs. It’s all part of this idea that China has to stay strong, can’t become like the Soviet Union and fall apart.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I know that you were able to report on the secret memo called document number nine. What is that and what does it reveal about Xi’s plans?

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah, it’s a remarkable document and Xi comes into power and he’s kind of like has this charm offensive and he goes around the neighborhoods, he pats kids on the heads, you know, like any politician would. He eats at a steam bun restaurant and all of this. Um, and you know, there’s always optimism in the West that maybe this new leader is going to be more moderate, more of a Gorbachev. Um, and then this document number nine surfaces, and in it, is a warning to party cadres, party officials across China to not adopt Western values, and we need to stick to the principles of Mao’s vision. And Xi Jinping is now the president and this comes out, the person who allegedly leaked it was sentenced to seven years in prison. But it is kind of their notion or his notion that somehow the West is out there to undermine China.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, what has Xi said publicly about it?

MARTIN SMITH: I don’t know of any comments by him publicly. There’s a lot of things that come out of the party that Xi hasn’t talked about. He’s never talked about Tiananmen Square, for instance. But I don’t know that he has owned document number nine, although it came out very close to the beginning of his rule in 2013. Um, and it was an instruction. It’s not something that would come out without him being behind it. And it, it comports with what Orville says is his hostility towards Western values. There’s no other way to see it.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Let’s just jump into the current day today. Talk to me about trade.

MARTIN SMITH: So, there had been growing concern under Bush and Obama, um, about China’s trade policies, that China was dumping products on the U. S. market that were under cost of production in order to grab market share, that China was stealing intellectual property. These were concerns, but nobody really raised it like Trump did. Trump went on the campaign trail and got elected in 2016 with this being a centerpiece of his campaign. And then he had advisors around him who were, you know, saying, we got to get tougher on China. They’re eating our lunch. They’re lying to us about this, that, and the other thing. Um, and they settle on some strict measures, among them tariffs, taxing imports into the United States, in some cases fairly high, that were meant to force the Chinese to play by the rules of the World Trade Organization, of all these other bodies, um, that govern the rules between countries and trade.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right, right. So where do you see things now? What are you thinking is going to happen?

MARTIN SMITH: We don’t know.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm hmm.

MARTIN SMITH: I mean, he’s coming back into office with a much more aggressive stance, just judging by his cabinet appointments and whatnot. So it’s hard to say. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, is saying, look, nobody wins in a trade war. Don’t do this.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Mm hmm.

MARTIN SMITH: Um, and Xi Jinping, he’s always saying to Biden, don’t mess with China. Don’t try to remodel our country. Don’t be so concerned about human rights or our adventures in the South China Sea or threats against Taiwan. And he’s saying the same thing about tariffs. He said, don’t do it. We’ll just move our exports somewhere else and our imports from America will, will source soybeans from Brazil instead of from the Midwest. Uh, so it’s hard to say what Trump is, is, um, going to be able to accomplish with this. We don’t know.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. And that they will be watching this space, obviously, and hopefully this time you’ll be able to report from China as well. But one of the questions on everybody’s mind is going to be Taiwan. What did you learn about Taiwan? I know you were able to travel to Taiwan as well.

MARTIN SMITH: Yeah, Taiwan. Um, and we were able to film in Taiwan because Taiwan is this sort of what they’ve termed a strategically ambiguous arrangement whereby we recognize their autonomy and China continues to threaten to take them over. China claims that Taiwan is rightfully theirs and that this is a domestic issue and that we should have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, the people of Taiwan through their elections have made it clear that they want to exercise the right of self determination. And this is a kind of a problem, as we say in the documentary, it’s festered ever since 1949 when Mao took over. The difference is that today, Xi Jinping is much more aggressive in his language and more aggressive in his military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait. And he’s, uh, said many times that we do not rule out the use of force and he’s ordered his military to get ready to fight, uh, and there are some estimates. that say we’re going to fight as early as 2027. There’s even others that say it might be sooner than that.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And what is the posture, would you say, or what are you hearing, about the Trump administration?

MARTIN SMITH: Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to imagine that he would stand by and allow this ally to fall. First of all, the sophisticated chips that are in your phone and in the microphone you’re using right now and in your car and in your toaster and in our military weaponry are made in Taiwan, and we’re slowly trying to take some of that production and move it into the U. S. But that takes a long time. So, uh, a war over Taiwan would cause a depression because it would take a lot of, uh, chip manufacturing offline. And that would be a very, very serious issue. So, we’ll be watching.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: We’ll be watching, right? And reporting on this, which is, you know, what we can do here. Thank you, Marty, so much for being on the Dispatch and for your entire team’s work on this.

MARTIN SMITH: Well, thank you for supporting our work over the years, Raney. It’s a privilege to do the work that we do for Frontline.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You can watch China, the US, and the Rise of Xi Jinping on frontline dot org, FRONTLINE’s YouTube Channel, and the PBS App.

This podcast was produced by Emily Pisacreta.

Jim Sullivan is our audio engineer.

Editorial support on this episode comes from Amy Rubin.

Lauren Ezell is our Senior Editor of Investigations.

Andrew Metz is our Managing Editor.

I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor in chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE.

Music in the episode is by Stellwagon Symphonette.

The FRONTLINE Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX.

Thanks for listening.