Guerrilla History - China’s Revolution & the Quest for a Socialist Future w/ Ken Hammond

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Ken Hammond to talk about his new book China’s Revolution & the Quest for a Socialist Future!  Here, we provide an overview of modern Chinese history, and Ken makes his case that China is still on the path to a socialist future.  This was a fantastic survey of this history, and will serve as a great introduction to a forthcoming mini-series we will be doing with Ken on some specific events in modern Chinese History! Ken Hammond is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. He has been engaged in radical politics since his involvement in the anti-war movement at Kent State in 1968-70. He is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and an activist with Pivot to Peace.  You can get the book we discussed in this episode from 1804 books. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory                               

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The prince had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckermacki, joined unfortunately by only one of my usual co-hosts. We are joined by Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director at the School of Religion in Queens University, Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? Hi, Henry. I'm doing well and delighted to be with you. Absolutely. I know that you're going very busy these.

days with a lot of research that you're putting in, in the libraries and whatnot. And I certainly want to hear more about what you're finding soon, but I'm glad that you're able to make it for this conversation. Unfortunately, we're not able to be joined by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea, who of course is a host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast as he just got back from some travels and needs to catch up on his Z's. but we do have an excellent guest here in a really great conversation coming our way. Before I introduce the guest and the work that we're going to be talking about,

I just want to remind listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue doing what we do by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. There you are able to, like I said, support the show, keep us up and running, and you also get some bonus content by doing that, including an ongoing mini-series that Adnan and I are doing on the religious cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. You can also follow us on Twitter to keep up with all that we're putting out by looking for us at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod.

As I mentioned, we have a great guest today in a really fascinating work. We're going to be talking with Ken Hammond, who's a professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, about his new book, China's Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future from 1804 books. Hello, Ken. It's nice to have you on the program. Thanks for having me here. Well, like I said, we're really looking forward to the conversation. And this book is one that I would highly recommend to anybody that's listening.

If for no other reason, and of course there are other reasons, that it's a very good condensed history of modern Chinese history. There's not that many other good books that come from an explicitly left. perspective that that compressed Chinese history which of course is so labyrinthin and in so many ways into such a small and easily digestible text you really do manage to cram a lot and rather small number of pages so I do commend you on that for the first part of this conversation I think that we're just going to have you sketch out this this modern Chinese history and eventually we're going to build up to the argument that you pose in this work

which is that despite contradictions, China is still a socialist country. And of course, we're going to discuss this position as we get into it. But I want to start by asking about where you begin the book, which is really the 18th century. So why is it that we're beginning this story of kind of modern Chinese history in the 17th century? You know, why doesn't it go back earlier than that? And why doesn't it pick up later than that? You talk a lot about what's going on in the 18th century here as we get underway. So why is that?

Well, I think that, you know, when ideally trying to come to grips with modern Chinese history, you know, there's this sort of process of almost infinite regression. You know, if you want to understand what's happening today, obviously we have to look back to how the revolution took place. And then we have to look back to, you know, what gave rise to the revolution and the ideas and the practices that could be called on there. And that takes us back into the failures of the old regime. and it goes on and on and on. And you could go back, you could easily go back in talking about the origins and the roots of modern China. You could go back a thousand years. Then the book would be, you know, a lot bigger and a lot more complex and a lot, I think, less accessible.

I think that if we start in the 18th century and really sort of towards the end of the 18th century, we can start with a historical period, sort of the end of a long historical period, in which China was a wealthy, prosperous society. It was probably the most technologically sophisticated economy in the world. It was highly productive. Chinese goods such as ceramics and silk and tea and many others were in great demand in the global economy. Chinese products had been being cranked out into international trade

for hundreds of years by the 18th century. people from around the world, especially people from Europe, were drawn to China, but also people, you know, from the Indian Ocean realm, from East Asia, were drawn to China through their demand for these Chinese goods. And that had structured a lot of global economic relations, again, over a very, very long period of time. So that's kind of a threshold, in a sense. And if we understand that China was this very sophisticated economy, in many ways, a capitalist commercial economy, commercial capitalist economy, a pre-industrial economy, although it did have certain industrial dimensions. But if we can understand what China was like at that point, that's kind of a takeoff point, because then we can see the changes that take place and situate them as part of an ongoing historical process, which, you know, doesn't fall from the sky, and so we want to have its, we want to trace its origins, but in order to do that, it's good, you know, you have to have a sort of a starting point, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a. a launch pad from which we can we can track out the changes that are going to be taking place. Yeah, I guess as Adnan is getting his thoughts together on that, I guess I'll just

stay with this now that we've talked about kind of why you pick up with Chinese history in the 18th century for this book. Can you kind of sketch out some of the major points in the 18th century and early 19th century in Chinese history? Because again, understanding this history is really critical to understanding China today. I mean, this is historical materialism 101. You really have to understand how the history works in order to understand the present, right? That's kind of what we do with this show in general. And so in order to understand what's going on today, in order to make informed, you know, assessments of current Chinese political character, we do have to have some understanding of the history. So what are some of the major events that you

touched on in this book in the late 18th century? in early 19th century. And then, of course, we'll get into more in the, you know, more contemporary days. But what are some of those early events that you talk about in the book? Sure. Sure. Well, I'd use one event in particular in the book and in my teaching. I think it's a really, it's a convenient way to take a look at what's happening at the towards the end of the 18th century

based upon what the situation was, you know, going back far into the past before that, which is that, as I said, there were all these complex. that were being produced in China, that were in great demand in other places, including in Europe and in the sort of Western Atlantic world, all that area. But the West didn't really have any goods, any commodities that were in demand in China. And what that meant was that for centuries, the trade with China had basically been a cash trade, where foreigners had to come to China, basically with silver, and they used that silver to buy Chinese goods, which they could then take elsewhere and sell and make a profit.

So it was a, you know, they were doing all right. They were, it was a profitable exchange, but it required the, you know, the constant production and expenditure of silver to have access to these Chinese goods. And the British in particular, they were the biggest Western traders with China. They were very frustrated by this. Luckily, for all of this system, there was a lot of silver being pumped into the global economy from the mines in the Spanish New World that had opened up in the late 16th century and from a few other sources. But that was the major source, the mines at Potosi and in what it's now Bolivia and at places like Zacatecas and Lanojato and Mexico.

Mexico, all that silver being pumped into the economy, about half of that eventually winds up in China, either by the Trans-Pacific trade that Spain ran or via Britain or other Northern Europeans that were trading. So that just sets a sort of threshold again. When the British, as the British were taking over, beginning the process of taking over India, one of the things they did there was to undermine and basically wipe out what had been the most sophisticated cotton textile industry in the world. Indian cotton textiles, you know, were in demand everywhere. They were, they were in demand, obviously, in India and other parts of Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in the Americas. They had a wide range of product.

you know, very inexpensive stuff all the way up to super elite kind of products. They had mastered certain techniques of dyeing cotton fabrics that were, the Europeans hadn't been able to figure out how to reproduce those. So the Indian textile industry was this, you know, globally dominant force. But the British at the end of the 18th century

were, you know, aspiring to ramp up their old cotton textile industry. That gets involved with, you know, the whole explosive launch of the Industrial Revolution. That's a whole historical narrative in its own right. But what the East India Company, the royally chartered corporation that ran the India trade, what they did was they got involved in a political controversy in the region of Bengal. They wound up taking control of that region, which was a center of cotton textile production. They forced farmers to stop growing cotton, one of the,

the benefits that the Indian industry had was that cotton was produced right there so transport costs were minimal and that when they stopped producing cotton then the the weavers and the manufacturers the fabric people many of them went out of business

and the British in fact took off and took looms that were very sophisticated big productive looms shipped them back to England where they were kind of retro-engineered Those became components of, you know, hooking them up with steam engines and water wheels and stuff. That became a driving factor in the advancement of the British Industrial Revolution.

