Guerrilla History - Commune to Capitalism - Decollectivization of Agriculture in China w/ Zhun Xu

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we once again have our great friend and comrade Zhun Xu, whom you should remember from two previous episodes of the show, North Korea & Industrial Agriculture as well as  Sanctions Against China & Their Political Economy.  Here, we discuss Zhun fantastic book From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty!  Unsurprisingly, this was a fabulous discussion, and is a really important conversation when added to the two conversations on this period of history that we had in our Modern Chinese History miniseries with Ken Hammond - The Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution and the Deng Reform Period. It might be helpful to listen to those two episodes first, but regardless, we are sure that you will find great use in this conversation! Zhun Xu is Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. He is on the editorial boards of Science and Society and the Journal of Labor and Society. His recent book is From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty. 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 Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. Welcome to Gorilla 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 Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? Oh, hello, Henry. I'm doing great, and it's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. It's great to see you, and also great to see our returning guests who I will introduce in just a moment. But before I do introduce our guest and the book that we're going to be talking about today, I want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash

guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that the show is doing, both as a collective as well as what Adnan and I are doing. individually by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A-U-Square-Pod. And I guess it's worth mentioning. We also do have an Instagram page. I don't advertise it very often, but we do post things on there as well. You can find that at Gorilla History.

Gorilla underscore Pod was taken amazingly. But in any case, you can find us on there. Now, as I mentioned, we have a returning guest, someone who I consider a friend and very, very grateful that he was willing to come back on. Listeners, you will remember Professor Jun Chu from two previous episodes on guerrilla history. He was part of our sanctions war series talking about the DPRK and China and also was on a very recent episode talking about his monthly review article, which came out recently titled Industrial Agriculture Lessons from North Korea. Jun is an associate professor at John Jay College and the Graduate Center City

University of New York. Hello, John. It's nice to have you back on the show. Thank you, Harry. Thank you. It's always great to be back at the program. Of course. It's definitely a pleasure to have you back on, and I'm really happy that we're able to talk about your book today. Now, listeners might be wondering why we didn't mention that you had a book coming out when we talked about your article, and that's because this book is not new. This book came out in 2018, but the analysis in it is timeless, as many history texts are. I'm also going to pitch before I mentioned this book and we get into the conversation that this conversation is going to be about China and specifically about decollectivization

of the agricultural system in China during the reform period. Listeners may remember that we have recently concluded a mini-series on the history of modern China with Professor Ken Hammond, where we covered the Boxer in Taiping rebellions, the Civil War and Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and then concluding with the Reform Period. Episodes 3 and 4 of that series on the Great Leap Forward Cultural Revolution, and then the Reform Period will probably be useful to listen to before you get to this episode, but I don't think it's going to be critical.

In either case, I highly recommend that you listen to those episodes of that mini-series as well as this episode to get maybe slightly different perspectives on that. things, but this is going to be a much more focused conversation on the agricultural and agrarian question within China. So the book is called From Commun to Capitalism, How China's Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty. To start this conversation, and as I mentioned, we have that previous series on modern Chinese history, we didn't really talk that much about the peasantry in China.

Specifically, we didn't talk about the agrarian question. didn't talk about the material conditions in that pre-revolutionary period, all that much. We did touch on it, but we didn't really focus on it. So before we start talking about how the structure of the agricultural system in China changes over time, I think it would be really useful to have a material analysis of the peasantry and the rural peasantry in particular before the revolutionary period. Oh, yes. I think there was, this was the basis. I mean, you mentioned the Taiping rebellion. You mentioned the Boxer's Rebellion. And there are many such movements and revolutions between 1980 and the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. So over that 100 years, there have been many such rebellions or revolution. And most of them, I think, were rural-based.

They were initiated by organized, largely staffed by rural workers, peasants. So this was, I think the arborian question was the foremost issue for the revolutionaries at the time, including obviously, including the Chinese Communist Party, which was officially formed in 1927. And if they follow the Soviet Russian path, and the focus would be to mobilize workers in a few major cities, while in Russian's case, the workers were highly concentrated. The working class was not that large in the imperial Russian, but they were highly concentrated. in a few places, make major cities. And by taking over those few cities, the Bolsheviks, for example,

had a real potential of taking over the entire nation. This, however, was not the case in China. The working class, the urban working class was really small. It started to emerge after 1840 with the introduction of foreign businesses and later on with domestic industrial capitalists. But overall it was, the scale of the, it was, everything was too small to sustain a successful revolution. The Communist Party did try. I mean, they, you know, initially their focus was, you know, they have lots of

organizing efforts among the workers in the cities. And for a while, the Communist Party, their revolution focus, was to take over a few major cities and use those major cities as base to expand the revolution. And as we know, those strategies ultimately failed. And what eventually survived was Mao's strategy of a countryside surrounding the cities. and that has to be based on a correct analysis and also a correct strategy dealing with the peasant question. Mao, among others, analyzed the Chinese class relations, especially in the countryside, in a very detailed way. It's not simply landlord-peasantry relationship. There's all sorts of middle layers in between, and I think, you know, if we're just doing

sociological research, we can do lots of those detailed research analysis. But for the purpose of the communist revolution, I think they were eventually called it the semi-feudal society, that you have a major social layer that was, they called the landlord class, which oftentimes had lots of connections with the combradors and also the urban bourgeois or the national bourgeois class. And besides this landlord class, you have the very poor peasants who didn't have any land. They are the proletariat, they're wage labors. And there are people who have some lands, but only nominal value. They couldn't really sustain themselves. They have to spend most of the time working for others. Those are also poor peasants.

And Mao basically said, well, the poor peasants and the wage labor peasants, they are the basis for our revolution. They are the rural working class. And besides that, you have the so-called the middle peasants who are basically roughly self-sufficient farmers who have a little piece of land which they can work on without using much of other people's labor. So it's like family business type of thing. They are self-exploiting, as you may say, and they make a living based on that. And then you have the rich peasants

who were more like a bourgeois entrepreneur in the countryside. They were organizing agricultural stuff like a typical capitalist. They would employ modern methodless technology inputs, and they would organize production according. So those are the things, those are the social classes that you have there. The Mao's strategy and the communist strategy was to base the revolution, poor and wage labor

peasants, and try to make alliance with part of the middle class, sort of the middle peasants, and isolate the rich parents. But the target is the landlords, who are oftentimes wealthy but not productive. Or, you know, they have all kinds of other crimes. And starting from the 1920s till the late 1930s, the so-called the first agrarian revolutionary period, and there were all kinds of back-and-force with their agrarian policy, but the main idea is that we're going to take over the land from the landlords. This is within the territory controlled by the communists. They took

all the landlord land and they're going to redistribute it to other farmers. And so that was a like a typical agrarian policy. And that did not last very long because militarily, the communists were defeated. So they have to move along and do the long march. They transit from southeastern province, Zhangxi in Fujian, and they move a long way to the northwest to Shanxi province. And when they got there, with the threat of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese Communist Party then had a new strategy, the United Front. They have to work with the national government, which was run by the nationalist party. And in a joint effort, to fight the Japanese invaders.

