Succession unplanned: Iran’s president killed

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's been a remarkable change in Britain's view of China over the past decade, from a source of golden trade and investment opportunities to something far more nefarious. We look at the growing pile of accusations of Chinese spying, and it's a platform where you can, of course, be an influencer. But we've also told you that tiktokers can be salespeople, book reviewers, news readers. Even so, naturally you can find people doling out work advice who we dive deep into CareerTalk. But first, It should have been a humdrum day for Iran's President, Ebrahim Raisi. He flew yesterday by helicopter to the northwestern border with Azerbaijan for the ribbon cutting on a new damage. He spoke of the dam's ability to provide safe transit, how it would be finished ahead of schedule. Then he set off again in a convoy of three helicopters, and somehow in heavy fog, it went wrong. The interior minister first said on state TV that one of the helicopters had made a hard landing. Then images of rescue teams searching. By morning it was official. Mr. Raisi was dead, along with the foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian. Tumult at the top of Iranian Politics at an already turbulent time.

Despite being seen as largely a figurehead right, his death is difficult for Iran.

Nicholas Pelham is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

It's going to force the Iranian regime to find a new president in short order at a difficult time. And this comes as a regional conflict is raging, focused on Gaza, but spreading across the region. Iran's adversaries are considering tightening their security links. The economy is sinking, and many in Iran are deeply disillusioned and fearful about their future.

And let's wind back a bit. Remind us who Mr. Raisi was, how he governed.

Mr. Raisi had risen through the ranks of the clergy. He was 63 years old. He'd spent his life as a protege of Mr. Khamenei's, the supreme leader. He'd been the prosecutor in Tehran. He was known as the hanging judge who helped send thousands of political prisoners to the gallows. In the late 1980s. He had led more, one of the clerical foundations, or bunyads, the largest, which had given him influence in the corridors of power. But he was particularly known as a hardline conservative. He was very focused on chastity laws and trying to reimpose the puritanical creed of the revolution. And that made him deeply unpopular amongst many Iranians, who also had to suffer from his sort of clueless handling of the economy. The real the country's capital currency lost over half its value over the past three years.

So is that to say then, that on the streets, anyway, Iranians aren't too troubled by his death.

State television has tried to bring out the public in vigils. They've called for supplications. In the hours after his helicopter went down, there was live broadcast of prayers in some of the country's largest mosques. But they were pretty sparsely attended. And in reality, most of the country was holding its breath in anticipation. He was somebody who was deeply unpopular. People very quickly started exchanging jokes on social media. People were urging wild animals to reach the crash site ahead of the rescue teams. There were these Shakespearean images of Mr. Raisi's exit, pursued by a mountain bear. But beneath this gallows humor, there's something much more existential that is worrying Iranians. It's really masking a deep concern about. About what the fate of the country is. The regime has lost so many of its senior stalwarts. Four years ago, it lost its top commander. It's now lost its president and its foreign minister. There's a kind of sense that this is a regime which is led by an aging ayatollah and without the key men at his side, I think many are asking how long the regime itself can sustain itself.

But staying on, Mr. Ricey, for a moment here, given his unpopularity at home, as you say, and certainly among certain quarters abroad, is it reasonable to speculate that there might be some foul play at work here?

The official story so far is that bad weather is the cause. It was rainy and foggy. Visibility was said to be just a few meters. That's certainly what we can see from the video. Iran has a very poor record when it comes to air safety, not least because much of its fleet dates back to before the revolution over 40 years ago. Sanctions has made it very difficult to get spare parts. Army commanders and former minister of Defence have all died in crashes before, so there is a history of planes going down. At the same time, Iranians are very quick to speculate that there could be other explanations. Not Mr. Raisi has a list of internal enemies. Those include sort of relative moderates who he's marginalized and reformers who've been victims of his successive purges. There are many conservatives who think that he's been inept. So there are many within the system who felt deeply uneasy with Mr. Raisi, not just as president, but as a future supreme leader. And then, of course, the country has many external enemies, and there were those who were quick to point their fingers at Israel. There is a long list of potential adversaries, but at this point, there are just far more questions than there are answers.

And so what next, then? Who's going to take over as president?

The authorities have already announced that Mohammed Mukhber, the first vice president, is going to succeed Raisi, but he only has a caretaker role. The country, under the constitution, has to hold elections within the next 50 days. That means sort of rerunning the election of last March, but without the presence, of course, of Braiisi. And it's really not clear who Mr. Khamenei is thinking of stepping into his shoes. In the past, the presidency was a stepping stone for becoming supreme leader. Mr. Khamenei had been president when the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, died, and he was then appointed a supreme leader in Khamenei's place. And it was widely seen that Raisi was being groomed for that role. So there are other candidates, but Raisi had been seen as a front runner. And Now I think Mr. Khamenei is going to be looking around as to who could step into his shoes when he dies.