But back in India, all those farmers who were no longer growing cotton had to grow something, and the EIC had them grow opium. And that becomes the origin of the opium trade, which the EIC then focuses on China. They import smuggle because it was illegal in China. They smuggle so much opium into China that it actually reverses the flow of silver, which for centuries had been a net gain for China. Now they start to lose silver in the domestic economy. That's a long sweep. That's a long process.

But one of the incidents that I start the book with is in 1793, the British send a trade mission to China. It's called the McCartney mission. Lord McCartney is the leader of it. and it's their calling for free trade with China, basically. And, you know, the Qing state at that point was uninterested in that. They had a system of trade that involved state oversight, and this is very important, again, when we think about how this stuff can be relevant for contemporary China. They didn't just want to throw their domestic market, which was a dynamic commercial capitalist economy,

but they didn't want to just throw it open to sort of rampant free trade. trade, free marketing. They wanted to make sure that they exercised some control over especially this international trade. So they sent Lord McCartney home with a letter to King George saying thanks but no thanks. And that was that for the time being. But as the Industrial Revolution ramps up in England and Britain, it not only transforms the productive economy in the sense of you know, vastly greater amounts of goods at vastly lower unit cost. But it transforms military technology and transportation technology. And that gives the British the capacity to project much greater military power,

much faster, anywhere in the world. And by the 1830s, you know, 40 years after the McCartney mission, the opium trade has just grown and grown and grown. It's illegal in China. and the Chinese are trying to stop it to shut it down. And the British in 1839 decided to go to war, not Parliament doesn't vote, you know, let's go to war for our drug dealers,

although that's exactly what it is. But they put it on the basis of the principle of free trade. And they, you know, have an incredible military technological advantage over the Chinese. China had never been threatened by invasion from the sea. It's the Chinese whole Chinese security. culture was focused on inner Asia, so they didn't really understand just how much of a threat the Brits were going to be. And when the Royal Navy comes and they start bombarding cities up and

down the coast, killing, you know, thousands of people and destroying property and all this, China tries to resist, but capitulates it by 1842, signs these treaties with Britain and then other countries, the United States, France, Germany, etc. And that's, that starts, this great transformation where the Chinese economy is hollowed out. Cheap Western goods are pouring in. Western companies are coming in and taking over different sectors of the economy. The international trade goes totally, not totally, but almost entirely out of the hands of the Chinese and is dominated by foreign, the foreign powers.

They open up what they call treaty ports, where they have control over the legal system. They have what's called extraterritoriality. They get to set the tariff rates That they build that into the treaty system It's a terrible time for China The Chinese economy, domestic economy, deflates And you know It goes into this sort of century-long crisis

The Chinese refer to this period As the century of humiliation From the 1840s to basically to the 1940s And that's just a long stretch where the fortunes of China China goes from being this powerful, prosperous, respected empire in the global system of the 18th century

to the sick man of Asia or just this weak, exploited, oppressed territory that the foreigners, they don't become a colony of a single European power, but there's a kind of equal opportunity imperialism where all the different imperialist powers, get involved and sort of have either their little spheres of influence or simply

share in the exploitation because there's just so much to be had in China. And that, as I say, that goes on for a very long time down until in the midst of the 20th century. That's so fascinating to encapsulate that very important transition point, you know, in the 1830s and 40s, you know, as a pre-modern historian, you know, I very much appreciate the portrait and picture of China as a globally important source of manufacture for high-quality goods, porcelain, silk, paper, you know, all of these things. And of course, as a medievalist, you know, it is seen as the kind of center, you know, you might say, of advanced production and culture and so on.

And, you know, this reversal that takes place in modernity from the narrative and the way you were describing it has to be appreciated a few things. One is that there is a process of underdevelopment and of creating dependency, just as like Walter Rodney talked about how Europe underdeveloped Africa. I mean, we could say the same, you know, in some ways you're saying how Britain and other European powers underdeveloped China through this kind of violent process of, you know, introducing drugs, you know, dependency to change the economic kind of relationship and then the military power to really, you know, exploit it and enforce these so-called free trade sorts of agreements.

A second point that I think is so important and interesting that you mentioned is the interplay, you know, between what happens in India and what happens in China, that they're very connected histories. can't happen in some ways without, you know, the predicates of the other. And, you know, we had a great interview with a young historian of Asia, Andrew Liu, who wrote this book, Tea War, on history of capitalism in India and China. And that was another occasion for observing the interplay through British imperial history of the, you know, these parts of the global South that are very important and were both hugely wealthy kind of sources of, you know, kind of non-Western civilization. And I guess sort of the third quest point that maybe leads to the real question

that I have here is how this background, you know, also points out because, you know, in most like Marxist theory or Marxist-inspired theory, There hasn't been a real recognition of China as a kind of capitalist, you know, having a version of capitalism because of the way was, you know, defined in, you know, the European historical transition of the industrial revolution as wage labor, you know, as being this kind of crucial step. And you don't have the same kind of systems of land tenure, production and so on. People are staying on the land. It's still a peasant proletariat as you were, you know, pointing out. And that was something that Andrew Liu in his book, you know, suggests is that if we widen our understanding of how to understand capitalism, we can see how there are transitions in intensification of labor exploitation through various different means and mechanisms. But do you think that because you're taking this approach that there was something like a kind of form of capitalism that is sort of eliminated in some ways or at least subordinated to this Western.

imperial kind of power projection that incorporates China and India into their kind of world system in a new way, that these are the roots in some ways of being able to appreciate, you know, socialism with Chinese characteristics because you can't have exactly the same definition of like how you define and understand capitalism? Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's really critical. That, you know, historical materialism, dialectical materialism, Marxism, however, whatever label we want to hang on these things, this is, and Marx is very, very clear about this himself, you know, throughout his work and certainly some of the prefaces to the different volumes of capital, he's very clear that he's using a method of historical analysis to develop an understanding of the particular history of the development of capitalism. and the operations, the functions of the capitalist system

in a case study essentially of Britain, right, with references to other parts of Europe, to France, to the German states at that point. But basically, it's a narrative that, you know, uses this one example, this one case study, to develop a model of a capitalist system, right? and he, you know, draws various attributes that are characteristic of that system. But he, you know, he's very clear that this is not the only way in which this can happen.

And these particular structures are not the only forms that these functions can take, right? And indeed, you know, there's points. there's a really good, a couple of good books on sort of late marks, you know, the marks of the late 70s, the early 80s before his death in 1883, where he is spending more time thinking about other models, other places. He has, of course, that famous exchange with Clara Zetkin in Russia about, you know, the role of the commune in rural society in Russia. and he looks at places like Peru, pre-Columbian economies in the new world. He looks at quite a number of places. At the same time, Marx's writings,

the things that he says in his writings explicitly about Asia, about India or China, are informed by a state of knowledge, which was, I suppose, we could say, inadequate, In certain ways, because Marx develops, and I've written some about this in a couple of places for monthly review online, develops an understanding of Asian economies as basically pretty static and, you know, unchanging and kind of mired in a sort of rural, you know, local self-sufficiency, local, you know, what's a subsistence kind of farming and all this. When in fact, you know, as our understanding is in the West, as our understanding of the economic history of China has evolved and as modern, you know, as especially in the socialist period, economists and China, economic historians and China have worked on this. it's become clear that that was absolutely not the case, that China's economic history, at least

certainly over the last thousand years of the imperial era, was very dynamic, very creative, technologically innovative. You know, there's scholarship like Ben Elman's scholarship on science in China shows that, you know, it's just not this idea of a sort of stagnant, unchanging, a, you know, sort of feudalist, it's just not, it's just not accurate. If we had, you know, if you sort of take almost a kind of checklist of characteristics that Marx talks about in his history, in his discussions of capitalism in Britain, you know, commodity production, a monetized economy, you know, division of labor, specialization of commodity production, banking and finance. I mean, all kinds, we find exactly the same features in the Chinese economy. They don't look exactly the same. It's an economy that is largely based not on sort of secular corporations, but on lineage

associations, for example. But they are corporate structures. They accumulate capital. They make investment decisions. They diversify their activities. You know, in some instances, trying to monopolize a particular. particular sector, in others, you know, collaborating with other producers or other distributors. You know, there's banking and finance. There's financial centers in Jujang province,

in Shanshi province that have been studied, but haven't been integrated into a sort of synthetic understanding of the totality of what functions as a commercial capitalist economy. You know, Jiris Banagy has his whole recent book on commercial capitalism, where he's, He looks at examples from around the world. He talks about China a bit in there. I think there's a lot more that can be done with that. I'm working on a book on this myself. But there's a lot more that can be done to help us have a more sophisticated and nuanced

understanding of what that economy was like. And there's even places in Marx where he writes about the British commercial agricultural economy, capitalist agricultural economy in the 17th or 18th centuries and how that sometimes led to collaboration and sort of political alliances with the mainstream, you know, the

London merchants in a pre-industrial moment, you know. So that, you know, that, even in Europe, Marx is able to understand that that sort of collaboration can take place at the level of the elites.

