November 21, 2025 — In this week's episode of Around the World, hosts Dhruva Jaishankar and Rachel Rizzo speak with Neil Thomas, Chinese Politics Fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, who breaks down China's domestic politics and Xi Jinping's consolidation of power. Later on, Dhruva and Rachel discuss Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's recent visit to the White House and the global impact of Russian oil sanctions.
Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Sneak Peek
Neil Thomas: We already know what Xi wants to see in the plan. And the big takeaway there is that self-reliance in technology and building a complete industrial system remain the top priorities. So Xi is basically doubling down on his existing set of policy agendas around making China the world's innovation powerhouse.
Rachel Rizzo: Trump approved a major defense sales package to Saudi Arabia that includes future deliveries of F-35s. This is subject to Congress, obviously. 300 tanks. This is a really significant upgrade to Saudi's military capabilities and builds upon this $142 billion arms package that was announced during Trump's visit to Riyadh in May of this year.
Dhruva Jaishankar: After November 21st, let's see, I say three things. One, what is the impact on global energy prices, if at all?
Rachel Rizzo: Okay.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Second, what, if any, effect is this going to have on Russia's approach to the war? And then three, what does it mean, I think, the second order effects for US relations with China, India, Turkey, Europe, and others who are still to varying degrees dependent on sourcing Russian energy, oil and gas, particularly from Russia? And so how will it affect their relations?
Welcome to Around the World
Dhruva Jaishankar: Hi, I'm Dhruva Jaishankar.
Rachel Rizzo: And I'm Rachel Rizzo. Welcome to the Around the World podcast. Your essential guide to understanding the forces shaping our world today. Every week, we cut through the noise to bring you clear, insightful analysis of the most important developments in geopolitics.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Whether it's security challenges across Europe, power dynamics in Asia, domestic updates from the United States, or regional updates in Latin America or the Middle East, we make sure you're up to speed on what's happening and more importantly, why it matters.
Rachel Rizzo: Thanks for tuning in. And be sure to like and subscribe to the Around the World podcast on both Youtube and Spotify. We are now also on Apple Podcasts. And now onto the show.
Chinese Domestic Politics with Neil Thomas
Rachel Rizzo: Hey Dhruva, happy Friday.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Hi, Rachel.
Rachel Rizzo: How's your week?
Dhruva Jaishankar: Good, good. It's been busy. I just got back from India. We have a lot to talk about. I think in the show, we'll be discussing Chinese domestic politics, Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman's visit to Washington and US-Saudi relations.
Rachel Rizzo: Yep, big news.
Dhruva Jaishankar: And also the implications of Russian oil sanctions, which will kick in very soon. But we're very pleased to have our first guest on the show to talk China and Chinese domestic politics - Neil Thomas, who's a fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute. And before I turn to him, you know, it's surprising given how much China is a peer competitor of the United States and how much the world obsesses over American politics, how little I think there's a general understanding of Chinese domestic politics and how little attention it gets. So it's really great to have someone like Neil on the show with us to kind of disentangle and decipher what's happening there. So Neil, welcome. Maybe start by talking us through some recent developments. We had the fourth plenum held in Beijing in October just a few weeks ago. Tell us what that is, why it's significant, and what does it tell us about Chinese Communist Party politics.
Neil Thomas: First of all, thanks for having me, Dhruva and Rachel. It's an honor to be the first guest and I'll try to live up to the spirit of the podcast. And hopefully you invite many more people on and it's not a failed experiment.
Rachel Rizzo: Yeah, it all depends on you.
Neil Thomas: Yeah, the pressure's on. In terms of the fourth plenum, these plenums which happen roughly once a year are important because they are gatherings of the Communist Party's central committee, which if you include voting and non-voting members, is the top roughly 370 odd figures in the Communist Party. And so they meet to approve policies and personnel decisions that have already been negotiated by a much smaller inner circle of she's top advisors beforehand.
Dhruva Jaishankar: That's the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee, correct? I mean that would be the smaller groupings.