And is there any obvious choice on that score.

The other name that's widely cited is Mr. Khamenei's second son, Mujtaba. There are deep concerns within the system. Mr. Whether you could have some form of dynastic succession. Of course, the revolution in 1979 was designed to overthrow hereditary rule and the hereditary monarchy. And for Mujtaba to succeed would seem very much like a return to that old hereditary monarchy. But there is a kind of growing body of opinion within the system that is rallying behind him. There are those who see him as an instrument of change. There are some who look to him as Iran's counterpart to Saudi Arabia's MbS, Mohammed bin Salman, who was a crown prince. He's overthrown the crusty religious morays that had governed the country for decades. And there are some who do see him as being able to lead the country away from its revolutionary underpinnings and turn the country away from being a sort of hybrid military and clerical regime to being one which is more akin to a military dictatorship which has shed some of its religious morays that so frustrate many Iranians.

And at the mention of the military, how do you think all of this is going to play out in terms of all of the regional conflicts that Iran is involved with?

Iran's leaders are going to be preoccupied internally. The last thing they want is a regional escalation when they don't fully have their own house in order. That, I think, begs two questions. Firstly, how are Iran's satellites in the region going to react without oversight from their mothership? And then you also have Iran's adversaries in the region who could spy an opportunity to try and further push their influence at a time when Iran is looking weak. And there may be some within Israel who see this as a good opportunity to try and prosecute war across their northern border against Hezbollah. So all told, I think this is a really nervous time for Iran's leaders. It's a very uncertain time for the Iranian population, and there are going to be many in the region who are going to be fearful of the days ahead.

Thanks very much for your time, Nick.

Thank you, Jason. Always a pleasure.

In Britain, allegations and evidence of Chinese spying have been stacking up. In March, Chinese hackers reportedly targeted the Electoral Commission and the email accounts of lawmakers who were critical of China. In April, two people, including a former parliamentary researcher, were charged with spying. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blamed China for hacking into the Armed Forces payment network.

They are a country with fundamentally different values to ours.

They're acting in a way that is.

More authoritarian at home, assertive abroad.

And last week police charged three people, including a former Royal Marine, with conducting foreign interference and aiding the intelligence service of Hong Kong. These days, not at much remove from Beijing, Chinese spokesman Wang Wenbin described all these accusations as sheer fabrications and malicious slander, Which will do little to calm the nerves of Anne Keast Butler, the director of Britain's signals intelligence agency gchq, who recently called China the epoch defining challenge for Britain.

Responding to the scale and complexity of.

This challenge is GCHQ's top priority.

And we now devote more resource to China than any other single mission.

And with good reason. The challenge is an enormous one.

Last year Parliament's Intelligence Committee noted that China had what it said was the largest state intelligence apparatus in the world, one that completely dwarfed British intelligence.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

And while all countries spy, that isn't unusual. The concern among officials is that Chinese espionage is aiming to damage British politics and that it has already done enormous damage to the British economy.

Well, let's start there. What kind of damage do you mean?

Well, for example, last year the Director General of MI5, Ken McCollum, gave a speech. Since 2018, MI5 is conducting seven times more investigations into covert Chinese activity. In my nation, we often see obfuscated masked approaches on professional networking sites to people in the UK who have information our adversaries seek. We've now seen more than 20,000 of those approaches using professional networking sites. So that gives you some sense of scale. He estimated there were about 10,000 businesses at risk. There's also a lot of concern, Jason, about the state of universities which have all kinds of partnerships with Chinese entities and Chinese researchers. There has been a big push in the last couple of months to work with university leaders to do more to be able to vet the kind of researchers that are coming in. There was one study recently of 46 universities that that found between 2017 and 2023 they accepted around 120 to 160 million pounds from Chinese sources. And of those sources, about 20% of that came from entities that had been sanctioned by America over ties to the People's Liberation Army. So obviously Chinese military cash is coming into UK academia.

And what about the risk, as you say, to British politics as well?