When they were doing that, they have to switch their agrarian policy accordingly. They were not because they have to work with the landlords in a certain way. They couldn't just, let's say, take the land from those landlords anymore. Rather, they were doing this reformist policy. They called the 3-3 policy, which is like, you know, It's, it's, um, everything is, it's, it's, you are, you're trying to make some kind of, some sort of progressive revol. You're reducing the rent to a certain extent. For example, the dominant rent,

rent rate for a, for a piece, like a piece of land in at the time was around 50% for the main product on the land. And the, uh, the, so the, the, so the common. party would push for, let's say, a 25% reduction from that. So the effective rent would be 37.25% around that rate. And so you're improving the peasant's condition while not totally alienating their landlord class. And that was the reformist policy that they pursued from the late 1930s to pretty much around mid-1940. until the Japanese war, Japanese invasion was defeated. I'm going to hop in for one second here.

Just something that I was planning on asking about you, you've touched on, but I'd like to just ask a little bit more about. So one of the things that you talked about is that actually this agrarian reform was happening long before the revolution and some of these kind of experimental ways of dealing with the peasant question or the agrarian question were happening immediately after the Long March when the Communist Party was controlling a very small area and by no means was the national government. Now, I just want to underscore that because listeners, you might be thinking, well, if you're dealing with big questions, like the question of the peasantry and the

agrarian question, maybe you would want to wait until you have something resembling national control of the country and not just when you're controlling this very small area when you have very few people who successfully completed the long march i know listeners you can go back to episode three of the modern chinese history miniseries to hear a bit more about the long march but as you mentioned they actually did try some kind of different experiments in reform in this period so the thing that i would like to follow up briefly on here is can you talk a little bit more deeply about how they were able to deal with trying to affect these sorts of change in this period of time when they have a very small cadre that had made it up to, you know, their

destination from the long march. And then as they begin expanding their control throughout that civil war period, how did they deal with fighting the civil war on one hand and then also trying to deal with the peasant question on the other hand simultaneously? Oh, yes, the civil war started around 1945 after the ending of the Second World War. There were efforts, I think, genuine efforts from the Communist Party, and also some sections of the national governments to form a coalition of governments. That's kind of a peaceful way of coexistence of different political forces. But that didn't work out.

The national government, after all, they just really wanted to eradicate the communist forces, no matter what they say. So the Communist Party didn't be, you know, they were prepared for this. They didn't naively believe that the national government would work with them. And so as soon as the military conflict started, the social program were on the top agenda. They wanted to, you know, because now the goal has changed. Previously, you want to make a broad coalition to fight the Japanese imperialists. Now the main target is the nationalist party, the government, and all the social interests

that they protect. And that would include the major landlords. And so they would change their algorithm accordingly. the slogan they used at the time was land to the tiller, like many other countries have embraced. That means that they would start redistributing the land from the landowners to the actual people working on the land. Of course, during this process, it was not always uniformly applied this land to the tiller. It depends on a lot of factors. I mean, how how fast the war is moving and how much advantage that the communists have in a particular region

and how much, how popular was the Communist Party, you know, in a particular region. I mean, it depends on lots of factors and those would eventually lead to how radical a policy would eventually become. Some of the areas I think I remember from different sources, For example, if you read the classic writing of this by William Hinton, Van Schen, and other sources, they would mention that once you study to have the idea of land to the tiller, and the, you know, the peasants, so they would self-organize and they would push that imagination to even further, let's say, they would make arguments like, well, if we are saying, we are saying, that at least the rents needs to be decreased from 50% to, let's say, 37%.

And that worked for the last three years or two years. But if this is the correct way of doing things, then, you know, it should apply to all the years before that. 100 years, I mean, we've been paying rents, I mean, some extra rents for so many years, we could ask the landlord to pay us back, those extra rents that we have paid. unfair rents. I mean, that eventually resulted in taking over the land because the landlord, of course, cannot pay for all those historical overpaid rents. So, I mean, then the parliamentist parties sometimes they would regulate such activities. Maybe this is going too extreme, too radical,

or sometimes they would accommodate say, well, you know, this is the better way to do this. But overall, I think that the Communist Party in the civil war, they were able to do extensive land reforms in the northeast of the country and different sections, different parts across northern China, but that was the basis of the revolution. The overall national, nationwide land reform was completed after really after the military triumph. against the national government. Then eventually fled to Taiwan, and the national reform was finished around 1950 or 1951. Okay, wow, that's fascinating to know how many different kinds of options and possibilities were being experimented with. But in the period of the revolution

and the civil war, first, of course, fighting against the Japanese and then subsequently in the the victory of the Communist Party in consolidating control over the national government over mainland China. So once, you know, the revolutionist successful, you know, the Japanese have been defeated, the nationalists have been, you know, relegated to Taiwan, you would think if there was a, you know, kind of peasant-based revolution built around Mao's deep insight into the nature of peasant revolutionary peasant potential, you know, by his analysis of the, you know, the nature of peasant society and how they were a proletariat and could actually be a revolutionary class, that

there would be a quick jump to, you know, complete collective control. But as I understand from your book, there were actually quite a lot of political contestations around, you know, agricultural policy. And so, you know, the land reform was one kind of, you know, accomplishment, but the next phase was hotly contested. And so I was interested if perhaps you could elaborate for readers how and why this was the case and why there were groups within the Communist Party that didn't necessarily accept collectivization. And, you know, explain to us, how did collectivization? actually take place and what that looked like. But maybe first we could start with this question of the problem,

why it was so contested and what the various groupings were that had different ideas from Mao's kinds of ideas. Yes, thank you, Ed, and those are great questions. I think fundamentally the debates and disagreements, the rural issue reflect some deep, you know, not a different understanding of what what socialism is or how do we actually achieve socialism. There is, when the revolutionaries around the world, when they looked at the only successful example at the time, that was Soviet Russia and Soviet Union, and they were looking at the dramatic

these achievements during the five-year plans, starting from late 1920s, I think the very natural reaction for many of the Chinese party members were like, oh, we were so much behind this. I don't think we can do something like what the Soviet Union has done, because we are so backward. I mean, it was true in many ways. Maybe the Soviet, you know, eventually we will get to the Soviet Union stage of socialism, the big brother. But right now, you know, we cannot just simply copy what Soviet Union has done because we start from very different points. And so when, you know, once you have the idea that we're going to do something different and then our sorts of speculations and optimism would come in, And, you know, for example, that's something you mentioned, there is the number two figure in the Chinese party, Liu Shao Qi.

And he didn't have much clue about how do we deal with the abhorian issue. Because he thought, well, you know, because no one was to be called, let's say, a peasant Marxist or an agroa Marxist. You know, even years after the Chinese revolution, analysts, from the west and also within, you know, some of the Chinese writers that would cover. The Chinese Communist Party was like a peasant party. They have this particular agrarian Marxist stuff, which means that you are inferior. And none of them wanted to be called something like this. And this would also weaken their confidence in dunes. Can we really build socialism on the basis of peasants? I mean, if you read the Communist Festo, read all the

classic Marxist writings, it would be very thoughtful. I was like, we, you know, this is something we don't want to get into reactionary, you know, this peasant socialist stuff. So I think that that was some of the theoretical basis of their understanding. It's like, okay, you know, this is, we can't just build socialism from those poor peasants. Now they have been very useful, very instrumental in winning the Revolutionary War. That's very true. But now we're building socialism, which is necessarily urban-based industry, in those big industry that we have seen in the Soviet Union.