And again, you know, what happens in China is that you get this agricultural proletariat, as Mao Zedong comes to characterize it, spread across the empire in this period where agricultural production has become commodity production, you know, large enterprises, not just in primary production, but in the trade, you know, grain craters, marketers, soy, what's the, of stuff that's derived from soybean production that used as a fertilizer, soy paste, you know, being produced in one area and packaged and marketed and shipped off to other areas. It's a very elaborate commercial capitalist economy. And if we understand that, and then we look at the political economy dimensions of it, how did the Chinese think about their economy, what did they say about their economy, How did the state function within that economy? What's the relationship between political elites and economic elites?

Again, we see patterns that reflect the kinds of interactions you would expect in that circumstance. One difference, and it's an important one, is that you don't get in the sweep of Chinese history. You don't get the antagonism. We don't get that sort of bourgeois, aristocratic antagonism that drives so much of early modern and modern European history, because as the commercial economy flourishes, and the merchants, of course, are politically disenfranchised in China. They're not allowed to sit to the imperial examinations. They can't become government officials. That distinction erodes over time, but it's always there to at least some extent. But even so, there's a convergence of interest between, you know, sort of mercantile manufacturing interests, urban-based production, textile production, ceramic production, you know, tea, marketing, all this kind of stuff. The elites that evolve from that, that accumulate wealth, there's a convergence of interest between them and the old landed elites that have now become commodity producers themselves. they meet in the marketplace.

So you get big landowners investing in commercial enterprises. You get manufacturers, textile people and tea merchants and stuff, investing in land. You get a convergence of elite interests. They're all, of course, oppressing workers and peasants. But they don't have the same antagonistic relationship that we see in Europe. And that gives the trajectory of development in China a different quality. but it doesn't invalidate the idea that the commercial capitalist economy is what's really operating. Yes.

No, it's a wonderful response, and it helps, you know, restore our view of things because there's been a lot, I would say, you know, in some ways bad faith or unfair criticism of Marx that he's adopted some of these Orientalist sort of tropes when he talks about, you know, non-Western people. people without at the same time recognizing and acknowledging that, you know, he was not a scholar of China or of India. He didn't have access to primary, you know, sources. And, you know, he was having to go on the state of contemporary, you know, colonialist era scholarship and his presumptions. And, you know, but at the same time, I guess the other side of it is, as you've pointed out, this, you know, that there might have been opportunities that he was starting to explore, there might have been opportunities for him to expand and relativize in some ways the model of the development of capitalism from the European history by that

comparative sense and also by, you know, recognizing, you know, the way in which the underdevelopment of the rest of the world was absolutely crucial, you know, to the development. You know, the Industrial Revolution didn't just happen because there were some, you know, productive forces that start to get, you know, managed, there's like active, you know, exploit, there's active depredation, you know, I mean, what he calls primitive accumulation, like if primitive accumulation had featured a bit more in his kind of analysis about how you get, you know, the industrial revolution, you know, then we might have been able to join up some of these sides more fully, but then, you know, that's what people like you were, you know, attempting to do. It's like, let's,

you know, kind of carry this on with genuine materialist. historical analysis of these situations. So I really appreciate, I really appreciate. I think it's very important. And hopefully, you know, as you're writing another, you know, book that will may engage, I hope we'll stay in, you know, contact about that in the future. I would hope so too. Okay. I guess I'll follow up then. You left when we were talking about Chinese history, we left off kind of in the century of humiliation. And before we move on, One of the things that you talk about during the century of humiliation within your book is how there was a lot of, you know, periodic resistance that came up, rebellion resistance. And of course, the most famous one and the one that you spend the most time on in the book is the Taiping rebellion.

But there really was this, you know, there was successive waves of rebellion against this colonial and Western imperialism on China. I'm wondering if before we move on to more contemporary Chinese history, if you can talk about the spirit of rebellion and these waves of rebellion that take place and maybe talk a little bit about the Taiping rebellion in particular. But what I'm particularly interested in is, you know, the whole the spirit of rebellion and this ongoing resistance to Western imperialism that was present in China during the century of humiliation because when we, I mean, in the West, we often don't get to read about the century of humiliation at all.

But when we do, it's often portrayed as there was the Taiping Rebellion, but other than that, like, they were pretty passive. And people who read more about China, they know that that's not the case. But when you look in U.S. history high school textbooks, that's generally how it's portrayed, not that, you know, American history textbooks should be what we look to for actually learning history. And that's a big problem that we have in the U.S. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, is that I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on the more ongoing spirit of rebellion and anti-imperialism that was present in China during this period of time. Sure, sure. Well, you know, the onset of imperialism, of Western imperialism in China, you know, you get the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 that starts this process of opening up the treaty ports.

And that's an ongoing process. They start with, you know, these five along the southern coast, but as time goes by, there are more and more and more added not only on the coast, but along the, excuse me, along the Yangs River and eventually at other places in the interior. The penetration of Western capitalism, Western imperialism into the Chinese economy has tremendously disruptive effect. So it has really, you know, concrete material impacts on the lives of many ordinary Chinese people. and not surprisingly, they don't like that. You know, China can't, has not been able or it had not been able to stand up militarily to the power of British imperialism. But that doesn't mean that everybody then just sort of throws out the towel. And what we see is resistance on all kinds of scales, you know, from just sort of hostility.

directed towards foreigners, towards foreign soldiers or foreign merchants or foreign missionaries, things like that, up to much more organized, systematic kinds of rebellions. And there are a number of those.

Certainly, the Taiping gets a lot of attention. It has some particular qualities that make it kind of of interest to the West. But it's by no means the only example. It is a fascinating example. It's one case, and I'll talk about it a little bit, and then maybe just talk about one

really big one, the Boxer Rebellion. But the Taiping Rebellion is an interesting, it's an interesting case, and it's not unique to China. There are movements like this that develop in Korea, the Tohok movement in Korea, developed down in French Indochina, the Kaudai movement down there, which are movements in which people, ordinary people, try to come to grips with not just the economic but also the sort of cultural impact of Western imperialism. Because, you know, the weakening of the economy, the disruptions in the economy, the pain, the suffering that's introduced, that's imposed on millions and millions of ordinary people. it, you know, they have to think about what is this mean? Why is this happening to us? What's going on?

And in these various East Asian cultures, and I'm sure there's other examples we could talk about as well. One thing that happens is there's a kind of semi-appropriation of elements from the West and a kind of assimilation or melding of those into new ideas and new doctrines as a way of kind of trying to cope with this threat almost by turning it around against itself, okay? And that's what happens with the Taiping. The Taiping Rebellion is basically set in, trained by a fellow named Hongshuo Quan. and Hong Shuo Chuan, a fascinating figure, he's a member of what's called the Haka community, which is a subset of the Han ethnicity in China.