So in 2022 MI5, Britain's domestic security service, issued what they called interference alert to Parliament, warning about the activity of someone called Christine Lee. She was a lawyer who had donated about half A million pounds to a Labour MP and she'd been building relationships in Westminster that wasn't at the time against the law. For the record, Christine Lee denies all charges, but it was alarming because it showed that China was trying to influence British politics. Now that concern has continued. In April 2000, men were charged under the Official Secrets act essentially for spying on behalf of China. Now, we can't say more on that because that case is under trial, but what we can say is that there is real concern, I think, not just about political influence, but also about pressure in civil society. And the real concern here, for example, is Chinese agents intimidating other Chinese students on campuses in the uk. And Amnesty International, the ngo, recently published a report saying that students have been forced to followed around on campus, they've been filmed, and that's a real concern. And I think, Jason, the final part of this is a real concern over the role of Chinese technology. You might remember we had a big row a few years ago over whether we should allow equipment from Huawei, the big Chinese tech giant, in the 5G mobile networks in Britain. The government eventually banned that equipment from central parts of the network. But now there are a lot of other disputes, for instance, over whether we should allow Chinese made surveillance cameras in sensitive places and whether we should allow Chinese made wireless modules inside everything from electric vehicles to the smart technology inside your house.

But these kind of technological moves are really only attacking one part of the problem here. What else can the government, should the government be doing?

Well, in the last few years, there has been a flurry of legislative activity designed to counter all of this stuff. One of those things was the National Security act that was passed in 2021 that allows the government to prosecute people for acting effectively as agents of a foreign state. They didn't really have those powers previously and that's already being used. So in May, three people were charged under that act for aiding the intelligence services of Hong Kong, which effectively means aiding Chinese intelligence. That's a big deal. A very, very big deal. In addition to that, there has been the National Security Investment act that has allowed the government to scrutinize inbound investment to make sure that Chinese companies are not taking over really sensitive British ones. There's the Higher Education act that allows the government to compel universities to protect free speech on campus. And there's an element of sort of woke culture wars around that. But the relevant bit here is that it might limit Chinese funding for institutions or research partnerships that are funded by the state. Now there are big questions over whether all of this is being implemented well. For instance, bt, the national telecoms firm, still hasn't removed Huawei equipment from the core of its telecoms network. It's missed two deadlines to do so. Local governments still use Chinese made surveillance cameras. And in fact, if you look at some of the devolved territories in the uk, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, these are not covered by some of these laws because they have their own. So there is a huge debate still taking place, particularly between MPs and the government, as to whether the government has really done enough to protect the country from this kind of national security onslaught by China.

But presumably the more that it does, the more it tightens things up, the more it might threaten less malign connections with China.

That's right. China is Britain's fifth largest trading partner. It is deeply enmeshed in supply chains. So there is this balance between what people call de risking, in other words, making yourself less dependent on China, particularly in very sensitive areas, and taking some economic pain. One big debate right now is Chinese electric vehicles. Just like America, just like the European Union. British politicians are asking, do we allow this flood of cheap Chinese EVs to come in and that will presumably accelerate decarbonisation, or is that going to expose us to Chinese technology inside every vehicle and ultimately slowly destroy our own automotive industry? So these debates are really live.

After multi billion dollar investment deals and agreements ranging from visas to cybersecurity, it was time for a few pints of beer and a basket of fish and chips.

When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he championed business ties with China. Famously drunk a pint of beer with Xi Jinping in a British pub. Those days are over. David Cameron is now Foreign Secretary, he's Lord Cameron and he, I think, is no longer as starry eyed about China as he. Whichever side you're on, Jason, whether you're a hawk, whether you're a dove, I think the real concern is whether Britain has enough expertise to deal with China. To take one example, Jason, the number of students on Chinese studies programs dropped by 31% between 2012 and 2021. And civil servants with Chinese expertise, they're not really rewarded for their expertise. The civil service in the UK rewards generalists who move between different areas. So if this really is what Ken McCollum, the head of MI5, has called a strategic contest across decades, it's something that the UK will really need to build up expertise in if it's going to wage that contest effectively.

Thanks very much for joining us, Zhujong.

Thanks as always, Jason.

So I've been dragged into the studio by Henrietta McFarlane, our assistant producer, but I'm not quite clear why yet. Henrietta, what's going on?

Listen, Jason, I have a really important question for you. I want to know how you went about applying for your first job at the Economist.

Right. Okay. It ends with an envelope full of application materials being delivered by hand on the deadline at the end of the day in the Economist's offices. You know, application test piece. I had the COVID designer actually mock up a cover relevant to the job role. It was all very paper based and stressy.

Yeah, Jason, that does sound like a lot of work. Well, applying for jobs today is a little bit different. It's not just that we can now email in our CVs.

I just want to be clear here. Email did exist at the time, I just didn't avail myself of it.

Sorry, Jason, I didn't mean to imply that you're old, but times have changed a little bit. Lots of young job seekers today are turning to TikTok in search of career advice.

So you are going to show me what some of this career advice looks like?

Yeah, Let me pull up some of the videos. So this is a creator called Lauren Spearman.

Let's talk interview tasks and how ridiculous they are getting. I've got an example.

