What does one owe their country? A family's 'reckoning on China'

In a new memoir, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong retraces the complicated story of his father’s life as a zealous young Communist in China to an immigrant in America. What does it mean to love country over party?

Today, On Point: Edward Wong on his memoir “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.”

Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent with the New York Times. He spent nearly a decade as a China correspondent and Beijing bureau chief for the NYTs from 2008 to 2016. Author of “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.”

From AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE: A Family’s Reckoning with China, by Edward Wong, published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Edward Wong.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Edward Wong is a long-time award-winning correspondent for the New York Times. For more than 25 years, he's reported from nearly 100 countries on diplomacy, espionage, the economy, and turning points in history. From 2008 to 2016, he was the Times' Beijing Bureau Chief.

Today, he joins us to share a story that's both historical in scale and deeply personal. It's the story of Wong's father, who grew up in Mao's communist China, was once an ardent believer in the CCP, but who then ended up fleeing to America and the Washington, D.C. suburbs as a young man. That story is written in a new memoir called "At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China."

It's a beautiful and complicated story that raises the question, what does it mean to love country over party in China? Edward Wong, welcome to On Point.

EDWARD WONG: Thanks a lot, Meghna. Great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: I would love it if you could start off by reading a letter that's featured in the book. And it was written by your father ... and a cousin.

And it was written to your father's brother, Sam, in February of 1958. During the Lunar New Year holiday, before you read it, can you give us a little background on how this letter came to be?

WONG: Sure. My father was in Beijing during the Lunar New Year holiday, which is in the winter. And this was in 1958.

It was later in his time in the People's Republic of China. He had by this point, he had already trained for the Air Force in the Northeast in Manchuria, but then instead of being sent to fight the American forces in Korea, he had been posted to the remote Northwest region of Xinjiang in China for the army, and he has served a half dozen years out there in the Northwest. And when he was sent out to Xinjiang, he felt he was being sent out to exile because of elements in his family background that had made the party and the military suspicious of him.

But then he felt he had managed to claw himself back into the good graces of the party. He had an application for the Communist Party that was pending, and he had managed to go back to central China to a provincial capital called Xi'an to study engineering. And his dream at that time was to build military aircraft for the Air Force in order to help build up China.

So he was still very much a believer in the party and in its mission at this time. And he felt he had redeemed himself in the party's eyes. So here he travels to Beijing for the Lunar New Year holiday to meet up with a cousin. And then together they write this letter to his older brother, Sam, who's living in Washington, D.C. at the time. Because Sam soon after graduating high school had decided to take a scholarship from the American government.

To go over to the U.S. to study. And his brother, Sam had studied engineering and then had gone to work for the U.S. military. So these 2 brothers 4 years apart have found themselves on the opposite sides of the geopolitical divide in the world at the time. And my father wrote this letter. It's mainly him, even though he wrote it with a cousin, and he sent it to his parents in Hong Kong, in the British colony of Hong Kong, to get it to his brother.

So here is how the letter goes. And in it, my father is talking about what he's seen in China in recent years. To my older brother: 'Our homeland has seen tremendous and continual progress, and we're confident that we will catch up to Great Britain in 15 years. We think this is entirely possible. In these past years, we have accomplished so much, some of which would be hard for you to imagine.

The construction of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge been completed and it is now in use. And one can catch a train direct from Yangtze River Bridge to Manzhouli Village in the northeast. This must be one of the world's most impressive bridge constructions. And there is a railway that is being built that extends from Xi'an to the edges of Xinjiang, traversing China's territory from east to west.

And it is expected that this year, the rail will extend to Hami in Xinjiang. The construction and engineering projects to control the flow of the Yellow River also commenced last year. This is such a tremendous project, and once it is completed in 1962, the Northwest region will be an area surrounded by waters on all sides, and with power stations to supply ample power for several major metropolises.

Many factories have appeared in other cities, where agricultural production had been separate endeavors prior to now, most of the agricultural production has become collectivized, and to a high and sophisticated order. Machinery is mass produced, and formerly fully privatized industrial processes have become public private collaborations.

All these various collectivizations and developments have been achieved through the previous eight years of hard work. Our country now has a brand new visage and outlook. And how have our lives been? In a word, content and happy. We did not pass these years idly or in vain. These past eight years taught us so very much.