There are people who had originally lived in northern China but moved south back around the 7th or 8 centuries, by which time there was already a well-established Chinese society in southern China, what's now southern China. So they were kind of newcomers, and they were excluded. they're often referred to as guest families. Haka is a southern dialect term that means guest families. Even though this was a thousand years ago by this time, you know, so again, it's the long perspective in Chinese history that we encounter many times. But Hohsi Huan is from the Haka community. Many Haka people had been involved in, you know,

as part of the system of international trade that had been in place in China, focused on the southern port of Guangzhou or Kenton, as the Westerners called it. Westerners called it. And many Hatha people were porters. That is to say, they carried goods over the mountains in southern China, goods that were produced in central China, which was a big center of ceramic production and tea production and things like that.

They carried them over the mountains to the markets down in Guangzhou. But that system collapses, very rapid. rapidly in the wake of the opening of the treaty ports. And so a lot of Haka people are finding themselves in severe economic straits. And Heng Shōkhochuan, like many young men in Imperial China, had the ambition. He was a smart guy. He had the ambition of taking the imperial examinations and perhaps, if he could pass, getting a position in the government. This was a, you know, once you pass the exams, you were kind of a made man.

you had career options. This was a dream that was shared by literally millions of young men in China. Hong Shuo Tuan studied very hard, his family sacrificed. They gave up basically his productive labor so that he could read books and study and master the knowledge you needed for the exam. But he failed as 90% of people who sat for the exam did. The exam, you know, it was a very steep inclined to get up through the exam. examination system. He fails, and he fails repeatedly. You could take the primary level exams

once every three years. He goes down to Guangzhou, that city, to take them, and he never passes. And this is very stressful because, you know, he's worked hard, his family is sacrificed. They put a lot into the hopes for his future this way, and it's just not happening. Well, Guangzhou at this time, this was the only place up until 1842 that foreigners could come to trade. And so there were also, in Guangzhou, there were Western missionaries. And Hojo-Tren encounters, you know, walking down the street one day, somebody hands him some religious tracts, some Christian tracts. He probably glances at him. He takes him out and puts him in a drawer or whatever.

but after one of his later failures at the exams he has kind of a nervous breakdown and he stays in his room for about six weeks keeps the blinds down he's just he's just so stressed out and during that time he has some visions let's call them in which he encounters some strange figures a bearded old guy and a yager fella and then he have a conversation with him he does it doesn't make sense to him he doesn't make sense to him he doesn't doesn't know what it's going on. But when he recovers and he starts to get back to work, he comes across these Christian tracts in this drawer, and he reads them and he says, oh, Lord, now how I understand it. He had been visited by God at Jesus, and they told him that he was Jesus' younger brother.

Okay? You can see how this appropriation of Western motifs can be empowering. And so he conceives this idea of bringing, you know, that Jesus came to the world, to bring Christianity to the West, and now it's his mission to bring this new idea

to the East, essentially. And he starts at first for a while in the 40s. He's working out in the countryside. They establish what we might think of as a kind of rural commune. They become self-sufficient. They practice the sort of primitive communalism.

Hong Shuo Tread reads more stuff about Christianity. It's not clear how sophisticated his understanding of all that became. but they develop an alternative economic model. They want to disengage from the commercial capital agricultural economy. They want to become self-sustaining. They want to share property. They want to share wealth that they're producing.

And so it's this sort of Christian primitive communist idea. They get in trouble for that, and that eventually triggers the rebellion. The rebellion becomes massively successful. Millions and 20 million or so people join in. In the course of this, they go to the north, up to the Yangtze River Valley in central China. They establish what they call the heavenly kingdom on earth, but they take over the old, long-past imperial capital at Nanjing. And this rebellion goes on for 15 years, right? Lots of people flock to the cause, and they try to produce this radically alternative society,

a much more egalitarian, a much more caring and participatory society. Contradictions emerge within the Taiping movement, and that's a history that anti-revolutionaries love to hype up. But in the end, it's, you know, the Qing state is able to mobilize resources. It causes a lot of problems for the Qing state, but they're able to mobilize resources. Eventually, the Taiping are suppressed. And that brings that whole episode to an end.

But it, you know, it certainly reveals the deep frustration and alienation both against the impacts of Western imperialism and against the reactionary elite, you know, this commercial elite of manufacturing and agriculture that dominates rural society, you know, that perviates China at this point. As things, as economic conditions are going, you know, increasingly deteriorating, people are increasingly looking for a radical alternative. And that's really what the hope of the Taiping Rebellion suggests. Later, I mean, there are other smaller localized rebellions that take place in different parts in China. But the other really, really big example, of course, is the Boxer Rebellion at the very end of the 19th century, which is, again, a rebelling. reaction against both the economic impact of imperialism and the cultural assault, if you will, on Chinese traditional society, traditional culture that comes in the wake of imperialism, comes right along with imperialism.

Yeah, just to butt in for one second, Ken, so I want to make sure that particularly American listeners listen particularly closely to this section, because when I mentioned that the Taiping rebellion was the most famous of the rebellions during the century of humiliation, of course, the Boxer Rebellion was the other famous one. But as people who were schooled in the United States as I was, you will remember the Boxer rebellion from world history. And at least in the textbooks that we used, it was always portrayed as this very weird, you know, rebellion of like just these kind of religious traditionalist weirdos who were just lashing out against foreigners for no reason without really ever connecting the dots of, well, why were the foreigners there? Why were

they lashing out? You know, why, why were they focusing on the traditional culture that was there and why were they focusing on the, the foreigners that were present within the cities, particularly those port cities there? Like, you know, they never put the connections together of why were the Westerners there? Why were the businesses that were being run their Western businesses? And why were they focusing on the traditional, uh, culture of the area? They just portrayed them as these, you know, kind of weirdos, like without a, you know, more, I guess academic term to use for it. But really, I do distinctly remember being taught about how weird the boxers were.

And so I, and I know that I am not the only person who received that sort of education on the boxer rebellion during my, my school years. So I want to make sure that the listeners are like really queued in for what you're about to say here because, I mean, the boxer rebellion was an anti-imperialist rebellion, plain and simple. And so this is important to just keep in mind as we go into this. Sure, sure. And, you know, thinking about sort of Western understandings of the Boxer Rebellion and really of the whole question of the role of imperialism in China and all that, you know, there was, I think it's made in the 1950s, maybe the 1960s, there's a movie called 55 Days at Peking, which is about the Boxer Rebellion and specifically about the 1850s. power expedition, which was sent in the military expedition of this coalition of imperialist

powers that was sent in to suppress the boxers and lift the siege that they had imposed on the diplomatic order in Beijing. And of course, it's an American film, so the Americans appear to be the main actors, which they weren't. But the portrayal of the boxers is this very racist portrayal of the sort of fanatical, religious, you know, mystical, you know, crazy people that had to be, you know, had to be disciplined and putting their place by the Enlightened West. You know, it's just this horrifying narrative. But that's very characteristic of sort of mainstream culture in the West and sadly remain so in many ways. raised today. The Boxer rebellion, you know, as you say, it's an anti-imperialist rebellion.

It arises in the western part of Shandong province on the east coast of China, and that's a province that had become a sphere of influence for Germany. Germany has, you know, had its great colony there at Qingdao on the coast. And of course, one of the only decent legacies of imperialism in China, it is the continuing production of Qingdao beer. But leaving that aside, from Qingda, the Germans sort of fanned out in the province. And one of the things that triggers the boxer rebellion is the German missionaries. Because German missionaries were all over the province. They were protected by the Qing state under treaty obligations. But they were very disruptive in local societies because, you know, they were, of course, introducing these alien

heterodox ideas, but they also had an economic impact. They had an economic impact because they recruited people through economic incentives. There were a lot of people who, others in China, other Chinese in their same communities, referred to as rice Christians, who only went to the missions for food, for meals, for things like that. Shandong, western Shandong province especially, was always an area that struggled economically, even though it's on the route of the Grand Canal. And so there was traded going on and passing through there.

The rural economy was often problematic. It's an area there were chronic rebellions. Later on, in the 20th century, it's one of the areas where there were something called the Red Wolf movement that persisted all the way down until liberation.