And the peasants, I think, although they don't say it explicitly, has to be a thing of the past. And if you think of them as something of the past and think, well, how do we make that process faster to make them as something in the past. And this number two figure, Niu Shao Xi, and Yi thought like, well, if we just allow capitalist relationship to develop in the countryside, and that would basically make peasantry disappear fairly quickly. And you're going to have large farms. And you can imagine this fully mechanized, very advanced capitalist farms. And when we get to that stage, we can just take over. The communist party can take over the assets like we have

done before from the landlords. And then we have socialist farms right away. So to him and to many people like him, they thought this might be the better way of achieving socialism. So this was one part of that. The other part was like, oh, maybe we don't want to go to capitalists like this that capitalists take over the countryside. But, you know, but we don't want to be, we want to be cautious. We don't want to rush this process. And we want to keep what peasants already had from the land reform, that little piece of land. And we're going to help them. So that's, you can, you might say that's kind of Bahrain type argument in the Chinese party, that it's more pro-small farmers,

more populist-oriented thinking. None of them would reject that, eventually we're going to build collectives. We're going to have socialist arms. But how do we go there? You know, it's like we can do it capitalists first where we can postpone that collectivization to some 20, 30, 50 years ago after.

And now we just keep the small farmers. And the rest of them would follow Mao's position. It's like, yes, we have done the land reform. And Mao and his allies have much confidence in the peasantry. They don't look at them simply as, let's say, a bag of potatoes. They look at them as something, someone who classed with really with this strong motivation and agency. And they have a genuine interest in. forming collectives in joining socialism. So that's a different way of looking at them. And

Mao recognized there are two sides in the peasantry politics. You know, they can be conservative, very conservative. Like, I have a piece of land. But on the other hand, they argue that they all know that they, with that little piece of land, they cannot really meaningfully function. They cannot prosper. So there is a material side that they want to you know, organize with others. They want to protect all of them. So Mel said, we, you know, as Communist Party, we can try to amplify the pro-socialist part of peasantry. And specifically, we rely, again, rely on the poor strata of the peasantry because they have the strong interest in forming collectives. And, you know, we try to organize with the middle peasantry. And again,

we isolate the richer well-to-do peasantry. So I think that's his basic strategy approach to this question. And because of his authority, eventually China was, you know, the Communist Party was able to conduct ways of collectivization, starting from early 1950s, first organized individual households into this very simple mutual aid teams voluntarily and then you have that further organized into the so-called the simple cooperatives where if you look at this primary or simple co-op the assets you have the land you have would give you a share of return at the end of the year and you can you can also factor in your skills

I guess, and with all the other assets you have. And the process continues. If you move on to eventually the advanced cooperatives, then your land or previous land would be mininous. You would not get a return from your previous assets in this core. And that process basically was completed around 1957, 1958. Just a small comment or I guess rather amusing because, you know, this is just something that struck me while you were talking. And I don't think that if you have an answer, feel free to put it out there.

But it's just something that struck me is interesting. So you talked about how, you know, nobody really wanted to be called a peasant socialist or, you know, a theorist of peasant socialism. It reminds me and the listeners, I'm sure by now we're aware that I live in Russia. and I know a little bit more about Russian history than Chinese history, although I'm always trying to learn. There is this movement in the mid-1800s to late-1800s in Russia, the Russian Empire called Narodny Chespo, which was a kind of peasant populist, socialist movement, and it had many branches that came off.

Essentially, it was the intelligentsia going out into the peasantry, thinking that the peasants were the revolutionary vanguard, And then they kind of, over time, this movement lost. It's more revolutionary edge to it. And they kind of stopped calling for revolution entirely. I know I've mentioned the Narotniki in the past, particularly the movement Naradnaya Volia people's will, as they were the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II. And as a result of which Lenin's brother was then executed because he was a member of this group. And it led to Lenin being sent out of the city where I live.

Kazan, this is actually where he was studying first, and he got more or less exiled from here. Anyway, that's not really the point. The point is that there was this movement of kind of peasant populist, proto-socialist idea in Russia, Nora de Chespo, that then influenced later groups as well, even after these original groups kind of fell apart after the repression of the assassination of Alexander II. And specifically, the Trudeviks were very inspired by Naradne Chespo as well as the socialist revolutionaries, the Eser's, which of course played a pretty big role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. So the musing that I had with that really long exposition and kind of pointless exposition out of the way is, you know, it's interesting to think about how perhaps there was some influences of some of these groups, these neurotic-based groups or the Trudeviks or the Eser's that perhaps had some influence

on some of these thinkers in China, even though they wouldn't want to be classified as peasant socialists. I don't know if they actually had any direct influence on them or not. It's just kind of this parallel that I see between the two. So there's my musing. I don't know if you have anything to add on that, Yuan, but I just figured I throw it out there before Adnan goes back in. Yeah, I appreciate the points that Harry just made, you know, that I know that in this whole thing, the obsession with the people that Narod in Russia really was a 19th century phenomenon and was part of the national, the national, the emergence of the Russian as a nation that was in this same period that they have the belief in the people, this homogeneous people. And you can think of that the Chinese Communist Party, that in the process of the long revolution before they made national triumph, in effect, they included many people. In Russia, it would be, let's say, in a socialist revolutionary party.

So, you know, the socialist revolution party also participated in the February Revolution, October Revolution, or the important ally of Lenin. But, you know, they have very important differences, and they split it right after. And I think, you know, in China, I mean, they were, they may all have Communist Party membership. But they can still have very big differences. They have some major agreements, like fighting off the Japanese imperialists, you know, defeating the big landlords and their protector, the national government, that they can have very different views on what is the next step afterwards. I don't think there is any direct

influence. But I think that's a natural, like, you know, for a country, Imperial Russia and China, they all have a large peasant base. And you would have some people would cater to that group of more conservative section of that group and saying, well, you know, why don't we keep things where they are and the good old days with the, you know, agrarian society, etc. Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, it gives me the sense both of the diversity within the Communist Party, that it was a pretty broad-based formation. And as you're saying, it had diverse kinds of factions. And it recruited people who maybe came to this from very different kinds of ideas. What they shared, many of them, was a sense of the need to modernize.

and to be, you know, to kind of progress in history. And so then there were questions, how do you do that? Because the theories of communist and socialist revolution were developed, of course, in a very different context with a different kind of population in mind, different historical trajectory, different institutions, different conditions. And so this is all very productive. What I get the sense, though, is that few of these others were as confident as Mao was in the revolutionary potential of the peasants, and few were as confident in theorizing, not as a kind of how do we manage to match the Soviet Union or the trajectories of some other Marxist formation, but actually to say these are our conditions, and I'm going to theorize

on the basis of how do we improve, you know, the society from what we have as a base, which is fundamentally a peasant society. So this is quite fascinating, and I really appreciated that in your book. But okay, so now by the late 50s, you know, and I think you didn't discuss it in the book, but you alluded to there was some resistance to the, you know, process of collectivization. It was finally completed by the late 50s, but probably some of the middle peasants and some of the larger, wealthier peasants who had control of bigger pieces. of land and so on did resist this, but eventually you have the collectivization of agriculture.

Now, your book is really about the process of decollectivization, and of course, this whole process that begins in the early 1980s, maybe late 70s is being thought about, but really the early 1980s is something that is now part of a historical narrative. of the failures of collectivization and the remarkable achievements of decollectivization in unleashing all of these kind of productive forces and efficiencies on the one hand. And the second is a more political kind of question about, you know, whose project was this and what the sources of it were? And as you portray, this is characterized in the official historiography and in the official kind of account that's widespread in society, that this is something that the peasants themselves wanted to achieve an engineer because of their frustrations with the failures of collectivization.

