Guerrilla History - The 20th Communist Party of China National Congress - Dispatch w/ Sun Feiyang and Mirah

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

In this Dispatch episode on a very recent topic, we bring in both a great guest and a fabulous guest host - both of whom are our friends from the DSA International Committee.  Mirah and Sun Feiyang.�� We discuss the recently wrapped up Communist Party of China National Congress, its implications for Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and what to expect in the next 5 years. Mirah and Feiyang are both members of the DSA International Committee.  Mirah can be followed on twitter @snackvampire, Feiyang can be followed @moghilemear13. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a new (free!) newsletter you can sign up for!

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. 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 two co-hosts, 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? Hi, Henry. I'm doing well. It's great to be with you. Hopefully you're well. Absolutely. It's always nice to see you. Also joined as usual by my other co-host, Brett O'Shea, host. of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Very excited to talk about China today. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be a great topic. And before I introduce our guests, I will also introduce. We have a guest host again. I know that this is something that we've recently trialed with our Brazilian election and, you know, kind of historical

analysis of the rise of fascism within Brazil episode that we just released. Was it last week, I think, at this point. And we're going to have another guest host again today. So hopefully listeners are going to enjoy this format of us bringing on people that can ask very well-informed questions, probably better than we could ourselves. Today we have Mira, who is DSA International Committee member joining us. Listeners may remember Mira from our panel discussion on why historical knowledge and is important for activism and organizing. So Mira, hello. Welcome to the show again. Thank you so much for having me back on.

Very excited to be here today to talk about the 20th Party Congress. Absolutely. And I'm very happy that you agreed to help us out with this episode. It's really a pleasure to have you on again. And now to introduce our guest, we have Fay Young, who is another DSA International Committee member, who is going to be taking us through the topic of the day, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. So hello, Fei Yang. It's nice to have you on the show.

Thanks, Henry. I'm really excited to be here as well. So, Adnan, why don't you take us away with the first question of this episode? Sure, thanks. Yeah, this is going to be really interesting and educational, especially for me. So I'm really looking forward to learning more about it. But for listeners who, you know, haven't been paying attention to the news, and frankly, there hasn't been a lot of good coverage, you know, other than maybe a few odd topics of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in, much of the mainstream media, perhaps it would be useful to get a sense for the importance and the significance of the party Congress, what happens there, what kinds of decisions are taken. Why is it important to understand it? And of course, if you have any thoughts on how it's being construed or misconstrued more widely as a corrective to that, that would be useful. But that background,

I think, is essential to begin with some sense of, you know, why is this an important? meeting of you know for china and for the world absolutely so it's a meeting that's held every five years in china with the all of the representatives of the party across the country meet together and their main stated purpose really is to elect the standing committee that's going to be china's leadership team for the next five years basically now that definitely that definitely is a big deal, but it's also not too big of a deal in that. It's a very regular mechanism. It happens every five years. It's no different than the Republican or Democratic Party holding their party convention ahead of an election or the Labor Party or the conservatives in the

UK holding their party conferences as well. So it's also a very normal process in China, too. And frankly, there aren't often many surprises. Many of the policies, many of the policies, see things that are discussed. They've been out there. They've been discussed publicly in the years leading up to this party Congress as well. It's just that the coverage only happens when the Congress is actually going on. And to people who may not be following China regularly, a lot of it can come as a surprise. Yeah, and as a way to kind of follow up on that, now that we kind of have an orientation to the actual event itself, and we'll get into the details on this as the episode goes forward. But can you just kind of talk about some of the main things that occurred during this National Party Congress and just some of the main themes that were hit upon by the Communist Party leaders. Yeah, absolutely. So China has always had this tradition of five-year plans, which is also shared with other communist countries, this tradition of long-term planning. And so one of the first

things they do is review the progress they've made on the last five-year plan. You know, what's gone well, what things we've achieved, what things we still need to work on. That's the first part of the report that's given out at the party Congress. And then it basically lay out, now here are our goals for the next five years, like the next five-year plan, basically. And I think there's a lot of continuity here. And if you dig into the the mass media coverage, there's also, they also admit to that there's, there's a lot of continuity in what was discussed. Like, the economy, continuing to develop what was termed common prosperity by Xi Jinping. The cracking down on corruption in the government within the party