So it's a tough area in many ways. And it's an area in part because of that where martial arts traditions were very highly developed. And the martial arts

community becomes the focal point of resistance to both the economic and the cultural impact of Western imperialism, particularly of the Germans, who of course are kind of late comers

to the imperialist game, but nonetheless are there in this particular locality in a very serious way. So at first, the Boxer Rebellion focuses very much on these missions and German businesses, which were seen as, you know, correctly so, as exploiting the local markets, as taking advantage of the needs, you know, raising prices when grain was scarce, things like this, the ability of the Qing state to intervene and regulate, prices in the grain markets had eroded. That had been a key feature of the traditional political economy. Now, because of restraints on the Qing state imposed through the treaties,

they can't do that anymore. So it's a very problematic situation for people. So at first, there's anti- imperialist anti-German attacks on missions and things like that. And initially, the Qing state orders the local officials to try to stop this. But very quickly, as the boxer movement grows, the Qing government realizes that this could be an opportunity to push back against Western imperialism. And so the Qing state stops trying to suppress the boxers and instead wants to sort of unite with them in an effort to push back to resist any further depredations, and if possible, to roll back some of the, some of the intrusions of imperialism into China. And so 1899, 1900, the movement grows, eventually this large column

of boxers. They're called boxers again. Again, it's a sort of Western kind of dismissive term because they were practitioners of martial arts. And there were certain, certain They wore certain talismans. They engaged in their exercises and they had their special diet. It's a popular martial arts tradition and community. But this gets ridiculed again by the West as just sort of, you know, primitive, mystical silliness or something like that. But these were very disciplined people. Anybody who's worked with martial arts, anybody who takes it seriously knows,

this is not it's not just some fun and games thing these were very disciplined very serious people dedicated to a political agenda that involved getting rid of western imperialism you know and that's there's no way around that so they go to be jane where they are you know welcomed by the by the ching state and uh by by june of 1900 they impose a siege on what's called the legation quarter the area where basically the embassies, the diplomatic representatives of the Western powers, were located. It's down in central Beijing and just a little bit southeast of the old imperial palace. And they besiege it. They want to get rid of the foreign diplomats.

They want to get rid of the presence of imperialism right there in the capital. And that's a pretty serious initiative. The imperialists, of course, are flipping out. they don't, you know, they're not going to, they don't want to have this happen. So the eight imperialist powers, and it includes, like, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you know, Japan, Russia, France, England, the United States, Italy. That may be all of them. I can't remember if that's all, but they joined together, and they send this, this mission

up the railway line from Tianjin, which is the port city near Beijing. and they fight their way in and they lift the seas, they save the diplomats and all that. And then, you know, they impose this new round of humiliation on China, the boxer convention, the treaty, they extort this massive indemnity that the Qing state, you know, had to pay and the Republic had to pay. And all the fortunately, finally, the People's Republic. repudiates all that. But, you know, this was a huge drain of resources. It's further oppression and exploitation. But the Boxer Rebellion, you know, was a massive anti-imperialist movement

that gained both popular support and, you know, the endorsement of the imperial state, the Chinese, the Chinese imperial state. You know, although it is suppressed by the superior military power of the West. You know, it remains an inspiration, shall we say, for anti-imperialists in China today, of whom there is no shortage. You know, there's a lot more that I like to ask about the Boxer Rebellion. Interestingly, it was one of the first episode ideas that I've had was to do like a deep dive in the Boxer Rebellion, kind of a blow-by-blow origins, events of aftermath and one of the reasons why we haven't done it yet is it's been relatively difficult to find a guest who would be willing to talk at length about the boxer

rebellion can i think we're going to bring you back on in the future to talk just about the boxer rebellion for an entire episode if you don't mind uh but i do want to make sure that we turn it over to ad non here because well there's so much more to talk about in this book i mean we haven't really even gotten to the the main thrust of the book or the purpose of the book yet and I know that you don't have forever for this interview. So Adnan, why don't you take us forward from here? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, thanks so much for this background. So, you know, that's the century of humiliation. I guess we should turn to what is the manner and method by which China turned revolutionary and ends this century of humiliation. Well, how do you see that

unfolding, particularly, you know, in the post-World War I kind of era. How does, you know, China turn revolutionary? You know, we had these acts of resistance or movements of resistance, you know, a quasi-Christian kind of religious movement in the Taiping rebellion and then, you know, kind of martial arts-based discipline. But they're clearly tapping into something very significant, as you've been pointing out, about anti-imperialist sort of tendencies, maybe some emergence of a kind of nationalist sort of feeling of some kind. But how does it turn a revolutionary? Well, that's an important question, obviously, going forward. Yeah, you know, as China is invaded and exploited and oppressed by imperialism. Of course, many Chinese, not just rebellions out

in the countryside or, you know, sort of direct resistance to the impositions of imperialism. But people educated Chinese at all different kinds of levels, not just the old Mandarin elite, but people, you know, self-educated people, people from traditional village schools and things like that. They're asking questions. They want to know. what's going on? How do we get into this mess? How can we get out of this mess? What can we do to sort of salvage our situation? Because, you know, the imperialists are talking at different points about carving China up, you know, like a melon, you know, maybe taking what had been these sort of vague spheres of influence and really turning them into, dismembering the empire and

turning them into little colonial possessions. China was very seriously menaced, economically, politically, militarily. And people want to find ways to counter that, to restore China, to revive China, to bring China back to a position of independence, of autonomy, of, you know, being able to control its own fate. But it's clear that the power of the West is something that needs to be understood in order to be overcome, right? So people start both examining the West,

trying to learn things from the West, and developing their critique of the problems of the institutional, structural problems within China that, you know, keep them down. And so that

develops that, that goes along two paths. And there's, in the first decades of the 20th century, of course, there's the rebellion, the overthrow of the imperial system, beginning in October 1911, and with the abdication of the last emperor in February 1912, 2,000 years of imperial rule come to an end. That doesn't mean that the old elite classes, especially the land-owning class in the countryside, that they go away, but the structure of the imperial state goes away.

And there's this brief abortive effort to create a modern sort of liberal democracy. Elections are held. But that stuff goes by the boards very quickly. China descends into this fragmented warlord era of about a decade. Some people in China, figures like Tsayuan Pei and Li Da Zhao, Chandushu, they start to look at the traditional culture and they start to develop what they call the new culture movement, new ideas. you know, science, democracy, other ideas like that. 1917 comes along, the Bolshevik Revolution, very important impact on China. They overthrow the Tsar, just as the Chinese had overthrown the emperors.

But they embark on a radically different path. They're not just trying to create a sort of liberal, democratic, you know, bourgeois republic. They're talking about a people's government. They're talking about these councils, these Soviets. It's a whole different ballgame. They repudiate the imperialist treaties that the Tsar state had with China. You know, and they expose, they publish a lot of information about the corruption and the, you know, the imperialist nature of the Tsar state.

And people in China start to look at that and they're thinking, whoa, what's going on here? ideas of more radical ideology. Anarchism, Marxism, other kinds of socialism, had begun to come into China. Some of that via Chinese students who had gone to Japan, where many of these things were being discussed as well. Some Chinese during World War I go to France as part of labor forces or student groups. And, of course, there they encounter the French Communist Party, eventually. and the French socialists and things like that. So the Bolshev revolution has a great impact.

People start reading Marx. People start reading Lenin. And then in 1919, when World War I comes to an end, and the Allies get together, the victorious allies get together at Versailles, they have promoted this rhetoric, making the world safe for democracy, self-determination of peoples, things like this.

