The dictators' survival guide

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1:08The documentary home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service. In China, top officials go missing fairly often and when you've watched them for a while, you'll see these vanishings follow a pattern. A senior communist party member or a high ranking general fails to turn up at a state event. Then they miss an important meeting or a military ceremony. They simply evaporate from public view. Weeks later, there's a TURSE formal announcement on China's state media. So and so is under investigation, usually for corruption or abuse of power. A few months after that, another announcement. They've been found guilty in a secret trial. The official in question is never seen in public again. They've been purged.

2:15You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton and this is the Dictator's Survival Guide. I've been both fascinated and horrified by this aspect of autocratic regimes since I first began working as a journalist inside China in the early 2000s. China's leader, Xi Jinping, has been purging the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party since he came to power over a decade ago. But with strong man politics on the march, it feels as if there's never been a better time to try to understand the behavior of dictators and why we should pay attention to how they treat the people closest to them. In January this year, Xi Jinping carried out a purge that stood out from the rest. Because the latest top official to vanish is China's military chief, Zhong Yuxiang. Tonight, the stunning fall of China's most powerful general.

3:17China has purged the very top man with its military, with the exception of Xi Jinping himself. Even the most ardent China watchers were stunned. I had no idea this purge was coming. Zhang Yuxiang getting perched would be the last thing I expect frankly. Zhong Yuxiang was Xi's right hand man, they've known each other since childhood. Some joked the two were besties. For years, Zhong was the man just behind Xi at every military ceremony. He'd been promoted under Xi and kept his post long after the party's normally strict rules would have forced him to retire. He was seen as untouchable. Every morning, right after news of Zhang's detention surfaced, I checked my phone, my email and social media, and there was almost no concrete information to explain why. Just more informed gases from people whose analysis I trust. Beijing is a black box. And that's not just to keep the foreigners guessing, it's to keep the rest of the political system in line.

4:19Exactly what Zhang Yuxiang has done that is so unforgivable is a mystery. It's also possible that Zhang Yuxiang simply outlived his usefulness. Theories as to why Xi had turned on his friend Rn Leashed. He was planning a coup leaking nuclear secrets to the US that he'd just got too big for his boots. The timing was also odd. Zhang was in charge of one of the world's biggest militaries, which many believed could be preparing to invade neighboring Taiwan. Why would he be perched now? So here's our mystery. Xi Jinping is arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet. And he stayed at the top with a loyal wingman at his side, Zhang Yuxiang, until now what's changed? After 25 years of reporting on China, I've learned one thing. Patience is important. Details often emerge slowly.

5:20I start to scroll through my contacts, and first I turn to people who go in and out of China frequently, but are based outside the country, so are free to talk. Commentators are saying Zhang Yuxiang's detention is the most dramatic purge since the days of Mao Zedong, China's revolutionary leader. And that's where the story takes us next, back to the birth of Communist China. Many prominent families in mainland China get bragging rights by dating their histories to 1949 when the Communist seized power. And that includes Xi Jinping and the now-austed general, Zhang Yuxiang, their known as Prinslings, the sons of China's Communist revolutionaries. Their fathers were literally comrades in arms. Xi Jinping and Zhang Zongshun, the father of Zhang Yuxiang, they were fighting directly under Mao, fighting together to defeat the nationalists all across this giant swath of the country's northwest.

6:24Joseph Tarigian is the author of a book on the Xi family. Through his research, he's also learned about the Zhangs because the two families' histories are so intertwined. Zhang Yuxiang was born in 1950, Xi in 1953. Xi made an early move into politics he applied and was rejected from the Communist Party ten times before he was accepted, and then he shot up through the ranks. At the same time, Zhang was building a reputation for himself within China's military. Zhang Yuxiang became a war hero in 1984 during a battle against the Vietnamese, and his name was all over the country. He was portrayed as someone who was risking his life and suffering and even killing for the regime, an impeccable member of his generation because he was so dedicated to the party. He had broader interest too. This is somebody who likes to engage in arm wrestling contests as a young person who during the Cultural Revolution was seen to dribble around a basketball and ask anybody around him whether they would dare to challenge him.