And as we put in our full effort for the good of our country, our lives have also been elevated and enriched. In sum, all that has occurred has been truly satisfying. And I'm not just saying that, but the truth is actually, let us say again, what I say here is the absolute truth. And there are many other things that have been, that have happened that I cannot even describe in detail here.

Older brother, please give this some serious consideration. How would you feel to be a citizen of China? What ought to be one's responsibilities to one's country? Should one wait to return one day and enjoy the outcomes in the future once everything has been accomplished? Or should one actively contribute to one's homeland now?

Anyone with a conscience should pursue the latter path. In 1948, you left to go abroad. And now that you are done with your studies and have surely become an expert in so many fields of scientific knowledge and expertise, then it is time to return. First off, upon return, there would be no concern at all in terms of employment.

Our country is in such a period of construction and is greatly in need of people, especially people with your abilities and your expertise. In terms of life here, we believe that there would be no issues either. You would be content, and you and yours would find everything quite ideal and comfortable.

Many scientists and overseas students have already taken the leap before you and have returned. Are they not finding everything very much to their liking? Though there are always a few who would spread malicious nonsense, reality has shown them to be in the wrong. So one should not trust any lies you might hear.

You should believe what we tell you.'

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

WONG: So that's the bulk of the letter right there.

CHAKRABARTI: That is incredible. I could spend the whole hour just talking to you about this letter, actually, Edward. There's so much in it. But when you first read it or even read it know what do you hear in your father's plea to his older brother?

WONG: I hear this intense sense of patriotism and it's a patriotism that had been tested over the years that he was in the People's Republic. As I said, he believed in the mission of the party and of Mao Zedong. At the start, when he enrolled in the army, he was a volunteer in the army, and he had decided to do that shortly after marching in a parade in Tiananmen Square in 1950 in front of Mao and the communist leaders.

And he dropped out of university in Beijing at that time to take part in the army. Because he believed in what Mao was saying, that the American forces were threatening to overtake the Korean peninsula, to defeat the North Korean forces in the Korean War and then would march onward into China to Beijing and depose the communists.

And my father felt that the communists were the power in China that could build up the institutions and the economy of China after the Japanese war, after the Chinese civil war. And so that was the beginning of his patriotic outlook for China, but also in service of the communists. That was tested, as I said, when he was not put into the Air Force for fighting Korea.

And this letter is his viewpoint after all those tests, but re-embracing that mission of the Communist Party.

CHAKRABARTI: Just remind me quickly, how old was your father when this letter was written?

WONG: He was in his late 20s at that time.

CHAKRABARTI: Late 20s, that's right. Okay. Do you know what fascinates me that is conspicuous in its absence is in the letter, is that as you said, essentially, your father and his older brother were involved with the two militaries specifically on the either side of this massive geopolitical conflict, which was flowing through the Korean War, right?

And in China, it was called the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. And yet your father in that letter never says to Sam, how could you possibly be working for the Americans? He simply instead focuses on China's rise as he sees it. To me, that's really interesting. I don't know if it's important to you or your father.

WONG: No, I think it is interesting. I think that it shows the language and the type of emotional appeal towards homeland that my father's trying to make, and I think many Chinese citizens felt this way at the time. That they were in the midst of building up this new China. And my father was making this appeal to family, appeal to nation, and he was hoping to entice his brother to come home.

Partly, the implication is that he's living in the West in a culture that's not his own, in a homeland that's not his own, even though obviously Sam had adopted America as his homeland, and trying to say, this is your true homeland. Please come back and please come back to your family too. Later on in the letter, he talks about coming back to help take care of their mother and father and helping to become part of the family again and support the family. So there's multiple levels on which this letter is working.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Now Edward, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your father's younger years because it was, what, in 1950? Then, in fact, he was in the first class from his high school that graduated into a Communist Party ruled China, yes?

WONG: That's correct. And I think those early years really explain the sense of devotion he had to the party and to the military early on.

He was born in Hong Kong, so he was born into the British colony, just like his brother Sam was. He came from a merchant family in Hong Kong. His father and grandfather on the mother side were herbal medicine traders, so they would take herbal medicine from China and then export it out to Southeast Asia.