There's a great expectation. on the part of the Chinese, that that Western liberal democracy is going to come through. But instead, China is sold down the river. The Versailles Peace Conference gives the former German concessions which had been seized by Japan

at the beginning of the war. It gives them to Japan as their concessions. And China is just, you know, China had contributed mightily to the allied cause, arguably much more so than the Japanese. But because Japan, Japan by this time was itself a developed capitalist imperialist power, taking Taiwan in 1895,

annexing Korea in 1910. The victorious allies, they saw the Japanese as partners in crime, you know. So they give Japan these concessions in China. So it's yet another humiliation. But it's also an expose of the bankruptcy of liberal democracy in the West. You know, so the Bolshevik Revolution on the one hand, the Versailles Peace Conference on the other, which triggers what's called the May 4th movement. That's the date in 1919 when the news of this betrayal arrives in Beijing triggers a huge demonstration, which becomes a national movement against imperialism. The first national, modern, you know, sort of ideological movement against Western imperialism and specifically, of course, Japanese imperialism.

In that context, first the Bolsheviks, frustrated by the non-event of the revolution in Western Europe and the capitalist core that they had anticipated, decide that they need to help promote revolutionary movements wherever possible, and that colonialism, Lenin, of course, has written about imperialism as the last stage of capitalism or the highest stage of capitalism. imperialism needs to be fought, and the place to do that is going to be out in the colonial world, of course. So the Bolsheviks create the third international. The international reaches out to groups in China that have been like Marxist reading societies and things like that. 1921, we get the foundation of the Communist Party at that time in July of 21. There were only 64 members across the empire, only 12 of them gathered in Shanghai for the Congress. but it takes off.

A year later, there's probably 60,000, you know, and beyond that, it just continues to grow and grow. The path of the revolution is challenging, to say the least, in the 20s. For a variety of reasons, the international follows a sort of orthodox, although unfortunately I think a misguided understanding of Marxism, that, you know, societies, all societies in the world have to go through a particular sequence of stages of development and that China needs to, China doesn't have a sufficiently large and developed industrial proletariat to be the foundation of a revolutionary transformation. And so with this, This, as I say, what seems to me to be an erroneous interpretation of the rural situation, seeing, you know, still talking about feudalism, that the international thinks that what China needs is a bourgeois revolution, which could then develop the economy to the point where the industrial proletariat could, in some distant future, become a revolutionary force. That leads to the collaboration with the Nationalists, which was a bourgeois party, although also closely tied to corrupt elements, organized crime elements, things like that, but was a bourgeois party and had an anti-imperialist dimension, although that becomes problematic for the Nationalists as time goes by. But there's this effort of collaboration, which after the death of Sun Yat-sen, who was himself a kind of socialist, leads to the emergence of Chiang Kai Shack, a rabid anti-communist and Christian, who, you know, breaks with the communists, kills thousands of communists in Shanghai and April of 27.

The party struggles over the following years to try to figure out how, you know, how to advance the revolution. and it's at this point that the ideas of Mao Zedong really become so important because he had all read it, 1925, 1926 in his writings, he talks about the analysis of classes in Chinese society, and he can see that it's the pestitry, it's what he calls the agricultural proletariat, that is the natural ally of the industrial working class, and that they together can make a successful revolution. of course, that's what happens. Once the tortuous path of party leadership culminates in January of 1935 at what's called the Zunyi conference, early in the long march, this epic journey from southern China to northwestern China, we can go into that, but let's let's let that sit on the side for a moment. That's actually another thing that I think that a whole episode should be devoted to because the long march really is.

That requires a lot of discussion. Yeah, not only is it like a very complex march, but also I think it's a very inspirational march in that way. I think that it deserves more time than we would be able to give it today. Yeah. Yeah. But early in the march, they pause at a place called Zunyi in Guajo province. And this is when Mao emerges as the most important leader in the party, along with

with Joanne Lai, who throws his support to Mao's views. And it's from this point on that they really make the agricultural proletariat, kind of the driving force in the revolution. And that, you know, Mao proves to be entirely correct. His understanding of the realities, the material realities of Chinese society, is application of the dynamic living and analytical methodology of historical materialism. seems to have been correct, and that takes the revolution forward. Japan, of course, invades.

Their imperialist ambitions are still running rampant, and the communists are the hard core of the resistance against imperialism. You know, the nationalists do what they can to some extent, but Chankajek famously says that the Japanese are an irritation of the skin, but the communists are a disease of the gut. And, of course, he's correct in one way in that it's the communists who are the future of China. The communists are the real force for change in China. So, Chakashik hoards his military supplies, you know, and the Japanese kind of sit there occupying China during the war, being struggled against by the communist guerrilla forces, but not being dislodged until, you know, the end of the war, the atomic bombing in Japan, all that.

And then Chakashchak goes on the offensive against the communists who had won massive popular support for things like land reform in the areas in the liberated zones, for their patriotic defense of China against Japanese imperialism, you know, and the revolution triumphs in a very short time during the Civil War. The nationalists collapse as a bankrupt and corrupt force. they retreat to the island of Taiwan where they're only protected by the military intervention of the United States. And that sets up, you know, the period of liberation, 1949, the establishment of the People's Republic, October. And the beginning of the second half of the title of the book, which is the quest for a socialist future. Yeah, and that's where I'll pick up right here. And I know that you don't have that much time left, Ken, to be able to... Another 20 minutes or so.

Well, I'll give you a really big question then, and you can go for as long as you want on it. And we'll see if we have more time left over after that. But I think that this question, I'm intentionally making it large because I want to encompass as much as I can in our remaining time. So can you discuss this quest for the socialist future from the end of the revolution to today? because in the process of doing so, can you also discuss the purpose of the book that you have in terms of why did you decide to undertake the book, but then also what is the purpose that you're driving towards? What is the narrative you're trying to put out with the book?

Because you do have a definite viewpoint on here, which is, you know, one of the things that we wanted to discuss, although we, you know, sadly won't have that much time to do so. But it's important that we focus on that whole sweep of history from 49 to today. You can't look at individualized small little periods of history since then because in isolation from one another, you can get a completely different reading on that sweep of history than you do by looking at the revolutionary period of China up through today. So if you can do that, you know, take us, and again, I appreciate that this is an absolutely massive question that we could be talking about for days, much less 20 minutes. But, you know,

can you give us some of the highlights of that post-revolutionary period and how we can use that history to understand what is going on in China right now and whether or not we should read that as an ongoing quest for a socialist future? Sure, sure. Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, The reason that we chose the title as it is, and there was a lot of discussion about this, and the word quest is very intentional for a couple of reasons. But I'll tease those out as we go forward. Yeah, I mean, liberation takes place in 1949. China is a wreck.

It's been exploited for well over a century by foreign imperialism. it's been, you know, invaded by Japan, and there's been a war of resistance from 1937 to 1945. And then there's the civil war. You know, there are millions and millions of displaced people. There's destruction of a lot of the communications infrastructure, even the parts of the industrial economy. You know, the situation in the countryside in many parts of the country is rather dire. inflation is out of control. You know, the people, the costs of living are just skyrocketing for people.

It's a, the country is a wreck at this point. And, of course, you know, the West, the imperialists as they're withdrawing as they're getting out, they're bailing out on China, are taking a lot of assets out of the country with them. So the challenges faced by the new government are immense. Fortunately, they have an ally, they have support coming from the Soviet Union, at least for the first decade. Unfortunately, they face the continued hostility, and in fact, if anything, the enhanced hostility of the West, you know, the United States fights its war of aggression in Korea from 1950 to 53, in which, you know, military commanders in Korea are calling to be able to cross the Yala River, invade China, get rid of the new government in China. So they're facing very serious threats, both, you know, from the lingering nationalist forces who are raiding along the coast.

The nationalist forces are still using American aircraft flying over there bombing Shanghai all the way down to about 1952. So, you know, it's a very, very tumultuous moment to start this process. But they basically roll up their sleeves and get right down to work. They had already begun the process of land reform, and I can't emphasize how important land reform is. Land reform that starts in the liberated area it is in 1948 and goes throughout the country by 1952. This is one of the great transformative moments in modern history. I think I always say historians, two or three hundred years down the road, when they look back and they talk about the 20th century, you ask them, what was the most important thing that happened in the 20th century?

they may well say land reform in China because that finally breaks the power of the old land holding elites across the empire, across the country that had survived the fall of the imperial state. They had still been the power.