has also been a main theme. Also, the environment, the, uh, the peak carbon emissions by 2030, carbon neutrality by 2060, those targets were also reiterated as well. And then also in terms of foreign policy as well as the Taiwan question, frankly, they just reiterated what China's policy has always been there, that there's one China and Taiwan's part of China. So no real change is there as well. But I'd say those are the main groups, like the focus on economic development, reiteration of the environmental and green goals, and also a restatement of China's foreign policy and policy towards Taiwan. Yeah, I guess I'll hop in now with just a brief statement and then, you know, a question to

follow up on that. So as we mentioned, this is the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, listeners of the show may also be familiar with another 20th Congress of a Communist Party, and that would be the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is the Congress where we had Khrushchev's famous secret speech, which was not really a secret and was not really intended to be. And, you know, the follow from that was disastrous in many ways. Some people, of course, would praise it. But, you know, the overall, the impact of that 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was relatively disastrous. And we saw big, big scale changes in terms of what direction the Communist Party was going to be taking in the years to come.

Now, as you mentioned, this Congress is much more geared towards continuity. But there are some changes that have been taking place. So I'm just wondering if you'd be able to lay out some of the bigger changes, particularly in the Constitution perhaps, that have been put forth within the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, I'd say the biggest pivot. And some of the most tangible reactions to the party Congress can be seen here is this focus on common prosperity. Now, it's not something that was new or announced at the Congress. It's been heralded for a couple of years. And probably in 2020 is when we start, saw the start of increasing scrutiny, heavy regulation on some of China's largest companies, especially in the tech

sector that has really driven down the stock prices of Alibaba, J.D., etc. And that's continued. There's one of the new terms to expand on the theme of common prosperity in the party Congress report was that we needed to further regulate the mechanism of wealth accumulation and that wealth income growth can't be multiple times of labor income growth. So it's these things that are coming increasingly into focus. And unsurprisingly, the market didn't really like that. And if you look at the performance of Hong Kong stocks on Monday, especially luxury brands like

Guadro Maltai, which sells really a premium liquor, their stock prices tumble like 10, 20% in a single day. So that's one of the probably a confirmation, I suppose, that this is going to continue to be the focus, that there's not going to be a pitch. pivot away from this common prosperity theme that that has been messaged in the last couple of years. Now, you did mention the Constitution, and I think this is also something that probably has been discussed in the media 40 years leading up to this Congress that Xi Jinping's going to stay on for another term. No, unsurprisingly, that did happen.

He's still on the Politburoes, still on the standing committee. And a lot of the coverage focused on this as unprecedented, like, how dare he, he's supposed to step down after these two terms. And, you know, it's kind of strange to me seeing unprecedented upward because China's only had, like, about five major leaders since the founding of the PRC. There's unprecedented and new things happening with every single leader. And, you know, there's not really, there's going to be unprecedented things anywhere. So, So, you know, it did happen. It is a change to the Constitution, but we're happy to discuss that further as well.

Mira, I know that you have a question, but let me just hop in with one quick point in terms of how media has been portraying this, you know, revelation, which is not really a revelation that Xi Jinping is going to continue for another five-year term. So after this five-year term, that would be a total of 15 years, which for Americans seems like a. a very long time because our president's term out after eight years. But this is not something that is particularly strange when you look at how other countries' leaders stay in office. For example, and I see a nod just mentioned the point I'm going to make in the chat, Anhella Merkel. Anhele Merkel, I used to live in Germany before I lived in Russia, I live in Russia. Anhelemerkel was chancellor for 16 years. And she really only left because she wanted to. There was no calls by other Western nations saying, you know, Anhella Merkel is this.

Now, Mira is taking the words out of my mouth, a dictator for life because she's staying in office as long as she wants. And that, you know, to defend democracy, we have to come out and put her out of office. No, everybody said, you know, Anhella Merkel was the champion of the European project. Xi Jinping has been in charge for 10 years. Go ahead, Brad. FDR had, what, four terms? He was over 16 years. So 12 years.