And so during the Japanese war, when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941, he had to then go into China, to mainland China to southern China and go back to his home village and went through schooling, middle school, high school, in southern China. And he graduated, as you mentioned, from that high school class from a fairly prestigious boarding school in Guangzhou, a major provincial capital in 1950.

And because he lived through the Japanese war, he also lived through the Chinese civil war. When the communists fought the nationalists. Then he felt that finally he was a power, the communists who had managed to conquer China and would stabilize China. His hope was that there would be no more wars in the future, and that finally the communist government could help rebuild China after these devastating decades that China had lived through.

And while he was in high school in Guangzhou, he had also seen the effects of the mismanagement, misgovernance, and corruption on the part of the nationalists. There was rampant inflation. He saw poverty in the streets. He saw homeless people in the streets. He saw gambling. He saw brothels. These were all, in his mind, effects of misgovernance by the nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who was backed by the Americans.

CHAKRABARTI: So before we get back more to your father specifically, I think it's not well enough understood in the United States, this period of China's history, because when you talk about those devastating decades, explain to us a little bit more about what Imperial Japan did in China. And then the actual devastation that also then followed in the Chinese Civil War, because it's so transformative in modern Chinese history.

WONG: Sure. Japan first took over parts of northeast China or Manchuria and set up a puppet government there. And then they moved forward to prosecute the war in many other parts of China, trying to take over the entire continent of Asia, or most of the continent of Asia with China being a huge part of that.

They engaged in atrocities throughout China. Mass deaths. Nanjing was the site of mass killings, what many Chinese citizens would call genocide today. And this sticks in the mind of many Chinese. It sticks in the mind of Chinese who live through it, as well as others who have learned about it.

Even many Chinese overseas today still think of Japan as the power that is the biggest adversary of China. And so I think living through that, seeing Japanese soldiers, both in Hong Kong, occupying Hong Kong, his birthplace, as well as Southern China, really made an impression on my father. It made an impression on my Uncle Sam, too, who also saw this when he fled with my father to Southern China.

And there's even an episode described in the book where Sam was taken captive by a soldier at one point, while he went to go shopping in a village in Southern China. The soldier ended up, I think, being a Chinese soldier who's working, collaborating with the Japanese army. But at that point, Sam feared for his life.

His family feared for his life. And so these episodes remained seared in the minds of my father and his family members.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I'm really grateful that you explained that because it helps us understand why the spiritual, emotional, and ultimately physical journey that your father took was more than just some sort of momentary political act, right?

Here was a young man amongst many young Chinese, who had lived through all of this hardship and devastation. And it's actually completely understandable why, at that time, the promise of Mao's Communist Party was, We will leave this behind and build, not just a better, but a great China. I can completely understand how your father would not only just believe in that, but want to dedicate his life to it.

WONG: Exactly. And Mao also said, we'll build up a new China and we'll also have equality in this new China. And I think people like my father, many other Chinese citizens who didn't come from wealthy or very elite backgrounds in the north, for example, felt that the people living in the rural parts of China, the people who are factory workers, they should have an equal say in the future of the country, along with a more equal say than the business owners and the others who have managed to profit off of China, a corrupt government in China.

Yeah. So you didn't really know a lot about your father's sort of pre-American history, I understand, until you saw a photo of him in uniform and you were in your 20s. Right?

WONG: That's right. When I was growing up, I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in Alexandria, and my father worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant nearby.

He didn't talk very much about his background. Neither did my mother. And so I didn't know that much about their past in China. And I wasn't that interested, frankly, at that time. I wanted to fit in into my schools in Alexandria. I was just trying to get through middle school and high school and then go on to college.

I had my friends and so it wasn't until after I did a summer study, studying Mandarin in Beijing in 1996 before grad school, and then going to grad school at Berkeley and deciding to learn more about Chinese history and politics there that I thought, oh, I need to ask my parents more about their backgrounds in China.

And I wasn't even sure what they had done in the People's Republic. I knew that they came from Hong Kong. They had passports from the British colony of Hong Kong. I wasn't sure what connections they had to the PRC. So then I sat down with my parents on visits home from grad school. And on one occasion, my father showed me this photograph of himself that he had taken when he was in Xinjiang in the far northwest when he was in the army. And it shows him in this PLA uniform. It's got this cap that he's wearing.