They owned the land. They controlled the commercial economy in the countryside. Now, that is swept away. And land is distributed to the producers, to the people who are actually living on it and working on.

And then there's this process of collectivization, cooperativization, the rapid development of the agricultural economy, agricultural productivity, it increases every year through the 50s. At the same time, they start the process, and it's a very careful,

deliberate process, an incremental process of reform and transformation in the urban industrial economy. They don't just expropriate industries and sort of take them over from scratch. We have to remember that when the communists achieve victory, when the Red Army enters Beijing, when the People's Republic has proclaimed, the Communist Party has maybe a million members in a society of 450 million people.

And most of them are from the countryside. They're not well-educated. They don't have a lot of sophisticated skills. To administer this new government, they have to rely on people with skill sets, with experience, with knowledge, but who are not necessarily communists or even, you know, sort of supportive of the new system. They have to find a way to run the country, and that's a very steep learning curve. So they master it.

They start to get forward. They start to move ahead, both in the urban industrial economy and in the rural economy, collectivization goes on. The 50s is a period of advance. but there are contradictions, there are challenges along the way, some of which are domestic. There are debates within the party, what is sometimes called, we talk about this in the book, the struggle between two lines, two different orientations on how to advance the development of the economy. Everybody wants to develop the economy. Everybody wants to move towards socialism, but there

are strong disagreements as to what's the best way to do that. And given the sort of political centrality of Mao and his ideas, the friction that was always there beneath the surface with Stalin and the leadership in the Soviet Union, especially after Stalin departs and as Khrushchev emerges, the Soviets start to see Mao and the Chinese as adventurists. This leads to a split in 1959, 1960, during the turmoil of the Great League Forward. that's further disruption weather goes bad for a while there's a lot of things that come together

that make this transition in the late 50s to the early 60s a tough time the struggle between two lines continues to deepen that leads to the cultural revolution which is on the one hand a very real

and substantial effort to reconnect in Mao's view a communist party which had to some extent become alienated from the masses to get it back into a profound engagement with ordinary people and to ensure that the party, you know, service the people. But it also was very disruptive. Not so much in the

economic sphere. There's a sort of narrative of that in the West, but if you look at the stats, the economy continues to grow steadily through the cultural revolution. But no doubt, you know, there was turmoil, especially in the big industrial cities like Shanghai. But those contradictions, you know, they advance. And through, by the end of the 60s, by the 9th Party Congress in April of 69, the party basically has reconfigured itself, right? A whole new leadership, a whole new central committee is elected, and things go forward from there. There's still political struggles now within, within. the sort of party center, but on a nationwide basis, in some ways the cultural revolution

proves to be a success in that the party is once again, you know, pretty seriously connected with the larger society. Mao dies in 76. Before that, of course, in 72, famously, he allows Nixon to come to China. That launches a new era where, you know, the antagonism with Western imperialism, certainly still there, but now the Western imperialists are seen as more of a spent force. It may have been a little premature reading, but that was the analysis at the time. But it creates opportunities to begin to draw new forms of investment, new sources of capital into the economy that are desperately needed. When Mao dies in 76, there's political convolutions within the leadership over the next two years.

But in 78, November 78, Deng Xiaoping emerges as the principal force, the principal leader, of a new sort of alignment within the leadership of the party, within the party as a whole, that begins what's called the era of reform and opening, which is, of course, the period in which we still find ourselves. and and what happens this again this is a really really critical moment of transition the goal is to build a socialist future for China the goal is to build socialism and eventually reach communism socialism is an economy of abundance China had achieved great things between 1949 and 1979 the economy had grown by an average of three percent or so a year. The livelihood of the people had been secured. You know, people weren't starving to death. Housing had been improved. Education had been improved. Health care had been improved. The economy, you know, inflation had been conquered. You know, things had improved

steadily. But China was still a very poor country. It was a very egalitarian country, but it was a very poor country. And socialism is not the egalitarianism of poverty. Socialism is an egalitarianism of prosperity, right? From each according to their ability to each according to their work, the principle of socialist distribution. But the goal is that people's lives will be good, will be rich, not rich in the sense of decadent bourgeois rich people, but enriched, humanly enriched. So the goal is to move to that. So the goal is to move to that. And to develop the productive economy so much that there's a sufficient abundance of goods to facilitate actual socialist distribution, to address the needs of the people.

That's what they embark upon, and the decision is to use the mechanisms of the market to develop the productive economy. And that's a very important way to understand it. Use the mechanisms of the market, not throw the country open to. of market forces, not abandon the idea of socialism, the socialist, what I call the socialist core, the state-owned enterprises, the financial system, you know, the health care system, the educational system, all these things that are at the heart of the socialist system, right? Allowing a market element, allowing private capital even, bringing in capital from the

outside world. This is what they decide. It's an experiment. It's a dangerous enterprise. There's no question. It's going to generate contradictions, contradictions of inequality, contradictions of corruption, contradictions, as we have seen very concretely, of environmental costs. They understand that, but the key is to maintain the socialist program, to maintain the leadership of the Communist Party so that the markets don't just run while. We know that markets generate all these bad things, but we have to find a way to balance that, to constrain that, to guide that development, so that when a point is reached of sufficient material prosperity, there would be somebody, the Communist Party, to

lead the process of transformation, to lead the process of addressing the serious needs of the country and of the people. what we've seen happen. It goes through phases, the 80s, a time of, as the Chinese say, crossing the river by feeling the rocks, just trying to figure out how they're going to do this. That needs to contradictions. We have the whole explosion of 1989, not something anybody wanted other than certain, you know, anti-party elements, but which, you know, gets resolved in ways that I don't think anybody feels are particularly great, but, you know, prove to be necessary in the times.

done relaunches reform in 1992, and from there on, things are booming. Twenty years of growth over 10% a year, massive improvement in housing, in health care, in education, in the quality of life for ordinary people. But these contradictions certainly emerge, corruption, inequality, environmental degradation. by the early 21st century, our time, after a period of what Deng Xiaoping called biting time and building capabilities, making accommodations with global capitalism,

making accommodations with American imperialism, in order to get the things that China needed to advance, to get the capital, to get the technology, to get the knowledge, to get the, you know, all of the package of development, capabilities to get those that had to be open to the outside world, to the capitalist economy, to the United States. And they did that, joining the WTO, things like

that. But by the time we get to, let's say, the 2008 global economic crisis, China has achieved tremendous advances. And they're able to weather that storm better than the Western economies, right? 20 million people lose their jobs in 2008 because of the collapse of consumer demand in the West. The export sector takes a serious hit. 20 million people lose their jobs, but they're not turned out on the street. They're not just dumped into the market economy because they have household registrations. They can go home where they can have housing and health care and their kids can go to school. They're taken care of. They're supported. And the state, the socialist state, led by the Communist Party, is able to respect. in ways that reorient the economy away from its excessive, perhaps, dependence on export, emphasizing domestic consumption, domestic development. In a year or so, those 20 million people are back to work, either back to their old jobs or in new jobs. So this demonstrates the resiliency, the power of the socialist core in China's economy. And from there on, you know, we've seen that that aspect increasingly in the forefront.

Xi Jinping is elected in 2012 and in what they now call the new era. A recommitment to Marxism, a recommitment, as Xi Jinping said us, to the original goals of the revolution. Serious crackdown, serious anti-corruption campaigns, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It doesn't eradicate inequality. There's still tremendous inequality in certain parts in China. But hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, right? Something unprecedented in the world. 80% of the elimination of poverty in the whole world has taken place in China, you know?