Neil Thomas: Yeah, so the Politburo was the top was 24, now 23 people. We'll get into some of the purges and the standing committee is the top seven leaders. They meet roughly every month and every week respectively. But even then there's informal consultations with smaller circles, different people that happen, or we suspect that don't rise to the level of being shared publicly with us analysts sitting not just in DC, but also in China itself. We've got to remember how opaque the system is to many of the people who end up being purged. I mean, they might have thought they understood Chinese elite politics, but they clearly didn't. So that's some comfort for us analysts sitting here overseas.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So the recent plan and what was so significant about it specifically, what was expected to pass, and what should people have noticed?
Neil Thomas: I think there's three big things to notice from the recent plenum. The first was the proposals it published for China's next five-year plan that will be issued in March. And it's just going to set the top-level priorities for economic development until 2030. So that's a big deal in itself. So we already know what Xi wants to see in the plan. And the big takeaway there is that self-reliance in technology and building a complete industrial system remain the top priorities. So Xi is basically doubling down on his existing set of policy agendas around making China the world's innovation powerhouse and ensuring that it can dominate global supply chains in future and emerging industries in the same way it has done for say new energy vehicles, new energy batteries, solar power. So these trade wars that we've seen developing, not just with the United States, but with Europe and other countries around industrial capacity and kind of hollowing out the industries of other countries, we're going to see those only intensify in the years ahead. And so that set of geopolitical frictions, I think is going to be a defining theme of the next few years. Just quickly on the second two takeaways, which are kind of in the more esoteric realms of Chinese elite politics. The second is that this was really the purge plenum. It was revealed for the first time kind of authoritatively that Xi has now officially overseen the largest purge of a central committee in the post Mao era. This central committee was selected in 2022, had 376 members all up. And at this plenum, it was held in late October, only 315 of those people were present.
Rachel Rizzo: Wow.
Neil Thomas: The rest being dead or disciplined or missing under a cloud of political rumors and likely future purges. So it's almost one in five of people who were promoted just three years ago already running into some kind of trouble.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So this would be like 20 % of the Senate not showing up mysteriously for a Senate meeting in the US Capitol. That would be the... Yeah.
Rachel Rizzo: Yeah, that's crazy.
Neil Thomas: Exactly. It's a great analogy. And so it just shows that Xi is still large and in charge. And I think a bit of a causal misunderstanding that some people have who assume that these purges maybe mean that Xi is under threat or his hand is being forced by factional rivals or party elders or generals who are pulling the strings behind closed doors, is that Xi actually wants these purges if, in his view, they are making him stronger because people are watching their backs more, or if they're making the party and the military more well-disciplined, less corrupt, and ultimately more capable. I mean his big fear is that the Communist Party is going to go the same way that the Soviet Union did, the Soviet Communist Party did in the early 90s. And this is a party that through his father, who's a former official, has come to define not just his career, but his life. This is his life's work, is to achieve China's national rejuvenation under Communist Party leadership. And so what he calls self-revolution is this drive to basically make the party a self-regulating body and kind of do for politics what China's already done for economics. To show that Western models of firstly markets and now democracy are not needed to build a strong and successful country. And so we'll see how it turns out in the coming decades, but that's the thinking at least behind Xi's purges.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Mm-hmm
Neil Thomas: And if these evidence of wrongdoing comes to light or disloyalty, he's very happy to chop the axe on people who he may have promoted a few years ago. There's no signs that he's losing control.
Dhruva Jaishankar: And what's the third big takeaway?
Neil Thomas: The third big takeaway, a very quick one, is that if we look at the drafting group for the plenum documents, these are small groups that are assembled before each plenum to oversee the messages that are put out. He's appointed the biggest group I've ever seen in the last few years or decades. Includes a lot of the people on the standing committee. And especially unusual is the appointment of...Wang Huning, he's kind of top ideology guy who's got quite a bit of attention in recent years for being the intellectual architect of Xi Jinping's thought.