Okay. So I guess now is the time for us to get into the substance of the book, which is your arguments that both of those are incorrect. But before, you know, getting into the specifics of that, you also had a very interesting chapter where you tried to situate this story in a broader global scale and a global context of neoliberal rollback across the global South. Well, even in across the first world as well, of changes in policy, changes in economy that ended up undermining some of the gains in the post-World War II era, whether it was land reform, whether it was collectivization, whether it was, you know, kind of other techniques for, you know, equalizing, you know, income in the peasant sphere. and to take it out of just the story of, you know, China as a unique or exceptional case. So before we get into the specifics of the Chinese story and the narrative that you are trying to debunk, perhaps you can tell us what do you think the larger global kind of changes that happen starting in the mid-late 70s? How and why do those have to be factored in to any analysis of the decollectivization that takes place in China? Was China in a position to be able to resist these? Is it just that, well, there's symmetry. It's happening everywhere. You know, what happens to, you know, why does China go this road? And how is that part of the story of why the globe as a whole underwent this shift of neoliberal globalization? during that period. Yeah. Thank you so much, Edlin, for the questions. I think those are, I mean, those countries that had had to deal with the Arborian question in the 20th century,

they shared some very similar backgrounds. Many of them were former colonies or semi-in colonies, and West, they tried to break away from the imperialist world system, At least at the beginning, the elites for either the revolutionaries or at least the reformers, they had some kind of ambition to build a social economic system that's somewhat alternative to the mainstream, let's say, the Western capitalist model. And not just that, but also in terms of the relationship between themselves, and the West, they try to be as much as autonomous as possible, ending the so-called colonial or neo-colonial relationship that they had formed over the past few hundred years. And so land reform and many other things, you know, more equality, a social progress,

they were part of the package that they're trying to build something different. And, you know, if the country doesn't have a explicit communist, Party, they might do reforms. Some regulations on the rental markets, like Egypt, like if your country has a Communist Party, then it would do more radical policies. They would just take the land away from the landers and redistribute it. And, you know, in countries like China or Soviet-type countries, they would form co-ops collectives. But those were part of the efforts of building an alternative system. And such efforts, they all met great difficulties. I think we're familiar with many of those difficulties over the 50s, 60 and 70s. And so by the time

we'll get to 1970s, I think this is a very like global thing that all those countries, socialists, non-socialists, the elites in those countries, I think they started to be mentally ready for something different. That, you know, I mean, give you a quote from the postman leader, Deng Xiaoping, who said, well, history has shown to us that any country that worked with the United States has got rich. I mean, that it's a, it's to a certain extent, it's a, it's a very true observation. Right? I mean, you fight against United States. Look at Cuba. Look at North Korea. I mean, those are real examples that you can get really punished. But you work with the United States. Then you look at South Korea or Japan. And you serve as a puppet state and you get rewards.

So the elites, I think that whatever aspiration and ambition they had for national developments by the 1950s, have largely disappeared by 1970s, 20 or 30 years after. So the question is, how do we actually get reintegrated into the capitalist world system? And in order to do that, you have to make friends, at least, with capitalists, not just in your country, but also in the West. And that would also mean that you have to basically take back. many of the progressive policy you have done in the past. And in certain cases where the institutions are so strong, you've already formed, let's say, a state-owned enterprise, which employs a thousand people. Well, you have a socialist collective arm, which has 10,000 members

in it. You cannot easily take that away. But you can do something else. For example, you can privatize that state-of-end enterprise, or you can, like, in China's case, you can decalculize the socialist collective. I mean, all of them would weaken whatever socialist institution that you already have in this society, and weaken people's support for the old model, and weaken any potential opposition to the integration or reintegration into the capitalist work or system. So I think there's a general lesson that we can draw from that process, that you can say, you know, we all betrayed the revolution in this or other ways. So I'm going to hop in here. I know that as Adnan said, the point of the book is talking

about decollectivization. But before we talk about decollectivization, I think that it'll be particularly important for us to talk about collectivization in terms of the ideological basis. for it. We've already touched on that a little bit. I think that it'll also be important for us to talk about the successes of collectivization and what collectivization meant for the peasantry. These are often things that are left behind when talking about collectivization when the narrative basically boils down to collectivization was a failure and look at all of these problems that were resulting from collectivization. One of the things you point out in the book is there were real successes from the process of collectivization, including successes that carried on through the

decollectivization process and into the modern era. So I think that that'll be something that's also quite important to talk about. And then the third thing, and I know that I'm giving you a lot here, but the third thing is one that always interests me, particularly in the last year or two, now that I've been working with narratives quite a bit. My last book that I worked on was about narratives. The upcoming book is about narratives and some of the other books that I'm engaging with right now are also about narratives, constructions of narratives,

and weaponization of narratives. So the third point is going to be about the narrative surrounding the collectivization process. How that narrative of the failures of collectivization was created, why it was created and how it was used in then the future process of decollectivization. So I guess those three points. Oh, thank you very much, Henry. Those are great suggestions, questions.

I think indeed, although collectivization has been something of really of the past, but overall the collective period in China and in many other countries, made great achievements. Economically, those large, you know, those collectives, they were very good in doing production in general, and they were very good in doing research, in distributing the latest research in technology to farmers. They were also very good in mobilizing the farmers to do their own research. There was some very good recent research that showed about this in a book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution, for example. And there were, the the collectives were also very good in building infrastructure. They mobilized rural workers

to do a lot of things. They also enabled industrialization in the countryside itself. So the the workers do not have to move away from their home, become migrant workers into some distant cities, they can become a worker, like industrial worker in their hometown, nearby their village. So those are historical really achievements that have been unmatched by anything come after that. And besides those economic achievements, the collective also, by definition, they also provide fairly comprehensive coverage for education and health care. And those are, you know, really unprecedented. By the time the People's Republic was established, the life expectancy was around 30 years old, a little bit more than 30 years old. And 30 years later, you know, before the decontivization, the life expectancy

have increased by 30 years. So we all doubled, one and doubled. Those are some of the great achievements because most of the population were in the countryside. So most of the health care achievements were made by those rural collectives. And Mao particularly emphasized on this point that he criticized very strongly at the health department in the 1950. In the 153, 50s and 60s, he said, well, you guys are only serving the laws in the cities. And, you know, the medical staff should go to the countryside. And that's what happened. And they train the bad food doctors in the villages who are professionally farmers or, you know, just rural workers, but they can do, you know, they can serve as like a family doctor for the for the local neighbors.

serve a local doctor and you don't charge much money at all. And I do think is affordable and you don't have to travel far to a hospital. Those are really greatly reduced children mortality and, you know, and facilitated the rise of life expectancy in much of, even the very poorest region in China. Education is the same. Education was a really a previous. village for most people in China. But under the collectives, every small village, every, you know, this small collective, they would have at least a primary school. And every commune at least would have one high school. So basically, you can finish your education up until the end of high school within your commune. It means like you don't have to travel far at all. And, you know,

this were never available to the peasants before. And after high school, you can, you know, you can work at the time. The college education was not so widespread. But so high school, finishing high school is already like a major milestone. And you finish high school, you can work in the commune or you can, you know, apply to colleges. I mean, the college education was not very widespread time. But, you know, it's fortunate. for many peasants to finish high school education

in those kind of conditions. And so those were achievements done by the collectives without using much financial resources at all. To give you an example, how Humphrey has those can be. I remember a few years ago, I went to visit a village in my hometown and we're looking at some of the old infrastructure they built, the villages built, back in the 16th and 70s.