And there's a little shadow on the cap. And where there should have been a red star, there was a shadow. And he told me that what happened was when he somehow got this photo, mailed it to his parents in Hong Kong, his father had rubbed out that red star, because his father was afraid that if the British authorities in Hong Kong found that photo, then there would be reprisals against the family. So it's just like very symbolic photo, and it's one of two existing photos of my father in a PLA uniform.

And so it's something that he still keeps with him in his bedroom in Alexandria as a memento of his time in the PRC.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you know why he didn't talk about this very much with you until you started, in your 20s, wanting to learn more?

WONG: I think that's a, there's a complex answer to that.

Obviously there, he went through a very tortuous history in China. It had both its high points as well as its darker moments. And I think many Chinese immigrants who survived those years under Mao rarely want to talk about them. I also think that when a lot of immigrants come to the U.S., and they're putting hardship behind them, they have their heads to the grindstone, what they're doing is they're trying to build up a new family, build a new life for themselves, and that's what they're focused on.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm only smiling at that, Edward, because you're telling my life story as a young person, because my parents were Indian immigrants, and my father especially, it just really resonates with you in terms of a child's relationship to his or her father, because my dad, he left India not because of any political reason, but to escape economic privation.

And he didn't go back to India for almost 30 years and almost never talked about his boyhood or childhood. He came from a large family, and it was only when I too was in my twenties that I asked him one day, I was like, dad, why haven't you gone back? And also, what were you like when you were a kid?

And he told me that he never wanted to look back, that once he came to the United States, his life was in America, he was an American, and he always wanted to look forward. So what you're saying about your parents, this really resonates powerfully with me, it's definitely an immigrant mindset, that when I was growing up, I didn't really think about it, but there's something about being in your 20s, which when you're like coming to the same age as when your parents made these monumental decisions, I think that awakens something in a child, an adult child.

WONG: Yeah, exactly. And my father also didn't go back to China for more than three decades. It wasn't until he left in 1962, went back in 1999 on his first trip back to the PRC.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So when you first started learning these things and you saw that picture. What was your response?

WONG: I was, first of all, I was surprised, obviously, like it's very surprising, even shocking to learn that your father was a member of another military.

So I think that it's one thing to learn some details about what their life was like in another country, but it's another to understand that they were in an army, in another army, an army that had been opposed to the Americans. At one point in history, and then had served under Mao in that context.

So I thought that was surprising. And of course, that was immediately after hearing the life stories of my father and mother. I grasped onto that part of his life and really wanted to focus on learning more about that. And it took decades for me to really unpack all the details of that.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay.

So let's talk more about those details because you had mentioned earlier that your father had been in his mind banished to the Chinese hinterland, right? As part of his military experience. And you found his military dossier about why he was sent away. And why was that?

WONG: Yeah, he, I actually haven't seen his dossier. I was hoping to find some trace of it at some point on a trip that I made out to the Northwest. But he found it surprisingly. Yeah. It's very rare for Chinese citizens to be able to see their dossier. The system officials and system keep dossiers on everyone.

And ... it's usually, there's very, they're kept secret. It's difficult for people to get a hold of them. But because my dad was working in the personnel department. In one of his postings in the remote Northwest, in this area, that's essentially in Central Asia on the Central Asian steps.

He managed to find the file one day in the station where he was posted, and he saw that it said on the file very simply, send him to the army. And this was at the point when he had been training for the air force. And there isn't a lot of clear explanation of why officials made that order.

But he understood enough about the party and about the army and about Mao's campaigns and purges at that time in the 1950s, that he knew that the reason why he had been sent into exile in the Northwest. And not sent to fight in Korea was because of his family background, he knew that the party harbored suspicions about him, that they thought he or someone who came from a capitalist family in Hong Kong in a British colony, whose brother has gone to America, whose parents still live in Hong Kong.

So can we really trust this person? And so they had sent him out there to the Northwest, the same way they had sent many other soldiers with questionable backgrounds, or where they had sent nationalist soldiers. Soldiers who had fought for the losing side in the Civil War and was now being placed in these very remote postings in the Northwest.