He's not even unprecedented in America. Yeah, he would have been 16 years if he hadn't died very early. I think we also do ourselves a disservice by just focusing on like the one person at the top. You look at the United States, how many senators and representatives has basically like been there for almost life. Like Pelosi's been in the house probably since I was born. There were multiple senators that have just sat and chaired committees for for decades. And, well, in China's standing committee, there's actually quite a bit of rotation. There was also a lot of media panic about the previous Premier Lee Khecheng being replaced with the mayor of Shanghai.

And there's also quite a lot of new names in the standing committee, which also is framed as unprecedented. Of course, in the bad way. But, you know, there's also a lot of rotation happening among China's leadership. And you don't necessarily see that in the United States Congress. Yeah. Just to make one final point on that, what I was saying is that, and this is just perhaps to make my co-hosts and the guests laugh a little bit, I had seen a graphic come out from AFP News, which is a French news agency.

I put this on Twitter. They put a graphic out that shows Xi Jinping's longevity compared to other major leaders. And the timeline is the goofiest thing in the world. First of all, they put him right next to Kim Jong-un, Putin, right at the top. So you have China, North Korea, and Russia all right next to each other. And then the Western countries, United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom at the bottom. But their X-axis is, like, completely off. The Chinese one starts in 2012.

North Korea starts in 2011. If you go down to Germany, the axis starts at 2005, but they put it level with the one that's at 2012. So it looks like they were in office for. the same amount of time, not that she was in office for six years longer than him. And all I wanted, you know, was pointing out there is not only are they grouping these countries that Americans and Westerners more generally are going to be predisposed to thinking as enemies, they're lumping them together, but also they're leaving out a lot of other

very notable examples like the Sultan of Brunei, who's been in office since 1967, Paul Bia, who's been in office since 1975, Musaveni, since. it goes on. We can think of like Paul Kagame, who's a very, you know, close ally to the West in the United States and Britain in particular. Nobody calls him a dictator for life in Western media, at least. You know, if you go on left circles, we might. But in Western media, nobody calls Paul Kagame a dictator for life. But, you know, they just kind of conveniently leave it out from the discussion. Anyway, Mira, feel free to hop on. Yeah, thank you, Henry. You know, there's so much mystification, I think, that happens around how leaders are selected in China, how the

political process works there. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about how members of the National Congress are elected. And, you know, who can participate in the National Congress? I saw a thread on Twitter about a delivery driver for a service that was pretty similar to Amazon, who ended up, you know, being one of the members of the national. Congress. So this is, I think, really an interesting thing for Americans to learn a little bit more about. Yeah. So I'll start at the very top of the funnel there. And that's, you have to be a member of the Communist Party to participate. And it's not easy getting into the Communist Party. Frankly, it's a little bit more of a difficult application process than joining DSA, thankfully for me.

But there's so many applicants every year in China to join the Communist Party, and most of them don't get approved. In fact, Xi Jinping himself actually had to apply multiple times before he got in. And it's made difficult on purpose. Like, it's not meant to be something that you just join, and it's just kind of a business card you have in your wallet. But it's supposed to be time-consuming. It's supposed to be demanding. It's supposed to be like a strong ideological fit. And you're expected to do a lot of things as a party member, too.

So it really starts there. And then, you know, in each locality, city and province, you go up. There's larger and larger party formations. And each of those, they select representatives and then the larger group from these represents select someone upwards. and it filters all the way up until you get the set of representatives that are part of the National People's Congress. And so that's how you have people from really all walks of life from former basketball players

like Yalming, as well as people who do delivery driving for mobile apps in the People's Congress. There's also, you know, people who make Laogan Ma like spicy chili crisp as well. Like the founder of Logamashi has also been a delegate to the party Congress as well. Yeah, and I kind of want to just, you know, build off that in showing like the differences between how you can rise to power within the Communist Party in China and how you rise to power here in the United States, right? We always hear this bullshit framing of democracy versus authoritarianism and meritocracy versus authoritarianism. But here in the U.S., somebody like Donald Trump just has to have name recognition and a fuck ton of money. You either have to have a bunch of money in your own pocket or be able to, through networks, often very corrupt shitty people, be able to get enough money. Money is the deciding factor in how you rise in American politics. Whereas in China, it seems like you have to display competency at governing. You have to actually serve people at a city or regional level before you can move up to a national level. And it's actually a real meritocracy. And then the democracy versus authoritarianism dichotomy is particularly.