And most of those infrastructure in the countryside, if you ask, they were all built during the Mao era, during the collective period. And then, you know, you need regular maintenance of those infrastructure afterwards. Otherwise, like say, the water aqueduct, you have more sand or soil and that would be blocked. And just by the village chief, basically, he told me me, well, you know, if we want to just clean up the old aqueduct, I mean, the smaller aqueducts that connecting the main water channel to the village, it would take more than, easily take more than a million Chinese yuan, Chinese currency. And that's well beyond capacity of the village. But, you know, this were all available during collective

theory. And that's, you know, some scholars call it a labor accumulation, so that instead of accumulating a lot of capital, you use a lot of rural labor to finish unimaginable projects and which benefit the local society. One thing I was quite intrigued by is the way in which some of the health care and education that you mentioned that improved the standard of living, improved the, you know, health outcomes and life expectancy as well as the general level of educational capacity and literacy in the rural population so dramatically over 20, 30 years, was organized very much at the local level by the communes themselves and that the funding for these, you know, so even if

Mao encouraged doctors to go into the countryside and for there to be some kind of training, the real financing and organizing of these services was happening at a local level by the agricultural communes and even by the local teams and brigade levels. They would be responsible for the financing and assigning the work credits for the specialist positions that are outside of the regular agricultural labor and how to integrate them. And that was another component that I was quite intrigued by, as well as how local a lot of these collective decisions were under the commune and collectivized system when it came to organizing labor. Now, it's true that at the brigade and the commune level, a lot of the officials

would be appointed rather than, you know, by the party rather than elected. But at the base grassroots team level, you know, there were local officials elected by, you know, the members deciding, you know, how to equitably distribute, you know, credits for work and the income that would follow and so on. So it seemed to me that there would be a very organized peasantry that would be deeply politicized and so one of the questions that your book raises is why when decollectivization is promoted by the party top down of course you know we should have a chance at some point to talk a little bit about the politics of that because the narrative was oh the peasants wanted it and they're the ones who you know, organized it themselves to decollectivize. But if this was coming from

top down, why there wasn't so much organized resistance? And so I wondered, why wouldn't there have been at least some sense of local autonomy and local reaction against centralized kinds of dictates at the kind of grassroots level, since they might have been very accustomed to organizing their own health care, organizing their own educational systems, and a lot of the labor being organized by the peasants themselves on the land that they were working. So why, you know, given that structure, why wasn't there more resistance? How do you explain that? And I guess, you know, what we're coming to is some of the deficiencies in the system and the way it was actually implemented. How did that fragment local grassroots power? And, you know, when it came, you know,

to this rather fateful process imposed from above of disbanding the collective farms? Yes. And I think that's a really important question for us to ask. I think to a large extent, I mean, by the way I describe the dramatic achievements of a collective, it includes a very clear component of this were all based on the hard labor of the rural working people. And by hard labor, those were really hard labor. When we build infrastructure,

it really involves a lot of labor. To give you on a brief estimate, the regular working day for just a simple farmer without considering all those other public projects it's about 150 days I mean that's what the typical

like a working working time for a Chinese farmer nowadays 150 days or even less and during Mao's time every day is a working day you know it's like because you have always something to do like you build or you

infrastructure, you build this aqueduct, and you take care of the collective stuff like here and there and there and so the average working day can be easy 250 days per year, which is very long. And so, yes, those were the things that you can say it's a price you need to pay for really building up the countryside based on your own hands, not relying on some extra like outside capital and really build up your own capacity of doing things. So it's great. But in the short term, it also carries lots of burden and expenses. It's a sacrifice you need to make. And, you know, when the reformers, when they persuade the farmers, then one of the things that you can, you can mention is like, well,

Now, now you don't have to worry about all those big, like, public-oriented works. You just mind your own little plots. You work 150 days per year. And I'm also trying to give you even higher income based on that. I mean, yes, I mean, that's a material basis for peasants to say, okay, you know, because this is all the older farmers that talk to, the commune members. They mention one thing

that is that once they get de-collarization, it's like, oh, we don't have to do that much work. It's like, we don't have to do much work. You know, it's a life get more comfortably. Yeah, this runs directly opposite to the bourgeois narratives, like, oh, the commune people,

they shirk, right? They free ride. They don't do a lot of work. Well, if that's true, they should be happy without staying in the communes. Like, you know, they don't have to go to the work. And once you get your own family plot, you will work day and night.

But that's totally not true because it's the opposite. Like when they were in the commune, they worked day and the night. But once they get to the family plot, like, okay, now I take a break. You know, it's like, it's much simpler for them. So I think this was part of the material basis for that, you know, for that transition. And the, well, this is not just, this is not the whole of that, the picture. The government also very carefully, you know, did their new policies. They increased the price of agricultural products by 50% and more so that you make you feel like,

oh, my income increased a lot under this new policy. It's not the new policy. It's not about, you know, decadivization. is about the procurement policy, the pricing policy that's controlled by the state. The state also tried to provide, during the initial years, provide highly subsidized fertilizer, you know, all those other inputs to the farmers to make the transition easy. And that was, you can even argue they're trying to buy the peasants support for the foreign reforms and they succeeded. I mean, they came, you know, they came with high prices. I mean, the government

run into huge deficits in the couple years during the reform, but they succeeded. But those are the material side. They created an incentive to minimize resistance. But even on top of that, I mean, the people in China had such deep trust in the Communist Party. So whatever they say, you know, they would follow. I mean, they follow the Communist Party doing revolution, doing collectivization, doing all those kind of things. And now the communist parties are, well, you know, I think the best way for us to move forward is to do de-collectivization.

And you might have doubts, and many of them have doubts because during the Mao period, you know, the central government repeatedly told them that if someone asked you to go de-collectarization, that is a capitalist, and they get kind of abused. You know, I asked all the people, they said, yeah, we were very confused at the time. But, you know, but that's the order from above, and this was on the party. And nobody even thought about, like, this was really different. And so I think that was a sort of a combination of different things. And something Henry mentioned that the government was very clever in making different kind of propaganda stuff.

They hide the very content of decadivization under different terms. And they make it very complicated. Like, for example, the use term household responsibility system that wouldn't like responsibility. I mean, everyone should take responsibility for something. And it's a household responsibility system. they don't say that, well, we just get rid of the commune or get rid of the collective, the anti-collective system. They don't call it that.

They could have a hostile responsibility system. And it sounds more neutral. And they use a lot of things like this in a way of describing and propaganda. And people, even until this day, there is this, the main Chinese term for this new system is called Jhaiting Lianchang, Cheng Bao. It's a household

and contract system. That Lian chan is, you know, in Chinese, it can be understood as unified production. So it's like a collective thing. But it's actually an

abbreviation of the term linking revenue to a product. So it's like, you know, how much do you produce, more revenue, get totally different. But I think that they were deliberate in making the term in that way that many people, even today, understood that term of unified production. So you can imagine

that kind of this thing, effort that they had put into this process. I want to hop in for one second. You mentioned the household responsibility system. Now, not only is it interesting from a narrative perspective and a linguistic perspective, but also the narrative that comes out regarding the success of the household responsibility system is something that is talked about very frequently. And one of the things that your book does is looks at a report that was put out by Justin Lin on the household responsibility system. And one of the things that you point out in your book and very interestingly in Appendix 1 of your book, not just in the text itself, but also in the appendix is you point out some methodological issues regarding his analysis of the

household responsibility system. So just briefly, because, you know, this is such a huge conversation, we really could go for hours and hours, but you brought up the household responsibility system. Can you talk a little bit about what the household responsibility system was functionally? And then talk about the narrative, at least, of the success of the household responsibility system versus what you actually found was, you know, more accurate in terms of a more fully rounded understanding of the impacts of the household responsibility system versus this extremely rosy depiction that we saw in the analyses of Lynn as well as others. Right. Yeah. Thank you, Henry, for that. Really wonderful question. I think the household

responsibility system is not so much about responsibility. It is about household that in the Chinese language, it's sometimes, it's very, it's not, it's always ambiguous what that means. There are different ways of reforming the old collectives. So in the post-mouth period, in that, you know, the time spent of five, six, seven years, people propose different thoughts, like, you know, there's how to, basically, they all involve some sort of linking your income to your output, and so that you don't, you have less egalitarianism, but, you know, if you produce more, you're going to get more, right? But there are different ways of doing this. And for example, there is a, another method called

a contracting system. So the collective would contract the land out to different families, saying that, well, this is the contract you get for this year, you're going to work on this piece of land, and you have to produce 100 kilograms of wheat on this piece of land. That's the contract. If you fulfill this quota, and then you will be rewarded in a certain way. So that's why we're doing it. If you do this way, the collective will still be. there. It would exist despite the increasing, you know, this individual control over the production process. But the actual household responsibility system is not even the contracting system, is that the whole village would simply divide all the land they have into every household.