Rachel Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
Neil Thomas: So he basically kept on expanding these bodies to allow for Wang Huning to keep playing a role, which kind of shows how much of a force he remains behind the scenes. And which for me, mean, whether it's Wang Huning or others raises some questions about what happens at the next party Congress. So every five years they select a new leadership. And that's going to be in 2027. And she's consulting a lot with the current people around him. But the next generation, if you like, of officials are people he hasn't had the same kind of working relationships with. As someone else has put it well, I think Jonathan Czin at Brookings, the protégée of protégée, rather than people he's been in the trenches with in local governments earlier in his career. So think for me, the big question that this kind higher consultation with close allies, but actually much less consultation with the wider party raises is, what comes next? Do we see a real overturning of retirement norms writ large? Are we just going to go back to an era of old man politics where she keeps around these trusted people for a long, long time and we get some more political ossification? Or does she decide to keep rotating them through and ensuring that no one group gets too powerful and he feels confident enough to deal with a group of people he doesn't know as well, but who he maybe trusts have imbibed Xi Jinping's thought and the new political realities in Beijing over the last more than a decade of his rule.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So, know, Wang Huning is a really interesting character because, you know, amongst all the things he came to the United States, I think in the early 90s on a fellowship, traveled around the US and wrote this book about it. And so like the decline of the West and many people have now read it, I think outside of China as a sort of this is sort of a guiding philosophy of Wang Huning and by extension Xi Jinping's view on the sort of inevitable decline of the West and stuff like that. Right? Is that correct?
Neil Thomas: Yeah, the book was called America Against America. And he noted two things. Firstly, that America was technologically so far ahead of China. That that was something that he wanted to come back to Beijing and fix. And secondly, that America had, in his view, all of these social problems around poverty, race relations, political dysfunction.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Yeah, yeah.
Neil Thomas: And the lesson for him there was that democracy is too messy and it creates all of these negative externalities that we don't want in China. So he basically came to embody in China's intellectual circles this school of thought called neo-authoritarianism
Rachel Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
Neil Thomas: Which is a real kind meeting of minds with Xi's political project to centralize power and use that centralization of power to basically make China great again and technology has become a really key facet of that. So, you know, it's a long time ago that Wang Huning wrote this book, but you can make some intellectual connections between what Wang was observing and concluding then and how policy priorities are being decided in Beijing today.
Rachel Rizzo: Yeah, very, very toquevillian in a way.
Neil Thomas: Yeah.
Rachel Rizzo: So just a couple of final questions here. When you're watching what happens at these major plenums, this one specifically, what are you taking from what just happened in China within the CCP? And how can you extrapolate something from that into what it means on the international stage, if anything?
Neil Thomas: I think Xi's confidence in his domestic position, which was reaffirmed at the fourth plenum, certainly helps him in his negotiations with the United States, for example.
Rachel Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
Neil Thomas: We've seen a lot of commentary on the Trump-Xi summit and the potential for US-China trade negotiations to lead to something bigger, perhaps when Xi hosts Trump in April in China, in Beijing.
Rachel Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
Neil Thomas: So I think Xi is negotiating from a position of strength and things like this plan have helped to reaffirm that. And that means that he can endure more pain perhaps than democracies who have to answer to voters. Xi's consumers are not voters. And that's why the party has been able to really favor investment over consumption in its economic policy for so many decades. And that's an enduring strength that a leader like Xi can count on. And additionally, the fact that Xi is not under pressure from party elders or from rival factions allows him conversely to also be more flexible if needed. So if the United States does decide to really escalate its economic pressure on China through export controls, sanctions, tariffs, the like, and sticks with those positions, then Xi can make some concessions if need be. If he judges that that's more in China's short-term economic interests than kind of living out the pain. I think his bet is on the former, that he'll be able to outlast the United States, but there was a really concerted push against Xi and a discipline on the kind of American, the Western side, then Xi has a long-term view. And if there is concessions that could be made, there were some arguably made in Busan with at least delaying the rare earth export controls, then he's not going to pay a political price for making those. So there's two different ways of, know, two different kind of forces, if you like, interacting in China's calculus for these negotiations. And right now, I think that the former, that feeling of comfort is certainly outweighing the latter.