particularly funny when you look at the levels of support among the Chinese people for the Communist Party, a study out of Harvard in the last couple years shown support over 93%. Ask the average American how they feel about their government, how responsive they feel it is, or just look at the polls that show that less than what, 20% of people or 15% of people support Congress. I can't find these people in my personal life. Everybody who I ask hates our government. And so this narrative of democracy versus authoritarian authoritarianism obscures so much reality. And it's really kind of sickening. But with all of that in mind, this democracy versus authoritarian dichotomy in particular is weaponized in the context of China and Taiwan and this fear mongering and kind of like setting the table for military confrontation by hyping up this threat to Taiwan, Pelosi going over there. you know, agitating this whole thing. So can you kind of talk about what foreign policy was established or as you talk about the continuity of already existing foreign policy with regard to Taiwan and what it could, what future scenarios are on the table regarding Taiwan? What would make China, for example, make a robust move on Taiwan? You can kind of take that question any direction you want. Sure. So I'll reiterate that there wasn't any

change in policy towards Taiwan from China standpoint. They've always maintained the one China policy that Taiwan is a part of China. Going back, there was a civil war. The other side of the civil war has fled to this province of China and that they need to be reunified. Now, they've always reiterated that we desire peaceful reunification. And there's this proposal of the one country two systems. Unfortunately, the branding for that is probably not the best right now, but that is the framework that they discussed in regards to Taiwan. Now, they have not ruled out the use of force, but that's not something that they've ever done. And so it's unsurprising given recent U.S. actions towards Taiwan and increasing arms sales, like frequent politician visits, really

just for the cameras, too, that they're not going to say, oh, well, okay, well, we're just going to rule out the use of force, go do whatever you want with Taiwan. So it's just a reiteration of their existing policy. Unfortunately, in the media, I've seen all that framed as a belligerent foreign policy towards Taiwan, but you can compare that to the statements on Taiwan in every party Congress, and it's more or less the same. How about this really quickly? as a follow up on the foreign policy question, just regards to their military buildup, but their defensive posture, and this constant thing that China pushes about national sovereignty, like no other country should be able to come in and mess with the sovereignty of a nation state.

So is there anything explicit with regards to U.S. belligerence and brinkmanship on this issue or anything about nuclear weapons or anything like that that you could touch on? No, so, you know, China has always had a no-first-strike policy regarding new. nuclear weapons. And, you know, this much hyped up Chinese military buildup, they still spend a significantly less amount of money on the military than the United States does, both in raw terms, as well as a percentage of GDP. Like, there have been increases to that rate, but it's still far short of what the U.S. is spending. And so, you know, instead of a big buildup, it's like, hey, maybe we need to do a little bit more, given how much the U.S. is spending.

the United States was not mentioned by name in any of the party reports. And, you know, you'll still see the same policy statements that, you know, we support national sovereignty. We support countries' right to exist without external interference. And that's been their longstanding policy. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up in this, since we're on this topic of foreign policy. I guess my question here is about the nature of. of the one-China policy, right?

So this was something that both the U.S. and China had, you know, historically agreed upon after that, you know, Nixon goes to China, et cetera, it became official U.S. policy of a one-China policy and leaving this kind of strategic ambiguity about whether it's, you know, one-China, two systems, and what the nature of that relationship will be. So I guess looking at it from both sides of where change may be possible is one, what has changed in an overt way besides, of course, you know, military buildup in the South, you know, China Sea and so on. What has the U.S. been doing that undermines or changes the one China policy, especially as it would be recognized by China? In other words, what would China seem the current Chinese government recognize as departures from the one China policy that would destabilize the situation? Yeah, so what's been happening in the probably last, I suppose, six years or so, really starting with Trump's first term and them receiving the Taiwanese ambassador as inauguration.