7:37In the 1980s, when he was fighting against the Vietnamese, after fighting a battle, it would invite a bunch of journalists to meet with him, and he would talk to them about Mozart, talk to them about literature. Not an average run of the mill communist then. I wanted to know more. I am Drew Thompson. I am a senior fellow at the S. Roger Rottenham School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Drew was one of the few outside China who spent any significant time with Zhang. He was working for the US Department of Defense in 2012 when Zhang and several other Chinese generals visited the US as part of a week-long tour. He was supremely confident. He was curious. He was asking questions. But really, he was taking the measure of the Americans. He had a spring in his step and he was clearly enjoying himself. So I kind of attached myself to him. Whatever Drew saw in Zhang might have appealed to Xi Jinping too.

8:38Xi promoted him from his earliest days in office, and Zhang became central to Xi's efforts to completely modernize China's outdated military, so it could, as she put it, fight and win wars by 2027. When he became military chief, Zhang was always front and center at Big State occasions. Like this one, just last September, Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong-un looked on as China showed off its military prowess. Then, in December, Xi and Zhang Yossi astered side by side at another military ceremony. Shortly after, Zhang was gone. There's a well-traud and path for journalists investigating stories like this. Usually, someone leaks information. But China doesn't work like that, because most secrets lie behind the walls of one huge complex in the heart of Beijing.

9:39Zhang Nanhai is the traditional housing compound where China's top leaders live. It's right beside Tiananmen Square, where most of China's political events happened, like the 1989 pro-democracy protests. I bike past Zhang Nanhai regularly when I was a correspondent, but like almost every other ordinary person, I've never seen the mansions, the lakes, or the manicured gardens beyond its high walls. Here, the rules of the game are different. Occasionally, heads of state get a peak, like Donald Trump recently. These are the most beautiful roses. Anyones ever seen, I asked, the president. But it's a world where secrecy and paranoia reign. It is a rather lonely existence, at the highest level. Victor Shure is one of the most connected China experts out there. He's the director of the 21st century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. He and his team study how the top ranks of party officials interact with one another.

10:40Or not. For one member, for example, to meet with another member, it would have to be during official meetings, or they would have to seek approval from Xi Jinping himself. Because of course, for the top leaders of China, especially Xi himself, he wants to keep track of all the social interactions between top leaders on the civilian side, and especially top generals. He wants to ask that even all the electronic communication of these generals are recorded and watched very carefully by Xi himself. The result of all this suspicion, Joseph Tarigian says, is that even the people at the top of the party have little idea what's going on. But he says this isn't that unusual in dictatorships. When Michele Gorbachev was brought to Moscow by his patron Yuri Andropov, Gorbachev trying to figure out what a career in the party center is like, ask Tizol Mentor, Andropov to go to a picnic.

11:45And Andropov said, what do you mean? What are you talking about? And Gorbachev said, you know, just to hang out, have a conversation. And Andropov said, if we did something like that by the end of the day, there would be a report. On General Secretary Brezhnev's desk, and there would be many questions, you just don't understand what it's like yet to be here in Moscow. And Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs that this was the moment when he realized that the party center was a place without normal human emotion. No normal human emotion. What a thought. But Zhang N.C. were believed to be the exception to this rule. They had the closest relationship allowed within the system, said one Chinese commentator. But we now know that didn't save Zhang. Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from the global story. And I've been speaking to the massively popular US money guru, he says, if there's a financial crisis, it's on us.

12:51When you borrow own credit cards and take out a $1,200 car payment or a freaking range rover, you've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you listen. I reach out to someone I only make contact with rarely. Let's call her Madam X. She's the person I know with by far the closest ties to the top tiers of the party. She's elusive, but I really wanted to know what she thought about this purge. I sent her a message and I wait. There are definitely more questions than answers at this stage. It would help to look elsewhere to other countries, maybe other periods. With that, I wonder, should any light on she's thoughts or how dictators think or uncover the logic behind these purges?

13:53The study of dictators and how they operate is a growing field with books, courses, journal articles and conferences like this one at Queen Mary University here in East London. It's a two-day conference and I have the agenda in my hand. It's got talks on everything from Russian Transnational Authoritarianism to post-protest propaganda. The academics here study how dictatorships work. I think some of the stereotypes we have about autocracies are that they're led by individuals who behave irrationally or act like madmen. Ed Goldring is with the University of Melbourne. If we strip away some of these idiosyncrasies, then there are actually systematic behaviors and patterns that we can observe in dictatorships across the world. Ed and others believe we need to pay attention when dictators are booting people from their inner circles because these purges are key to understanding the balance of power in potentially dangerous autocracies.