Dhruva Jaishankar: The final question on we have because we haven't touched upon the military aspect of it and one thing that's sort of interesting about analyzing China and Chinese domestic politics is you kind of have three parallel structures as I understand, right? The state, the party and the military, the PLA and Xi Jinping in some ways has three titles as the head of those three entities in some ways. We've seen a lot of military purges taking place in the rocket forces and pretty much every command. What are we to make of that as well? I mean, there's pretty sweeping purges in the PLA that have taken place recently as well.
Neil Thomas: So the PLA or the Chinese military has always been the most autonomous of those three structures or pillars of power that you mentioned was very stovepipe and Xi Jinping as chairman of the Central Military Commission is the only civilian who has a leadership role in the military, which is a party army rather than being a state army. It's a fundamentally political beast, but that distance from the party meant that for many decades preceding Xi's leadership, the army and the other forces basically did their own things. They were in business. There was a huge amount of corruption. They were conducting all sorts of tests, like a famous test of a jet fighter before a US-China meeting that then President Hu Jintao seemed to not have any idea had happened. And so I think there was a perception that they were unwieldy and politically becoming less reliable, and also just less capable of fighting, given all the corruption that was happening. And so, I mean, Xi, from his very first years as leader, back in the 2010s, he prosecuted an unprecedented reform of the military bureaucracy and purged two former members of the Central Military Commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, basically to send a message that he was going to be in charge in a way that previous political leaders were not. And so this has been kind of a constant theme of Xi's leadership. But I think there was some interruption during his second term when we got the shocks of Trump's trade war against China, which was not expected by Beijing, and also COVID, which was not expected by anyone. And so some of these domestic political agendas had to be put to one side while those were being pursued. But now Xi had a massive political victory at the last party congress in 2022. He's surrounded at the very top by people he really trusts. There's no more representatives of factional rivals anywhere near him. And so he has more freedom of action to pursue these political agendas now. And I think that's why we're seeing this renewed focus on the military. We also saw how a military that was once thought to be very formidable, the Russian military, really fail in Ukraine compared to predictions. It's blamed a lot by Russian military analysts on corruption and on procurement challenges especially. And then we saw the balloon incident, right, with PLA spy balloon basically getting out of control and very unintentionally drifting over the United States and blowing up a diplomatic agenda.
Rachel Rizzo: Oh yeah, big news here. Totally.
Neil Thomas: Xi wanted to, you know calm down US-China relations at that point, coming out of COVID and the economic shock that presented. And so we have this confluence of events and it seems evidence of quite significant corruption in missile forces, the rocket forces emerge. And so I think Xi just wants to clean house ahead of the next leadership reshuffle in 2027 and promote a whole new generation of people who are more vetted, who have less of their career in the pre-Xi era and in his view will hopefully be more dependable and more politically reliable. And so this is basically, you know, the latest chapter in Xi's long-term mission to really stamp the party's political control over the military, to be able to use it both as a reliable guarantor of its political rule within China. See, the military was a big factor in 1989, crushing the Tiananmen protests, but also in Xi's increasingly ambitious external agenda, right? I mean, if you want to put pressure on Taiwan and the South China Sea, you need a military that is an effective deterrent. needs to work. It needs to pose a credible threat. And if your missiles aren't working, then that's a trouble. And if you don't trust your leadership, that's another big source of trouble.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Yeah, Yeah, Xi keeps on saying you know, I want a military that is prepared to win battles, right, to win wars, right. He keeps emphasizing that. Neil, thanks so much for coming on. It was a great explainer of like what's going on there. You hopefully we'll have you back periodically to sort of update us on developments, because it's not a story that's going to go away. But thanks again for joining us on Around the World.
Neil Thomas: Thanks for having me.
Rachel Rizzo: Thanks Neil.
Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Sit Down
Dhruva Jaishankar: So, Rachel, this week we also had Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visit Washington. It's his first visit there in a while. A big gala event at the White House. Trump rolled out the red carpet. Tell us what happened there.