It's just this endless salami slicing of, well, we'll do this other thing. that we didn't used to do before. We're going to sell this new weapon that we haven't sold to Taiwan before. And after they do it, the State Department spokesman will step out and say, oh, we support the one China policy. We support everyone's interpretation of the one China policy, some version of that. But, you know, China's obviously going to see through that and see that what it is. And so they have had to respond to that.

But I think some of the major changes that's really. really gotten us to this point. Maybe a little less familiar to American listeners, but it used to be in the 90s when I was growing up that people on Taiwan, including the government, there would also support the one China policy. In fact, one of the popular sayings then was that, you know, China and Taiwan are going to reunify, but they're going to beg us to lead them because Taiwan was so prosperous then relative to China that, like, of course, they're going to want our expertise. They're going to want us to bring all this wealth and, you know, all this freedom to them. And that dynamic has really shifted over the last 10, 20 years. Now, you can

attribute that to China's just suddenly becoming scarier or whatever. But the main issue is that just China is much more developed than it was in the 90s. There are some memes going around of Chinese tourists in Taiwan. They get in a cab in Taipei and they're driving around in the cab driver ASMO, do they have buildings this tall where you're from in China? So there's kind of a perception gap there of how far China has come. And for the people that realize it, they're like, well, geez, you know, we can't really compete anymore. There's a lot of young people in Taiwan, what's a decently high youth employment rate, that go to the mainland for job opportunities. the quality of even cultural exports like TV dramas music has just exploded when I was in college

and I went to karaoke all of the popular songs were by Taiwanese or Hong Kong singers now I went to karaoke like about a month ago and now it's all mainland singers right so in response Taiwan's even banned some Chinese streaming websites for cartoons and TV dramas so there's a lot more feeling that, hey, we're kind of threatened, not just militarily, but culturally, economically, like, they're just doing so much better now, and we really need to get the U.S. or to do something to assert that, you know, we're different from them. And so that's why that kind of one-China mentality on Taiwan has also kind of fallen out of favor.

And, you know, it's just kind of a natural outcome of all these larger trends going on the last few decades. Well, maybe just a quick follow up on that is like, well, so has this, what politically is happening then in Taiwan? As you said, there's a lot more integration as a result of the stronger Chinese economy, more cultural products and exports. Is there a kind of reaction developing either from the change of the old guard that was convinced that a one China policy would mean Taiwan system would. become, you know, the policy for, for, or the government and structure for China, or from these, you know, other groupings and generations of a Taiwanese independence sort of nationalist movement trying to emphasize distinctive Taiwanese culture and protective. Of course,

there was an indigenous, you know, culture before the Chinese nationalists, you know, had to go into exile on the island. What's happening on that sort of level? Is there a move to try and emphasize that in order to create a breakaway kind of distinctive nationalism and depart from this one China policy? Or do you feel that maybe there is a move to some popular support of integration into the Chinese system that the U.S. is concerned or nervous about? How do you see that development? So there absolutely is that movement that you describe. So the last KMT, President of Taiwan, Ma Yingzio, actually before he left office, he had a meeting with Xi Jinping in person, which was unprecedented in the good way. But unfortunately, his party lost in the landslide in the next election to the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party, and they've been in power since.

Now, they have been the party of Han Chinese people who have been on Taiwan before 1949. That's a generalization, but that's generally where their power base is, whereas the KMT support is from Chinese people who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Civil War and after. Now, this population, since they've been on Taiwan longer, there's obviously more of a, well, we're from Taiwan. were not from the mainland. They tend not to be indigenous Taiwanese. The indigenous Taiwanese actually block vote for the KMT in a very interesting dynamic because they don't see a lot of room for them in that kind of DPP nationalism there. But that's been the party that's been ruling Taiwan for about a decade now.