So there is no one who would really have like quota, a contract with the household. You mind your own business. You produce the way you like. And that's it. To me, that's a de facto privatization because the collectives would disappear after this whole process. And that is the household responsibility system. It's really, it's the extreme, the most extreme form of all the post-mile proposals regarding agrarian relations. And that was the one that was adopted by the central government. Yes, it's very interesting. What we haven't talked about is the failures of decollectivization as well.

So part of the myth is that it was a big success. It was what the peasants wanted. It was something that they demanded. And it led to all of these efficiencies. And one big part of your argument is that it, didn't lead to a lot of efficiencies. There was this transitional period that you talk about where there were some increases in production and so on. But your book looks very carefully at that the data takes a look at the weather and notices that there were a lot of exogenous

factors that led to increases in crop yields and so on. But that overall, what was also happening was that investments that had been made in infrastructure, in, you know, development of mechanized, you know, use of machinery and inputs in machine power and so on, that had been financed and organized under the collectives, you know, were beneficial during the period of transition. But obviously, once you don't have a collective large scale organized, agricultural system, these households, individual small plots, they're not going to be able to finance large-scale machinery. They can't have access to some of the more modern and progressive developments. And so, you know, you tell us the story that actually after the transitional period,

when the weather, you know, kind of went back to kind of normal, it wasn't so hospitable, that the levels of efficiency and production actually decreased. So is that basically the story that since that time, that has been consistently the case that under this household system that, of course, now is also starting to be under pressure where there is larger agglomeration starting to take place, you know, where people can sell their land and so on. But that, you know, for this period of about 15, 20, 30. Now it's been, how many years, actually? It's been several decades now.

40 years, yeah. Yeah, sorry, 40 years. To me, the 80s were like yesterday, but. That's how time works at none. The 80s were yesterday for me, too, and I wasn't even born in them. Exactly. But I guess my point is just to get your analysis here about, you know, what really happened under decollectivization, you know, and what did it

really lead to? Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about that. And then after that, I would really like to ask about the political consequences of it. But let's just look at the material question. Once it was reorganized and decollectivized in this household responsibility system, you know, what does it achieve? What happens? Right. Thank you, Edna. I think I forgot to respond to the question from Harry before about Justin Lane's research. But, you know, I think this is a good time to get back to that because that's part of the consequences of de-collectivization. So in case any listeners don't know, Justin Lane is a very influential economist in China. He was, he grew up in Taiwan.

In the 1970s, late 1970s, and he was part of the military force in Taiwan, stationed close to the Chinese mainland. And he, the legend said he, you know, he grabs on basketball and jump into the Taiwan Strait Ocean and then swim across and get to the mainland. And that's how he, you know, become part of the People's Republic. And I think, again, legend said that he was very interested in Marxian economics, so he wanted to study. But eventually he went to the University of Chicago to do his Ph.D. And so that was a time of really the peak of conservative economics, the Chicago. Yeah, that's a danger. That's a danger sign that he went to the University of Chicago. Yes, yes. And he's a, and he produced some of the,

the most widely cited research on decalectivization. Basically, he said, well, you know, close to half of the productivity increase after 1980 was because the decadivization reform. It was very widely cited. But, you know, we know how autochademia works. We know how, you know, particularly how this kind of stuff was produced. even without Justin Lane's research, I'm sure that the mainstream will produce something similar.

You know, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not just in the research that produced the propaganda. It's the propaganda that choose Justin Lean's research to push it further. So if we're looking at Justin Blaine's research itself, you know, it's a well-done research. It's just that the data that was very limited, the methods that he utilized was a typical, you know, this bourgeois economics technique, a so-called a neoclassical production function. I don't believe in those kind of neoclassical production function anyway to describe agriculture, in particular. But even if we use this model and we use the same data, and there is still some, I think, big issues. One of the things I identified was the timing of decollectivization, because the data that he used was that you look at how many teams have declectivized by the end of the year. But, you know, but a lot of those teams choose to decalectarize, you know, not at the beginning

of the year, but somewhere in the middle, especially after the fall harvest. So even if they were decollectivized by the end of the year, it doesn't mean that the decollectivized production has any impact in that year's output. So I argue that, you know, I think a safer way to examine this is. to take a one-year lack value of decalectalization. And once you do that, the whole results disappear. I mean, there is no real, I mean, statistically, there's no impact from decapitalization on output.

And so, again, I don't believe in those production models at all. But the point is that even we use the same thing, we're adding a little bit realistic understanding of what's going on in countryside. the results would not hold. I think at best we can say that there is no strong evidence to prove that there has really been a productivity breakthrough under decalectivization. And after that, you know, after 1984, after the decaduct fishing campaign was finished,

Chinese agriculture didn't grow very fast at all. The growth rate of yields, for example, have been growing much slower than before, much slower than the transition period from 1980 to 1984, but also slower than the mal period. So, of course, people would argue, well, you know, there is a limit to how much you can grow out of a piece of land. It's possible. But at least there's no evidence that after decontivize, you have a improvement of technical productivity. You know, it's clear that that has not happened.

Whether that is, whether there is, this is, you can make the counter, like this counterfactual argument that, well, even if you keep the collectives, the productivity will still be growing slower. That's possible. But we don't know that, for sure. sure. But the official propaganda, the mainstream academia, they just choose to emphasize on those very pro-de-activization research, saying that, well, you know, the decapitalization solved all the incentive issues, you know, avoid all the free rider problems, and now everything gets better,

and that's the economy. And also for the shows that this is one of the main successful campaigns that the post-mower leadership has done. And that really always signifies the correctness of the decision-making of the post-mile leadership. Right. Well, if it wasn't for efficiency and it didn't come from the peasants themselves, although they didn't, you know, resist it, the real question then that your book tries to deal with is why did it happen and what were the political economic consequences of it? And what you were arguing is that basically the peasants were collectively weak, politically speaking, so it was possible to target them, as it were, for this kind of capitalization, market reform that wasn't possible in the urban economic industrial sector from the outset, but that by fragmenting,

And, you know, the worker peasant alliance that it was then possible subsequently to capitalize, you know, the industrial urban economy as a political gambit here. One other component of it that I think you mentioned, but it occurred to me as well, was that, you know, even in the classic history of, you know, Marxism, discussion of the development of capitalism, it was absolutely necessary to remove peasants from the land. And so one of the consequences, it seems, of this was to free them up for urban labor projects when there's expanded kind of factories and so on as a kind of migrant labor class that could undermine politically speaking the organized sector of labor that had already established workers, workers who were part of state enterprises. And so it seems that it actually was not just to sever the political alliance, but also it did damage to the workers as well. So I'm

wondering if you can talk a little bit about the political consequences and the political objectives. Why you see this, you know, being contemplated here is that decollectivization was basically just a first step towards this transition to capitalism and to manage to achieve these goals politically that wouldn't have been possible if it had just been attempted directly across the economies. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit more and give us some insight about how and why that was an achievement of this post-Mal government. Yeah. Thank you, Edna.