CHAKRABARTI: But that didn't sour your father's belief in the Communist Party or, Mao's project for China.

WONG: No, he had a complex reaction to that. And this came out in some letters that he had written later to his brother when he escaped to Hong Kong. He wrote some letters in which he had more candid views on this turn in his fortunes, and he said that when he's being sent out there to the Northwest, he realized something had gone wrong. He was being sent to exile, but he felt that what he could do was get back into the good graces of the party and of the military, and then work his way back into central China.

He thought that there was one road in which he would never see his family again and live out his remaining decades in the Northwest and die out there. But he thought there was another path by which he could claw his way back to Interior China and so he worked hard for the party out there. He worked hard for the military.

He obeyed orders, he tried to help indoctrinate people out there into communist ideology. And these were, there were many people who were of the non-Han ethnicity out there. We're talking about Uyghur Muslims, Kazakh Muslims. He lived for many years among Kazakhs, and he was part of this project to indoctrinate them with communism and to also disband some of the Kazakh militias that have formed out there.

And eventually, he gets accepted back into the good graces. Because he wins the favor of officials right above him, who then recommend him for a party membership.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Good graces. But then eventually something else happens that makes your father believe that he has to leave China.

WONG: And he believes he's on this path to success now, and to a better future through the channels of the party.

But as he's studying engineering back in Xi'an after he gets back to Xi'an to enroll in a university there, he several things happened. One is that officials who are reviewing his party application tell him that they still need to investigate his family background more. And that they have to put a halt to the application process. Because there are still uncertainties or shadows around his family background.

And I think at that point, he realized there was something inherently wrong with the party system. This Leninist system, this Leninist organization, and he realizes that internal hostility, internal suspicion, internal paranoia are built in parts of this type of organization, this type of authoritarian system, because you're always suspicious of someone because of certain elements in their background.

You're always looking over your shoulder for who could be the traitor in the country, the traitor in the system. And he felt that there was no way he could get out from under the shadow of this. And that it was a systemic problem within the party.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Edward, so you had described to us how your father had come to the painful realization that the paranoia, which was built into the Communist Party, was never going to allow him, who believed so fervently in this project of China, to be a full participant in that project. And so he realized that he had to leave China.

You also talk about how he felt like he was very lucky to escape. Tell us about how that happened.

WONG: Sure and as his doubts were setting in about the party, there were also several other very dramatic episodes that took place that increased those doubts. One was the Great Leap Forward, this economic project that Mao undertook, and that led to the Great Famine, where 30 to 40 million Chinese citizens died in China because of these failed economic policies.

And my father and his classmates in Xi'an suffered because of that. They starved, they grew thin, but my father survived, and so that, again, increased his doubts about the Party and its direction, as well as Mao's purges of very senior Party members that happened at the start of this period. Mao purged Peng Dehuai, who was this very revered military commander, and my father and many other soldiers had looked up to him.

So my father, at this time, was starting to wonder, really, about the future of China under Mao, and about Mao's wisdom. And that combined with the party's own suspicions of him really motivated him to flee the country. And he had to come up with this very complicated scheme, because he was up there in university in northern central China.

And he went down south on several school breaks, back to his home area of Guangdong province met up with his mother in Guangzhou. At that time, people could still come from Hong Kong to meet up with relatives in southern China. The border hadn't been tightened yet. And for a year or two, he crafted this plan where he would try and pretend he was ill in Southern China, not go back to university, then call in a favor from a friend who worked in the police force in China to get him exit papers to leave China for the Portuguese colony of Macau, which is next to Hong Kong.

So it was this very complex scheme. And he thought he knew that the party and also officials would become suspicious of him if they knew he was trying to leave, because he was a former soldier. He felt that there would be greater suspicion, greater skepticism of why he was trying to make these travel plans.

So he really had to do it very secretively and call in this favor from a family friend.

CHAKRABARTI: Edward, the way you so elegantly weave in these really truly historical upheavals in China that your father lived through, the Great Leap Forward, Great Famine, and even before that, the Korean War and others, it just makes me think about how your father experienced something that many of us thankfully will never have to, right?

And that is being failed by a belief, if I can put it that way, right? That after having experienced so much and believed so powerfully in what had been promised by Mao, to have to come to the realization that it was never going to happen, at least for him, that has to leave behind some kind of psychic pain.