Rachel Rizzo: Yeah, and if you've tried to, if you live in Washington and you've tried to drive downtown this week, it's an absolute disaster. All the roads are shut down. It's been super busy. But this marks MBS's first visit to Washington since the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never came out. He was murdered there. And so there's been a lot of conflict and a disagreement about what this visit means for MBS and whether he should be normalized here after that. And I think what this visit did is really marked his successful normalization and reputation rehabilitation in the United States as a serious international leader and valued US partner. This was a highly transactional visit. It was really focused on business deals and investments rather than broader strategic alignment on issues like human rights or progress on that front. So very transactional couple of days here for him.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So you say it's transactional. What did Saudi Arabia get?
Rachel Rizzo: Yes, there was a couple of sides of this coin. So what Saudi gets - security guarantees, that's a big one. Trump designated Saudi Arabia as a major non-NATO ally. This is a status that really provides enhanced defense trade and security cooperation. The two countries also signed a strategic defense agreement that makes it a lot easier for US defense cooperation with Saudi Arabia, though it falls short of the Senate ratified mutual defense treaty that the Saudis were initially looking for. They also got some major defense sales out of it. Trump approved a major defense sales package to Saudi Arabia that includes future deliveries of F-35s. This is subject to Congress, obviously. 300 tanks. This is a really significant upgrade to Saudi's military capabilities and builds upon this $142 billion arms package that was announced during Trump's visit to Riyadh in May of this year. So beyond this, there was an approved US Saudi Arabia civilian nuclear deal for a multi-billion dollar partnership that would last decades. So lots, I think, that MBS came out of from this meeting.
Dhruva Jaishankar: And he got, think Elon Musk, his company has agreed to set up a data center in Riyadh as well. I Musk was at the White House, his first sort of visit back there since he left Doge. We actually, I was in Washington, we had a F-35 fly over the city to kind of showcase the F-35 to MBS as well.
Rachel Rizzo: That's right. Yeah, that happened a couple days ago. Yeah.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Yeah it was to show it off. So, okay, what does the US get out of this deal?
Rachel Rizzo: Yeah, so as I said, there's two sides of this coin. MBS announced that he is going to increase Saudi investments in the US from $600 billion now to almost $1 trillion. That's a huge jump. This is a really significant influx of capital into the American economy. Specifically, and you were kind of just mentioning this on the AI front, 20 billion of this is earmarked for AI and AI data centers in the United States. Going back to this strategic defense agreement, this secures new burden sharing funds from Saudi Arabia to defray US cost. Basically, shorthand, what does this mean? The Saudis are gonna help pay for American military presence and operations in the Middle East, rather than the US bearing the full burden alone. And if you take this through and sort of extrapolate it more broadly through the Middle East, this represents a broader shift in the US in terms of burden sharing for our allies and partners in different regions. So from the Europeans to our partners in the Middle East, this is a common theme. I think what is absent from this agreement on either side is really any progress on getting Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel. This is a key diplomatic priority for Trump. MBS said he wanted to join the accords, but really first needs what he calls clear path to Palestinian statehood. This is a major obstacle. So a lot happened during this visit, a lot that both sides can be proud of, but also major obstacles, I think, still to overcome.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So it's interesting, it came just short of what everyone is expecting to be the grand bargain, right, which is a sort of Article 5 NATO type treaty alliance that MBS wants from the United States, that kind of commitment. And in exchange for the Abraham Accords, which is what Trump really wants, and Saudi formal diplomatic recognition of Israel. So it came almost up to that line without actually crossing that line.
Rachel Rizzo: Yep. Yeah, which means there might be still a little bit room for a deal on both sides, which is this is what Trump loves and so we'll watch it closely. And then for you, you were just at CSIS a couple days ago doing an event on Russian oil sanctions.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Yeah.
Rachel Rizzo: Talk a little bit about that. We discussed it a few weeks ago on the show ⁓ after Trump announced it initially. What are some updates there? What have you been watching?
Dhruva Jaishankar: Yeah, so that event yesterday was with Senators Lindsey Graham, was a Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, who's a Democrat from Connecticut. They are kind of pushing some legislation on Russian oil sanctions or proposing that. And they've got Trump's blessings. Trump actually a couple of days ago spoke about supporting such an initiative. I was on there as the token Indian perspective, partly because India's...