They came close to losing power in the last election, but frankly the KMT put up a very very bizarre pineapple farmer candidate. He had a lot of gaffes. The Hong Kong protest happened concurrently, too, and that really just kind of blew up his campaign. So, you know, aside from the one China policy question, Taiwan has its own domestic politics as well. This party's cuts the pensions has been very unpopular as well. But they've been able to successfully paper over that by focusing on China and focusing on that sort of where we're different from China, that kind of political platform instead. I have kind of a sort of a two-part question for you, Fayyang, but one part of it is sort of

to speak to, you know, why reunification is so important to China. Like, what does this matter so much, you know, to the country? And, you know, how does that play into China's core security? I remember reading something about how Japan had used Taiwan as a launching base for its invasions of China in a colonial fashion. So I think it would be interesting if you could talk about that a little bit. And then also, I think, you know, the U.S. tends to characterize China's military development at this point as something that threatens the region. But also, you know, I think China's military is not constructed in a similar way as the U.S. military, which is built primarily for forward force projection.

China's military is built more on like an anti-access area denial strategy, which other countries that are sort of under imperial threat by the U.S. have used. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what you think the differences are there. Sure. So I'll answer your second question first. I think you cut out a little bit on the previous ones. I'll try and cover that later as well. But you're absolutely right in terms of the characteristics of Chinese military development versus the U.S. Like from China's perspective as probably the number one trading partner for most of the countries around the world, a lot of that trade is by sea.

And a lot of that sea trade flows to the South China Sea where there are a lot of choke points there. Like the Straits of Malacca, there's a lot of places where the U.S. Navy operates, and China's Navy historically hasn't had access to. So it makes China very vulnerable if one day the United States says, hey, we're just not going to allow any ships carrying Chinese goods to pass through the strait, you know, tough luck, just go around or something. And that would be, well, that would hurt the U.S. too, but it would be so much more harmful to China. And that's a scenario that really, like, they would be dumb not to at least think about and somewhat prepare for. So it's preventing situations like that where trade, like energy, food, et cetera, is cut off to China or China is unable to export its goods abroad. That's a lot of the focus of Chinese military development. As a threat to the region, it's funny that that is being pushed when you also have some a little bit less mainstream, like right-wing.

outlets, pushing the idea that China should just take advantage of this Ukraine situation, forget about Taiwan, and invade Siberia, you know, which is just a terminal case of risk brain. But, you know, you can't be concerned about Chinese military being a threat to the region and then just encourage China to go invade a neighboring country. It's just bizarre to me. But to your first question about Taiwan and its importance, I think there are two aspects to it. One of them is just very real politic. Like a U.S. aligned Taiwan that's hostile to China that is not allowed to export any of its high-end chips to China. That's pretty tough. Like we wouldn't accept that. We did not accept like nuclear missiles on Cuba because they're so far

us. We probably wouldn't accept a hostile China-aligned Puerto Rico either. So just from a very real politics standpoint that's a tough not to swallow but also just because taiwan was part of the the ching dynasty and it was handed over to imperial japan after the defeat um in the treaty of shimonosaki and that's um it was a pretty humiliating treaty uh it was uh like um the people on taiwan then hated it. They refused to accept it. They fought back against the Japanese coming to take control over the island and, you know, thousands of them died because the Japanese, like, too bad. This is our island now. And they massacred a lot of Han Chinese and indigenous people in Taiwan when they took it over. And so because of that history, and then after World War II, in Japan's

surrender documents, they gave Taiwan back over to the entity China. So they, they they feel that, hey, we've got a claim here. This is a civil war that hasn't ended, but by all rights and means, Taiwan belongs to China. So there's that sort of historical claim as well as just the, you know, well, it's right next door. And if it's hostile to us, that that's a really bad situation. Yeah, moving off of Taiwan for a second, but sticking with foreign policy, I guess let me start with a little bit of a preamble. So Mira was talking about, you know, China's military is not set up in the same way as the United States is where it's essentially force projection in a way of, you know, maintaining a threat, you know, in order to coerce partners, their partners, right? They work with us.