14:56The argument goes that the people who are removed are often those who have softened a leader's power-hungry ideas like invading other countries and starting wars. When purges happen, those people are often replaced by yes men and that's when the danger increases for us all. Ed and his fellow academics believe there's almost a dictators' handbook. Those kinds of leaders use similar logic and rule number one. The point in allowing officials to resign gracefully purges need to be seen to have an effect. The best known example of that is of course Saddam Hussein in 1979. In the weeks before Saddam became a Raks new president, members of his own bath party had opposed his rise to power. And six days after Saddam takes office he of course has not forgotten this and so he implements this very performative purge of elites.

15:56He gathers party members together, then one official who has been tortured before the meeting gets up on the stage. He's forced to confess he plotted against Saddam. Saddam sits there very coolly and there are these famous images of him lighting a Cuban cigar as this performance is taking place. Saddam then has the names of other officials read out each one must stand, recite the party slogan and leave the room. So 68's are officials who take them at the room. 21 of them were executed and Saddam enlisted other party officials to conduct the executions themselves thereby making them complicit in this very performative purge. Is the ultimate I stakes political theater? Yeah, absolutely. Dictators rule number two choose your purge method well executions are risky those left behind in the inner circle might be so scared they'll be up next that they decide to pull off a coup.

17:04So death sentences could threaten the leader's survival. What other options are there? Long ago exile was a possibility no longer ed says. The Bolsheviks were quite a fan of that one in the 1920s but given the advancement of modern communication technologies, exiling someone might now mean that they could still be problematic just from another location. Exile is off the table execution is to and so leaders these days go for the Goldilocks outcome sending officials to prison. It's widely believed Zhang Yuzhia has been sent to Qin Chong in Beijing suburbs a famous luxury prison along with other top officials. When I was reporting from inside China, I discovered that VIP communist party prisoners get unusual perks like an extra apple and a glass of milk at breakfast carpets in their cells that are more like apartments with televisions. So that's what happens to the officials who've been purged. Japanese born researcher Jun Sedu is a leading authority on when purchase are most likely to happen.

18:13We have collected data on pargis that cover most of the Austritian leaders or leaders in Austritian regimes between 1918 to 2000. Jun's research has debunked the assumption that dictators choose to weed officials out of their inner circles when they're feeling weak. Instead the data she's collected shows that purges happen in the quiet moments when they feel they have enough leverage over their rivals to pounce. By looking at these global data, there are definitely certain patterns in terms of when they do pargis. I find that leaders can only parge when the pargis are unlikely to lead to successful coups. Okay, so to put it in simple terms, you found that the purges actually occur when a leader is feeling temporarily strong in comparison to the people around them.

19:14Exactly. So the window opportunity to podge without causing backlash, that is the key idea. So the rules of the dictators handbook reveal that purges must have an element of theater, whether it's a sudden disappearance or a sedom style confession. They tend to lean towards imprisonment and they happen before a storm is brewing when the leader feels the risks of eliminating others at the top are low. We'll take this and see how it applies to Jun's purge. I keep checking my messages for an answer from Madame X. After a few days, she tells me she'll share what she knows about Jiang Yossiah, but she's also consulting with a close friend. Someone, she says mysteriously, who is very well connected and lives near Zhongnan High. I can only wait. A few weeks after Jiang's purge and its Chinese New Year, the year of the horse is wrung in with the annual State TV's Festival Gala.

20:18One theory about Jiang's downfall is galloping across social media, corruption. Jiang, the rumors say, has been linked to a lingering scandal. Remember Xi Jinping's pledge to transform the military by next year so it can win wars? Chinese generals were given vast amounts of money to make that happen. Instead, there are accusations that they've been siphoning huge piles for themselves. leaked US intelligence says the modern missiles they were supposed to have purchased were reportedly found to be filled with water, not fuel. There were other equipment failings too. If true, it's not only a spectacular defense failure. It's also bad news for Xi's anti-corruption drive. When Xi Jinping delivers his New Year speech to the nation, he talks about how the army has undergone revolutionary toughening in the fight against corruption.