COVID, another example, where the socialist system saves millions of lives, right? Had China had a market economy like the United States, they would have lost five or six million people. Instead, they've lost, even now, after the relaxation of things, you know, less than 100,000, right? a fraction of what we lost in the United States over 1.1 million people, right? In a population, a quarter the size of China's. So, you know, they've demonstrated over and over that this socialist core, the legal system,

the economic core, the leadership of the party, means that China is still, it's still on the quest for a socialist's future. We don't say, oh, they've achieved socialism, everything is perfect, it's a workers' paradise. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is this is a work in progress. This is a revolutionary struggle to transform China

and to create a model that other people in the world may be inspired by and may choose to emulate. It's an ongoing effort. It faces challenges. There are bourgeois elements in China. They're not a class that dominates the state, but they can be problematic. That's why we've seen efforts to rein that in under Xi Jinping.

right so we support china socialist quest we support china socialist core we support the leadership of the party where we recognize that they face contradictions and challenges and that they may make mistakes from time to time that are made may be missteps along the way that doesn't invalidate you know the cause that doesn't mean that that we say oh you made one one mistake here so let's just write the whole thing off i think unfortunately many on the left who are other quite sincere revolutionaries and Marxists have a jaundiced view of China, you know, that they misunderstand the dynamism of socialism there. I think that's very unfortunate. But, you know, my view as expressed in the book and in other writings, is that they are on the quest for a socialist

future and that this is something that we, as socialists and revolutionaries in the West, need to support and need to defend. Okay, interesting. I mean, I do want to ask a little further about that because what I was wondering is two things, really, that are connected. One is, do you see this quest for a socialist future as principally a domestic quest for China's society? Or do you think it has implications itself for, you know,

an international socialist revolution, what's its sort of real design? Is it just that it would be a model that others could learn from? Or is it, you know, you think actively going to be participating as it continues along this quest towards a socialist future to have consequences and impacts for the global, you know, kind of world order? And so secondly, in following up from your, you know, a final conclusion there. What you mentioned is that we should support it. We should defend it. I guess my question here would be that depending on also how you see that first question that I just asked, what do you think should really be the positions? If there is this continuity that you've been outlining of China's revolutionary project historically, how should

that in form left politics for those of us in the imperial court. Should we be doing more than what I think we can most of us pretty much agree on, which is we should, you know, kind of put the brakes on insofar as we can and oppose, you know, the global West, particularly led by the United States, martial militaristic attempts to, you know, ratchet up hostility tensions dangerously so with a potential, you know, kind of war, cold war. that could turn into a hot war, you know, that we should be opposing that for sure. I think most of us can agree on that. But what would you think is the case really for, you know, greater solidarity with the, you know, project and how and what form should that take if it really demands that kind of global

international solidarity? Yeah. I'm going to have to give the briefest response to that right now, but I would be delighted to return and unpack this in a much, much more expansive way because I'm afraid I have another commitment in about seven. Consider it an invocation. Yeah, but

yeah, I think that for the time being, China is content to serve as a model, to serve as an inspiration, that as its socialist project continues to develop and to succeed, hopefully, that for the time being, I think that they are content to have that be

something that is primarily a domestic agenda. They're very clear, for example, in things like the Belt Road Initiative, other international engagements, that they do not impose political conditions. They set this up as a contrast, of course, with the West, which does everything it can to tie whatever assistance it may provide, whatever loans they may provide. to political conditions to try to impose, you know, capitalist norms on, on nations that are receiving whatever kind of funding. China doesn't do that. And they're very clear. One of their fundamental principles is respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. And they are deeply, deeply committed to that. So I think that, as I say for the time being, personally, I think

that perhaps at some point, if political situations around the country, around the world, rather, develop if there is an upsurge in socialist efforts at transformation in countries, I would hope China would be perhaps a little more willing to get more directly engaged. I don't know that we're going to go back to the sort of Chinese Soviet competitions of the Cold War period where, you know, they supported radically different factions in Africa or wherever, you know. I'm not sure we're going to see that emerge again. But I would hope that as China becomes more successful, more self-confident in its conduct in world affairs, they might be a little more, how shall we say, ideologically forthcoming, perhaps, something like that. The rest of those concerns, you know, I certainly, of me, of course, we're all anti-imperialists.

There's no question about that. We understand imperialism. I think those who on the left who somehow managed to equate China's international engagements these days as a kind of neo-imperialism are profoundly in error. And I think that we need to work with our comrades about that. But I also think that we do need to be that the risk of war is not the only issue with China, you know, that imperialist aggression against China is a very real possibility. and we need to push back very hard against that. But I think we also, you know, we can draw, you know, obviously revolution in the United States isn't going to be like revolution in China.

Our path to a socialist future is going to be our path to a socialist future. We have our own culture, our own history and our own, you know, problematics, but also our own strengths. We have our working class, which is a wonderful, powerful force. We're seeing this rising tide of union activism again, And the UPS situation, UAW strike may be coming up, we're at a very exciting period. Our revolution is going to be different from China because we're different from China. What China has is great for China.

It's not necessarily the way we would do things here. And nor should it be. More should their revolution be modeled on some European derived system, right? So if we accept that, I think nonetheless, we can learn from many things in China, the relationship between the party, 100 million people, one out of every seven adults in China, is in the Communist Party. That's a tremendous level of political engagement, political activism, and we want to support and encourage that here. We want to build revolutionary movements. We want to build parties. I belong to the Party for Socialism and Liberation. I would love to

see that grow. We've been growing. I want to see us grow more. I want to see us become a force for the working class, a force for political transformation here. There's a lot more to unpack with that. And I wish that we had time to do that today, but I hope that we can seek an opportunity to carry on soon. Well, Ken, on that note, then, why don't I get some verbal commitment from you? Why don't we bring you back on, we, Adnan and I just came up with this idea. We'll bring you back on if you're up for it, for a little mini-series to focus on some of these individual topics that you talk about in the book, and perhaps that'll culminate then in that discussion that we, sadly, we're cut short on in that last question because I know, at least in my perspective, to get

anywhere near where I wanted to get to in this conversation, we would need a couple more hours at least. So if I can get some verbal commitment from you, can we bring you back on, Ken? Absolutely. I'll be here whenever you need me. Fabulous. So again, listeners, our guest was Ken Hammond, who is the author of China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. Ken, do you want to tell the listeners how they can find your work in case they want to check it out? Sure. The book is published by 1804 Books in New York. And at this point, it is available on their website, which is 1804books.com. We're hoping that we'll get it out into other forms of online distribution. But right now, go to 1804.com and you'll be able to order it up there. Fabulous. And we'll see you again soon then. Ken, I know you have to go out right now. But it was really a pleasure having you on the show. and like I said, hopefully we'll bring you back on a few more times.

Well, thanks for having me here. It's been a great conversation, and I look forward to dig it a little deeper, perhaps, even next time around. Excellent. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. You bet. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast? Well, they can follow me on Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. If you're so inclined, we also have, I also host a podcast called the M-A-J-L-I-S, Middle East Islamic World, Muslim Diasporic Affairs, and you can check out some of our back catalog. I look forward to getting back to eventually producing a few more new episodes.

So look for that. Excellent. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-1-995, the translation of Domenico Losortos, Stalin history and critique of a black legend that I did alongside Salvatore Angledi Morrow has been published by Iskra Books. You can get that from the Iskra Books website in print form as paperback, hardcover, or you can download the PDF for free. I see Adnan has his copy in his hand. Ken also showed me that he had his copy in hand before we started recording. And I have two copies next to me right here. So

It was a full house today of Stalin all around. Listeners, you can get your copy to, EscriBooks. I think it's Iskrabbooks.org. Like I said, you can get the PDF for free or the print editions. Really look nice. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skod. That'll keep you up to date with everything that Adnan, Brett, and myself are putting out,

as well as the show collectively. And you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this and episodes like that forthcoming mini-series that I'm going to hold Ken to making sure that he comes back on because there's a lot that I want to talk about with him on some of these individual aspects of Chinese history by supporting us at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, just reminding the listeners one final time that we will never run ads on the show. we are entirely 100% funded by listeners like you.

So if you appreciate the work that we do, do consider helping us stay afloat by donating as little as $3 a month on Patreon. And you'll get some bonus content in return for that. Until next time, listeners, solidarity. You know what I'm going to do. You know,