That's a really important question. I think that all the reformers, I mean, we mentioned this before in the 1970s, so the national elites were ready to say goodbye to the old, you know, this whole progressive projects. But they need something for them to start with. in China, if they really want to reintegrate into the capitalist system, I mean, they were doing multiple things at the same time. They were inviting, for example, the oversee Chinese money from Hong Kong, from Taiwan, from Singapore, from Japan to invest in the mainland. That's one part

of the story. They get some foreign money, foreign capital. But, you know, they all. They all also need wage labor to do it as well. But the witch labor, it has to be produced out of the mainland itself. It is very hard, however, to find freely available wage labor in a socialist society. Everyone has a position, has a job, and you are asking a person to leave a lifetime of a job to join a capitalist company, a factory, and at least it's highly risky move. It's not going to be very popular. I think that in, so in the urban areas, the post-mile government first tried to try to do reforms. Like in many other former social countries, they try to do so-called increase the

autonomy of enterprises to introduce a, like, a proto-market mechanism in a society. So instead of have a fully planned, like a central planning economy, now every enterprise can keep their own revenue, keep the profits, they can have their own decision of how much bonus, how much compensation they can pay to their workers. And they, you know, so they have their own decision power in making investments in hiring and many other things. And that was thought to be a necessary step for the enterprises to be competitive, to, you know, be further, you know, transition into a efficient market economy. But in a society where workers still have formal and informal power where workers cannot be easily fired, if you increase enterprise

autonomy, the result would not be great that, you know, this has been proven not just in China, but in other countries, that if you increase autonomy to firms and the workers cannot be fired, basically the firms would keep increasing wages for the workers, because they are the owner of the farm, basically, and they would demand, well, we want a higher salary. We want a better package, and they will get it. And that you would have higher salary, high wages, higher spending power. At the same time, the investment coming out of all the enterprises would decline because you only have $100. Previously, you gave half to the workers' wage, half as investment. Now workers demand more, and you have much less for investment.

The whole society economy would run into unbalanced situation. More people try to buy stuff, but there's not much available. You have the shortage previously existed that worse along waiting lines. You have inflation, basically, in the society. So the urban economy quickly run into chaos in the 1930s after some trial experiments by the government. And that was, you know, You know, they were at a sensitive moment. They were the post-long leadership. They tried to prove that this path is correct. And if this crisis situation continued, then that whatever legitimacy they got would be gone.

So I think they were in this situation somewhat desperate to find a way to really break apart the Maoist legacy. you have to find a point, a weak point. I think that eventually, I mean, I don't think they were planning for this, but eventually they realized that, well, the countryside was a relatively weak point, that, you know, you can basically dismantle the collectives without damaging agricultural production that much. There's some damage, but not much. And given that you keep producing, you know, cheap fertilizer and other things,

to them. And this would also free up people to engage in non-socialist economy. They call the dual-track reform because you're creating that new sector, which is not damaging the socialist sector at the beginning. But eventually, it will be a competing factor in, you know, as a private economy. So I think that's, you know, really a smart way of doing things. And they figured out that that's the way to do it. And eventually, as you know, that those migrant workers, they would be a major part of the Chinese working class. And by the 1990s, it would be rather easy, much easier,

to displace the old socialist sector, socialist workers. I mean, they can lose the jobs. But you have a sufficiently large private economy to make sure that the economy will keep going, which is very different from the Russian case. You know, when talking about these motivations and goals for changes in policy, this does bring up the question of ideology. Now, Joanne, you've been very generous with your time,

so I will make this the kind of concluding question, but it's going to be a very big and two-part question. So I apologize for the scale of this question because it is going to be a big one. When we're talking about goals and motivations, oftentimes, and not just in the case of China, but particularly in the case of China and particularly relevant for this conversation, we have the consideration of class struggle versus the consideration of modernization. And these two things, they aren't inherently opposed to one another,

but the way that they manifest themselves in many of these countries, you do see a division between the consideration of class struggle versus modernization. So the first part of this question is, can we talk about how, what to focus on within the case of China, class struggle versus modernization, in many ways drove these changes in policy, both in terms of the policy to have collectivization and then the policy of decollectivization. We see a change in priority of class struggle, or let's say a sideline. of class struggle. I think that it would be fair

to characterize it in this way. And then relatedly, so that's the first part of the question is, you know, can you talk a little bit about these kind of two prongs, class struggle, modernization, and how these two factors come to the foreground

or the sidelines within the context of China. The second question then is, again, kind of a concluding question. When we're thinking about the political and economic possibilities of China for the, the future. How do you analyze what these trajectories look like at the present time and how we

should think about this consideration of class struggle versus modernization from the point where we are at presently and moving towards the future for a socialist egalitarian and hopefully communist future? Right. Thank you very much, Henry. Those are great, great questions. Indeed, as you mentioned, there are the two things, the class struggle and modernization, were always there within, you know, among the Chinese leadership, but also for the Chinese academia, and all these activists. I mean, those are important politics. The, in to a certain extent, I mean, even during Mao's time, both class struggle and modernization were emphasized. the full modernization, the goal was raised during Mao's time, and at the same time,

and at the same time, Mao emphasized class struggle. And we know the modernization in the Western context has a very reactionary element in it. It really refers to a particular kind of capitalist development. And in the socialist context, I think cause struggle and modernization is still a unpleasant couple. Right. That's why I said they're not inherently opposed to one another, but the way in dealing with these oftentimes makes there be a contradiction between the two. It's about that how you deal with these two factors that really, it's the devil is in the details, right? Yes. Yes. I mean, if we, everything was as planned by Marx and Engels, we wouldn't have to deal with this issue, because the revolution will happen in the West,

and there is no issue of modernization. Everything is modern by definition. And now the revolution took place in the South and the East, I mean, where all the countries have to deal to a certain degree, the modernization issue. And that, I think, oftentimes create lots of pains in the process because the Communist Party or any socialist party, they cannot just worry about building socialist stuff. They have to do what a lot of capitalist countries have to, you know, they have done in the past. They have to emphasize capital accumulation. They have to move a sizable portion of the surplus into investment, into, you know, into other things that without directly benefiting people's lives.

And that, you know, in the China's case, as you can see, the rural peasants, they gave their lives, the sacrifice tremendously to build a socialist project, and they were betrayed. And, you know, whatever they built didn't benefit them, right? So I think that's the common experience of all the working people in those socialist countries, that when the elites move away from socialism, they always use the term modernization. We want to be part of Europe. Let me say this in Russia. We want to be part of the modern world. We want to follow the United States. I mean, that's all part of modernization. And in that context, it's a directly, you know, anti-socialist, anti-communist slogan.