21:22It's a rare reference by Xi to the military's problems and by extension, his friends recent downfall. Victor Xi thinks, given the money being thrown at the military modernization drive, it's inevitable that some officials would break the rules. All the additional aircraft carriers, the ten destroyers, whatever the number that China builds every year and thousands of point thousands of missiles they're being built, as well as a lot of electronic equipment of course, is hundreds of billions of US dollars in military contracts a year. That is going to create a lot of opportunities for corruption. Corruption is baked into the Communist Party system, but under Xi, the drive to weed out corrupt officials has never been greater. The Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government that is in charge of discipline have punished more than seven million people since Xi Jinping first launched the anti-corruption campaign in late 2012.

22:26Olivia Chung is at King's College London. She's been studying how she operates for years and she says under him the entire concept of corruption has expanded. Anti-corruption is not only a matter of avoiding bribery or not saying bad things about Xi Jinping. It is about loyalty to Xi Jinping, loyalty implementing his policy line and also making sure that Xi Jinping is informed at the right time, at the right frequency, and because of this much widened definition. This requires a lot of political judgment that isn't black and white. It's not obvious. So could even the long-time Communist Conrad Zhang Yossiya have put a foot wrong in this complicated party system? I don't think we can rule it out. March arrives and in the great hall of the people, it's the start of China's annual parliament session.

23:28By then, the murmurs around Zhang Yossiya's demise have shifted to another explanation, which talk of a power struggle. Joseph Turigian says Zhang's big personality might have landed him in trouble. It's wonderful to be close to the top leader. It's also extremely dangerous. Now, when you are a powerful person and you believe that you have the trust of the top leader, it's easy for you to become overconfident. If you're seen to be taking advantage of that kind of relationship, then you can really get in trouble. But is this explanation really enough for Xi to purge the man he's known since childhood? For a long time, these competing theories, corruption or a personality clash are all we have to go on. So the conversation shifts from what Zhang might have done wrong to the strange timing of it all. Xi has a big political date on the calendar. In the autumn of 2027, he's expected to enter an unprecedented fourth turn.

24:35He's a leader for life, most say, and he hasn't indicated any successors. And so the circle around him is shrinking. Nobody is safe. And this is happening at a key strategic moment, too. 2027 is also the year that US admirals argued China would be powerful enough to invade Taiwan. Some even argue that Zhang had either pushed for or tried to hold Xi back from military action, though the chances of an immediate invasion are dimming. Victor Scher. Right now, it doesn't look very likely because there are no commanders at the highest level. It is astonishing what's happening. China's Central Military Commission has been hollowed out from seven to just two members, Xi Jinping and one other general. Have you ever seen that happen in Chinese politics before? We've never seen the CMC with just two people in it. That's very, very unusual.

25:38Even if there's no immediate Taiwan invasion, the Chinese military is becoming much more assertive from the Arctic down to the South China Sea. And ultimately, that's why these purges and the expulsion of Zhang Yossiah matters to all of us far beyond Zhongnanhai. As we heard earlier from the people who study purges, when a dictator begins to isolate himself, filling his inner circle with yes-men, that's when the danger of global military aggression increases. Even the most experienced China watchers have different views on what led to Zhang Yossiah's downfall. And then, word from the top or near the top, I should say, Madame X reaches out. She's spoken to her friend, the one who lives near the Communist leader's official compound, Zhongnanhai. We're not using her real voice. My friend knows what happened to Zhang, another general who had been detained in a purge last year.

26:41Miao Hui had been caught up in a huge corruption scandal surrounding weapons that was worth billions. And Miao had handed evidence that Zhang was actively involved too. So that same scandal I mentioned before, that one with missiles filled with water, I asked Madame X if she thought she was genuinely trying to eradicate corruption from China to make the country better as a whole. Her answer was blunt. No, that's not the way she thinks. He thinks he's the emperor of China. He thinks the whole country belongs to him and his family. If someone does anything bad or steals money from the government, she feels they are stealing money from him. He is the emperor and this is his empire. Whether Madame X has the whole story or not, it's clear that Xi's empire might not be shaping up the way he intended. As some have joked, there are now more senior military officials inside the luxury Qin Chang prison than serving at the top of the Chinese military.

27:51Xi seems to be following the pattern the survival guide of strong man leaders before him using the same logic with the same brutal outcomes. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. The dictator's survival guide was presented by me, Celia Hatton. The producer was Adele Armstrong and the editor was Penny Murphy. Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from the Global Story and I've been speaking to the massively popular US money guru who says if there's a financial crisis, it's on us. When you borrow own credit cards and take out a $1,200 car payment or a freaking range rover, you've destroyed your life not the president. For the full interview, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.