So Ms. Spearman uploads these videos about what she calls red flag job postings and unreasonable job expectations. And then there's Kenny Buckey, who shares her salary journey and lots of tips for pay negotiations.

The five skills that made me six figures last year are actually simple enough for basically anyone to learn. So let's get into it.

And if I kept scrolling, sooner or later we're pretty likely to come across Brittney Peach. And she went viral after posting a video account of her own experience being laid off from the software company Cloudflare. And now she creates videos offering advice to other young people suffering through similar ordeals.

So this seems a lot like the kind of advice that you'd get from friends, from colleagues, from parents, from teachers, what have you, but in sort of bite sized TikTok Y form. And you're saying it's super popular?

Yep. Jason, these videos are really popular. The hashtag CareerTop has over 2 billion views on the app. And the creators that post these videos are a really diverse bunch of people. There are some creators that are old enough to be former chief executives to 30 somethings recounting their own early career mistakes and then actually lots of gen zers themselves. But as I mentioned before, a lot of the People viewing the clips belong, like me, to Gen Z people born between 1997 and 2012. And given that we're going to make up about 27% of the workforce in the club of rich countries by 2025, this is likely to keep growing.

Yeah, totally. Gen Z. Like eventually you guys are going to be our bosses. I'm interested to know what you can see in this stuff. What patterns do you see? What does it tell you about what Gen Z wants, likes, seeks?

One thing the success of career related content points to is that Gen Zers desire more transparency in the workplace. On that topic I spoke to Chris Williams, who was formerly in charge of human resources at Microsoft.

And frankly, I love the fact that people are recording their layoffs because it is exposing people who are doing terrible layoffs.

He now actually posts his own career advice on TikTok. And Lauren Spearman, who I mentioned earlier, gained her following after she started posting videos on TikTok to document the difficulty she was having with her job hunting.

When I was applying for jobs, there was lack of salary transparency. I was set really unrealistic tasks, doing interviews. I wasn't getting any feedback and in some instances that's just complete ghosting.

So her videos are designed primarily to encourage companies to do better.

I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

And a surprising number of these companies actually respond, which is probably a reflection of the power of TikTok, but also a sign of workers expectations changing.

If you want an example of everything wrong with the job market right now for marketing roles, then I have the perfect example for you.

From Never Fully Dressed after she posted this red flag role clip about a company called Neverfully Dressed, the firm actually replied and the job listing was updated to reflect her criticism. And actually, in the aftermath of Ms. Peach's viral layoff video, Cloudflare's chief executive Matthew Price tweeted on X that the video was painful for him to watch, and he added that the company was determined not to make any similar mistakes in the future. But as well as holding companies accountable, CareerTalk is giving creators and viewers a sense of solidarity.

In the sense that everybody is seeing that these problems are shared and can be overcome.

Yeah, I think so. The fact that so many people have watched these videos and the success of the content offers viewers a sense of strength in numbers.

Just being a black girl, I was coming online and talking about earning, you know, this amount. It's like, oh, all the other black girls are kind of looking at me like oh, I didn't, I didn't know this was possible. Oh my God, you're negotiating salaries. I'm like, yes, yes, I'm negotiating salaries.

So that was Kenny Bucky, and she told me she hopes her thoughts and experiences on pay negotiations will make viewers feel more confident in their own professional lives.

Employers are having to really sit up and like, kind of think, okay, are we paying our employees fairly? How are we treating these people?

And employers don't really have that much choice but to respond well, especially if.

Some of these videos are aimed at them rather than at job seekers, right?

Yeah, exactly. And the videos haven't always had a positive reception from employers. The layoff clips in particular have faced quite a lot of backlash. Even if they don't admit it, I think many older executives find them to be a kind of expression of Gen Z entitlement. And on X, Candice Owens, who's a prominent right wing commentator, called the video that Brittney Peach posted about Cloudflare young and stupid.

Um, stupid. Why?

Well, when I say layoff video, I actually mean someone filming themselves being fired and then posting it on TikTok, which definitely has some interesting legal implications.

Go on.

So I spoke to an employment lawyer called David Harman about this, and he's cautioned creators to be quite mindful about what they're posting. He says it's all too easy to post something that runs afoul of non disclosure and confidentiality agreements or securities laws or trade secrets.

Which I guess seems like valuable career advice in itself.

Yeah, it really does. But those repercussions are unlikely to stop venues like CareerTalk becoming the site of a continued workplace struggle between the expectations of Gen Z workers and employers. And that struggle doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. Even if the American government does succeed in banning TikTok, young professionals will probably just find another outlet.

Henrietta, thanks very much for coming this side of the glass this time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Inspiration Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.