I don't know, I don't know of any better way to put it.

WONG: Yeah, I think that now that I look back on my relationship with my father in my childhood and in my young adult years and also look at what his interests, his behavior, I think a lot of it is explained by those formative years when he was in his 20s, wedded to this ideology and to working for this ideology and this leadership.

And when he doesn't have a lot of interest, for example, in U.S. politics we don't talk a lot about that. I think that one of the things he concluded was that politics can betray you, ideologies can betray you. And so he has never been a political person, as he's lived in the U.S. He is interested in Chinese history and in party history, I think because of how he was immersed in it. And so he reads a lot, still, on Chinese history, especially 20th century history.

But in terms of current day politics, he's not that involved in it or that interested in it. And I think that's a result of what he lived through, and of that betrayal of ideas and of beliefs.

CHAKRABARTI: Because of your long history as a top journalist in the United States and the reporting you've done from around the world, you also write the book with this very tender journalistic remove. But it's also about your father.

WONG: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: That's a delicate balance to strike, but I'm wondering how in learning more about your father of many years and writing this book, how did it change you or how did it change your view of this man who was such an enigma to you when you were a young man?

WONG: I think that you probably know this Meghna, but when you engage in a project like this, when you learn a lot more about a parent and what they've gone through, a parent who has remained distant to you for much of the early years in your life, then you realize that not only have they gone through this whole life experience that probably makes your own life pale in comparison in terms of in terms of your emotions, your feelings, what you've gone through.

Whereas early in your life, you think of them as this very two dimensional figure and that they might be even devoid of these very complex feelings that you attribute to other people, but you also realize everyone around you, all these immigrants around you, people from other walks of life, have experienced very similar things, especially ones who are of that generation and lived through the great upheavals of the 20th century, no matter where they come from.

And I think that it gives you this appreciation, both for your parents, for other members of your family in the older generation, but also for many other American citizens around you. And I think that part of my intent on writing this book was to show how these people, these immigrants around us are these fully fleshed out people whose life stories you might never know in detail, people we encounter in our daily lives, waiters in restaurants, but that they themselves have.

CHAKRABARTI: In my father's case, I guess I should have mentioned this earlier, the major upheaval that he experienced, and he was just a little boy at the time, was the partition of India. And it was only recently that from one of my aunts that I heard about that when my father's family had to flee, they were living in what's now Bangladesh, and they had to flee west to go into where the line was where India would be.

I didn't know this at all about him, but when they had to flee, the last thing my father did was he ran to the center of his village and there was this enormous banyan tree there. And he, according to my aunt, he promised that tree, he said, one day I'm going to come back. And stand underneath your bows.

He never did, but I just, that story just popped to mind because of what you said about these like whole human beings that we don't see. We just see them as immigrants in the context here. But getting back to your father, then, the subtitle of your book is A Family's Reckoning with China. So what was that reckoning for your family?

WONG: First there's, part of my book also is my mother's story. And she was persecuted early on as a child by the communists. Because she was young, she's 12 years younger than my father, so she was younger in southern China when the communists took over.

And then her family was a landowning family, so they were clearly in this bourgeois class that was persecuted by villagers sympathetic to the communists and then they fled to Hong Kong, and she was around 8 or 9 when this happened, when she made that flight. And so I tell her story briefly in the book. But I don't dwell on it because my intent on writing this book was to talk about the People's Republic under communism. And she only experienced it as a very young child and didn't live through it in her adult years. So my father becomes the narrative backbone for that tale of communism.

And also, my own reckoning with China. In parallel with telling the story of my father, I write about my entry to China as a journalist in 2008 and about the changes in my outlook on China that I went through during the nearly decade I worked there and on my journeys to these regions in the frontiers of China in Xinjiang, in Tibet, looking for the legacy of the military occupations that my father was a part of.

And what I found there was fairly grim. And it made me realize that China is this imperial power today that is trying to hold together this empire that it reconstituted from the fallen empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. That type of traditional empire was trying to hold it together by force and also is intent on expanding it further eastward into the waters of the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and other areas.