Rachel Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
Dhruva Jaishankar: In various points of time been the largest buyer of Russian oil. So the implications are going to be particularly significant for India. Just to give some context, on November 21st this month, US oil sanctions on Russia's two largest producers of oil, Luke Oil and Rosneft, are going to kick in. And the announcement of this a little while ago has already resulted in a tapering of oil purchases from India and China, which are the two largest purchases of Russian crude oil. In the meantime, India's oil imports from the United States have actually surged this year. So it's over $8 billion in the first eight to 10 months of this year. And on Monday, just a few days ago, we had a new gas deal signed between India and the United States. So the US is committed to providing 10 % of India's LPG needs for next year in 2026. there is that sort of shift underway driven by some of these larger forces.
Rachel Rizzo: Okay, and then what else or what other steps are being contemplated at this point by Washington and policymakers here?
Dhruva Jaishankar: So, yeah, so this is the Senate led by the two senators in question, so really considering legislation, Trump has endorsed it, that would potentially threaten very sweeping secondary sanctions against anyone doing business with Russia. And I think the scale of it will have to be negotiated in the details. Now, it's clearly meant to do a couple of things. One is to exert leverage on Russia to bring Putin to negotiating table on a ceasefire in Ukraine, and also give legislative cover to the president to apply tariffs on countries, which is something that's been thrown into question by a possible decision next year by the Supreme Court. So now the questions I think that this raises, there are a lot of open questions, it's still very early on, are these credible threats? Because I think one thing is if it's worded in a way that is sort of 500 % tariffs on any entity that does any kind of business with Russia, I think a lot of people are gonna call bluff on that. So I think that the credibility of those threats is an open question would they have any effect on the Kremlin? I mean, this is a government under Vladimir Putin that has actually survived several rounds of sanctions, right?
Rachel Rizzo: It sure has. Yep.
Dhruva Jaishankar: So, and they've taken shifts, they've taken, they've removed like about 50 % of the budget in Moscow was basically based on oil and gas revenue. It has now come down to 30%. So they've already taken steps to sort of insulate some of the effects of some of the sanctions. And the other thing that I think a lot people are not really paying attention to in Washington is what could the second order effects of some of these sanctions be? It could adversely affect US exports. It could cause inflation at home. It could cause global energy volatility. And it doesn't really address the sort of global energy production shortfalls because there are also sanctions in place on Iran, Venezuela. So it's not solving some of the longer term problems. I think a lot of that, I mean, the points I was trying to raise is like that hasn't really been fully thought through.
Rachel Rizzo: So in terms of fully thought through, what are you watching for going forward here?
Dhruva Jaishankar: So in the near term, again, after November 21st, let's see, I say three things. One, what is the impact on global energy prices, if at all? Again, there's attempts by energy companies all the way up and down the supply chain to take measures to mitigate some of the impact of this. If Russian oil starts coming offline. Second, what, if any, effect is this going to have on Russia's approach to the war? There was a great deal of skepticism expressed by people who follow Russia more than I do on the panel I was on. And then three, what does it mean, I think, the second order effects for US relations with China, India, Turkey, Europe, and others who are still to varying degrees dependent on sourcing Russian energy, oil and gas, particularly from Russia? And so how will it affect their relations?
Rachel Rizzo: Okay, so lots to watch there. Also, there's been some discussion about potential developments on a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine brokered by the US.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Mm-hmm.
Rachel Rizzo: We'll talk about that in a couple weeks, actually, because we're going to take a break next Thursday and Friday because it's Thanksgiving here in the United States. But we're going to be keeping a close eye on all these developments and in a couple weeks from now, we'll come back at it, give you all a bunch of updates, hopefully on the ceasefire front as well. As I mentioned in the opening, we're now on Apple Podcasts, so you can listen to the Around the World podcast there. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to Around the World on YouTube and Spotify as well.
Dhruva Jaishankar: Thanks for joining us on the Around the World podcast.
Rachel Rizzo: Thanks.