But at the same time, there's many socialists and communists in that context, they would agree with the necessity of modernization. If we use this very programmatic attitudes of Deng Xiaoping, it's like, you know, as all as a catch his mouth, right, or rats, and we don't care what color the, you know, the cat is. that. If you follow that attitude, then okay, you know, then you have, you have, you can pursue whatever market-based modernization, westernization, and worry about socialism or class struggle later. And that's the mainstream attitudes in China for a long time. But I, you know, but, but, but if, if, I think those were, these, those were possible at a particular historical

momentum. Like, at the time, the U.S., the West, really represents absolutely the more northern part of the world. I mean, they give you, you know, a lot of benefits, high income. Everything is great. You know, the grass is greener. And, and, but as time goes by, like, by now, for example, 2024, you ask the same question. The answer is not that simple. I think. It's not like the same that we were also in 1980s. Because the vanguard of capitalism, that is United States, the West, are entering this really deep crisis phase. It's not clear how they would get out. I mean, this is the economic stagnation, but also cultural and political decay in those countries. And geopolitically, they were clearly making all those unwise decisions.

in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, in East Asia. So, so, you know, today even if someone is like, oh, we should focus on modernization, we should modernize. And that, that, you know, the implicit, those ideology might not be so clearly like a Westernized or like a typical U.S. centered capitalist system. It can be something different.

Like, we can still modernize, but we can try something else. I think time has changed that I think for future socialists and current socialists, future social communists, I think we are at a point that Marx and Angos and many others dream about, but they have never lived to see it, that the capitalist system itself is really, I think, approaching the end. And there's not so much ideological appealing part of capitalism to ordinary folks anymore, to intellectuals, to working people. And, you know, you can, I think it's not, it would be, it would be not very difficult

to talk about a modern world and without talking about capitalism, you know, and that's quite possible. I know that China might not be the best example, but let me use China as an example here. In a better society, in the future social society, we would like to see much more public transportation? We want to see much less use of private automobiles, at least the oil-based cars. I mean, but yes, I mean, obviously China built this very impressive network of high-send. speed rails. It's become part of the daily thing for ordinary working people in China. They use it a lot. They don't have to drive that a long way. They don't have to take airplanes in most

cases. They also, today they use a lot of electric vehicles. So even if we involve the idea of modernization, oftentimes it's like that that modernization is not in the United States anymore. And that's, that's, I think that's a, it's not necessarily, you know, something that we can use. Oh, well, that's socialism. But I think that points to some possibilities, potentials, that we have not encountered before in the past two centuries. So I think there's a like optimal, I mean like optimistic side in this. But ideally, I think in the future society, we would not have to worry about economic growth. we would not have to worry about modernization, whenever that is,

that our focus, our energy can be really spent in making everyone live better, live longer, healthier, getting more knowledge, live peacefully with each other, and preserving our nature, and just making a really communist society. I mean, that doesn't have to evolve economic growth or modernization. But that's something, I think, you know, I think eventually we would have to do that. I think you're right that the conditions perhaps are riper now for broader global, true international, you know, internationalism now in the past. the conditions, perhaps, weren't, even though it's true that these revolutions, like the, you know, communist-inspired revolutions took place in, you know, Russia and China, you know, places that hadn't been industrialized and weren't integrated in quite the same way to, you know, industrial capitalism. But now that has happened. And so even if there is this fragmentation politically and we have, a world where there's a lot of contestation and it's not along ideological lines in quite the same

way. Nonetheless, that is creating the conditions where if, you know, peoples of the world can actually organize together, the mechanisms and the structures of the economic integration are there, you know, so that's something we have to look forward to. And I guess the last thing that I just wanted to say in this is that I have more, I have a, you know, your book even though tells a story that is quite a pessimistic story because it's, although your conclusion, it points towards an optimistic potential for the future. But of course, this sounds like it's a story of, you know, advances that were made in organizing, you know, the peasant agrarian sector through collective ownership was rolled back and undermined in China just like it was throughout the rest of the world

and the global south, then you have the immiseration in some ways of people now becoming poor laborers in the urban societies. Nonetheless, it is a hopeful and positive story if it might precipitate some kind of change, the conditions for a genuine change that's more sustainable than perhaps it was in the early part of the 20th century when these initial attempts at socialism and communism were put into effect. And one thing that gives me confidence is the wisdom of Chinese people. Throughout this text, you quote these pithy, you know, kind of statements that, you know, basically represent a lot of political wisdom about what's happened in these kind of rhyming short phrases. You use them throughout here. What it suggests is that these popular phrases

suggest that, you know, the Chinese people really know and understand what's going on in their society. And that gives me quite a lot of hope for the future, that even if there's been a lot of effective political propaganda and achieving initially these kind of, well, we might think of is in some ways reactive and reactionary projects of decollectivization and so on. But nonetheless, at this point, nobody is fooled. And, you know, there are conditions for a genuine class struggle and class solidarity being created now for the future. And so I really have to thank you. This was a very clarifying book. You know, the argument is very, very clear, and it makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it goes well, even though it disagrees in some components with

the way in which our narrative of modern Chinese history has been unfolded. I think I see some ways in which maybe the two can integrate in a hopeful kind of next phase and next stage of Chinese and global South and world history. That's what we have to hope for. Yes. Thank you very much, Edna and Henry. I appreciate the comments and the questions. I agree. The book is about how it was defeated. But the point, I mean, what we use it for is to Bernard for a future success. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I co-sign all of Adnan's comments, and I just want to let the listeners know, since we didn't mention, this book is pretty short. It's only about 115 pages. super important, and it's got a lot of really great stuff in it in case you didn't pick

that up from the conversation that we had. So I want to encourage the listeners to go out and get yourself a copy. Of course, you can get yourself a digital copy or this was printed by monthly review press and of course we support monthly review press and so you should also pick up a physical copy. I know next time I go to the U.S. I might try to get my hands on a physical copy as well because I just have the digital edition. and I've had the digital copy for years. And like I said, when we first met, Juan, I was really hoping that we would be able to talk about this book at some point in the future, which, you know, of whatever, a year and a half later, we were finally able to do so. So I definitely want to recommend the listeners pick up the book that we've been talking about today from commune to capitalism, how China's peasants lost collective farming and gained urban poverty by our guest,

Zhuan Shu. It's been great to have you on the program again. I know you have basically no online presence, but can you tell the listeners where they can find your book, your article that we talked about in the previous conversation, and maybe tease if you have anything that you're working on now. What can we be looking forward to seeing coming out from you in the near future? Yeah. Thank you, Henry.

I've been working on stuff about the re-emergence of the third. in the 21st century, and I've been working on this thing called China as an international project, which is to talk about the forming of the People's Republic, like the Soviet Union, was an international thing, and how much that has transcended the so-called nation-state categories in bourgeois history. And besides that, I'll be doing some like more slightly more technical, empirical work on political economy. But, you know, that's, I try to write in both English and Chinese. And so if there's anything new, Henry, I'll send it to you. Are you better? I'm going to hold you to that. Preferably the things in English, my Chinese

ability is rather lacking, I have to admit. My abilities and many things are lacking, but Chinese is really, really down there on the list. Adnan, how can the listeners find you, your other excellent podcast. Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain-H-U-S-A-I-N, and you can take a listen to the other podcast. It's a little more occasional than our weekly show here, but we do have new episodes coming very soon called the M-A-J-L-I-S, and it's on Spotify and all the other usual platforms, so do check it out.

Of course, highly recommend that. And as Adnan mentioned, this is a weekly show, I had just counted, and at the time of recording, we had released 91 consecutive weeks of episodes without missing a single week. And by the time this episode comes out, it'll be about 95, because we already have things recorded for the next few weeks as well. So listeners, if you want to find me on Twitter, you can follow me at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-1-995.

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