CHAKRABARTI: Regarding modern day China then, it makes a lot of sense to me that your father, who lived in China before the Communist Party, that he was able to then see by virtue of all the struggles that he had about perhaps China under the Communist Party, and particularly Mao's rule, wasn't going to lead the country down the path that he had hoped.

Because he had that comparison. But in modern China, Edward, help us understand, what does it mean to love country over party in modern China when the Communist Party is so inextricably linked to what China is and has been for many decades?

WONG: Yeah, I think one of the stereotypes that many Americans who haven't been to China might have is that Chinese citizens are in these brainwashed masses who are dedicated to the party because it is this one party authoritarian state and it has become more autocratic in recent years.

But for anyone who spent time in China, has gotten to know many Chinese citizens and who have friends there, they understand that one of the abiding beliefs of Chinese citizens is that they want their country to be strong and powerful. They wanted to have wealth and power. Once again, they wanted to be on par on the world stage with America, with Britain, with Europe, with other wealthy industrialized countries.

At the same time, they often harbor some skepticism of some level of governance in China. For many Chinese, that's skepticism of local officials. In my travels and reporting China, I often found that many Chinese, whether they were in a large city or in a rural area, were skeptical of what was going on.

What city and provincial officials were doing policy wise in their areas, and they also felt there was a lot of corruption. Many do look to the national leadership for the betterment of China, but I think that's starting to change somewhat in recent years. Because there's this intense economic slowdown in China, where China's economy is now at 5% growth or lower as opposed to double digit growth.

And also, we saw, for example, during the zero COVID policy that Xi Jinping had imposed where there were these very strict lockdowns all across China, that there were people who came out in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai and protested openly in the streets against Xi's policy, and he was eventually compelled to reverse his policy.

So there is more disaffection right now, I think, with the direction of China, especially among liberal minded and younger Chinese.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I ask you a quick question about Xi? Because it sounds to me as if it wasn't just communism that your father ended up being disillusioned with, but it was Mao's communism.

And I wonder if perhaps there's a similar tremble happening with President Xi, who's essentially made himself president forever now in China.

WONG: Yeah. I think that many people talk about the parallels between Xi and Mao, and there are definitely parallels. I think there is one major difference, which is Xi believes in this very Leninist style control of the country and of the party.

So he believes there should be tight control of the entire party. He should be the person doing it. Mao believed in that, but he believed also that he could exercise that control personally through the masses, by mobilizing the masses, the citizenry and having them upturn elements of the party that were that he felt were working against him.

And that resulted in chaos, but it also resulted in him accruing power. Xi is, in some ways, is the opposite of that. He still believes in top down control and in concentrating party. The power of the party and in his role at the top. But he also believes as Mao did in this national security state that national security agency, state security should have unfettered control over elements of society and that's the most important aspect of governing China, to think about security in China.

During the reform and opening period between now and Xi, leaders thought that party control could be sustained by economic liberalization. That if you help people prosper, they would believe in the party. Xi, part of him concludes the opposite, that actually economic liberalization leads to erosion of party power and party control.

And so he's trying to reign that in and to reassert the force of the security agencies. And in some ways that's very much in parallel with Mao.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. We have only one minute left, Edward, and my heart's breaking about this. Because the story is so good. One last question for you. The first time that my father went back to India after almost three decades, I actually happened to be on that trip with him.

And for the first time in my life while we were there, I saw the boy that my father once was. And I wonder if while maybe while you were working in China or at some other time, have you ever been in China with your father at the same time?

WONG: Yeah, he's come twice. Once for my wedding in 2009, once when my daughter was born in 2012, and we went down south to Guangzhou where he met with his high school classmates who graduated in 1950.

And it was amazing. I saw the boy the same way that you saw the boy of your father and saw him talking about his life and all the changes with his classmates who talked about the same events and how they fit into Chinese history. It was a stunning moment for me. And there's an entire chapter in the book about that.

CHAKRABARTI: You have 30 more seconds to tell us a little bit more about what you saw. Sure.

WONG: It was incredible because he and some of his classmates had all signed on to working with the communists. They all went through hardships in the Mao era. My father chose to flee to America, but some stayed in China, and they eventually prospered from the reform and opening period when there was economic liberalization in China.

And I think seeing that contrast between Mao and now, and then now this big question mark around the future China. It really raises all these big questions about the arc of history.