But as Mira is doing on the video right now, air quotes on the word partners, right? You know, are they really partners if we have military bases in and all around their country in the threat of. using those forces in a coercive fashion anytime that they don't do something that we want to. Are they really partners in that scenario? And so people, this is particularly for people in the United States, they like to think of, you know, how do countries get what they want through the lenses of, you know, economy, military, and also cultural hegemony. So in the past, you know, several decades, the United States has had economic hegemony,

military hegemony and cultural hegemony over the world. of the things that is threatening to the United States is that while they still have some semblance of military hegemony and also cultural hegemony to a large extent, the economic hegemony is quickly fading as China continues to develop and continues to become more economically prosperous. So this is just my preamble to getting to talk about the Belt and Road Initiative. So, of course, the Belt and Road Initiative, which we've talked about several times on the show before, is kind of China's cornerstone of foreign policy in many ways in terms of this is how it's building partnerships across the world, particularly in the developing world, through these

loans and development projects to many different places. And getting back to the topic at hand of the 20th National Congress, I'm just curious of what developments there's been on the Belt and Road initiative because I have seen some verbiage coming out in terms of, you know, China remains committed to the Belt and Road initiative. They are going to continue the Belt and Road initiative. It is going to continue to be the cornerstone of their, you know, foreign policy partnerships and in all of that. But there has also been some mentions that I have seen of prudence in lending and negotiating. And I'm wondering if you have seen, you know, something more substantial than I have seen just in terms of this verbiage that's coming out in secondary sources and whatnot,

in terms of how the Belt and Road initiative is going to be construed in the next five years compared to the previous five years, given the context that we're currently in, you know, global financial issues coming out of a pandemic, you know, if we ever get out of a pandemic, I should, I should say. But yeah, you know, how is the Belt and Road initiative going to be functioning in the next five years compared to the password? five years. Yeah. So I'd say that there's a lot of projects in the Belt and Road that you could probably already consider mature, functioning successful. And for projects like that, you really don't need to keep pumping in like more money into those, like the Port of Piraeus in Greece or that supposedly

white elephant port in Sri Lanka that's now up and running and quite successful. Like those are examples of projects that have succeeded and, you know, the ongoing maintenance and running of those projects, you know, hopefully they, there's turning profits. Then there's not really any need to continue investing new money into that. Now, like for projects elsewhere, like in the developing worlds, there's also projects that are like you can consider successful, like the the rail from Ethiopia to the sea in Djibouti that that train's been finished it's been running for a while they've been training local train conductors engineers to run that as well and so there are a lot of projects that are probably in the like in progress or wrapping up phase and so I think the total amount of new funding needed for the BRI is naturally going to go down that's also compounded by other factors you've mentioned that a lot of countries are going to undergoing a lot of financial stress right now, especially with a very strong dollar pushing down.

You know, currencies all across the globe. China's currency is no stranger to that, too. But the yen, the Turkish lira, the euro, like currency prices are being pushed down across the board. There's a lot of internal issues to deal with. And so the appetite for new projects is probably like a little less, a little less strong than it was five years ago. But the focus, and this ties into another plank of the topics discussed at the Congress,

is kind of the environmental and green impacts of projects. Now, when the Belt and Road was started, it was there, but it wasn't really a big focus of it. Like, you know, we're going to build these projects if the local government and Laos wants a coal plant. Yeah, sure, we'll fund a coal plant. But there's been a much more increased focus on making sure that, like, projects that are funded are sustainable. We move away from like these kind of coal and fossil fuel energy sources as much as possible and more appetite for funding sort of like solar panels and other sort of green energy too, especially leveraging China's like immense capacity in the area of solar panel manufacturing too. So that I think is where most of the focus and BRI policy was in this party Congress. Yeah, so let me, I'm going to ask more about climate change, but a little preamble into it, which is just kind of an amusing aside where, you know, China is demonized across the West for obvious reasons, right, left and center, have their own versions of anti-China hysteria, really.

But it's quite funny because so much of what China does and is doing is so in line with progressive or, socialist or left-wing people in the West on multiple fronts. So on the front of domestic economics, there's this move to hold capital accountable, to decrease rural poverty, to decrease inequality more broadly. On the foreign policy front, it's very much a defensive posture. I think China is the only country with nukes that has promised never to use a first strike. And it seems very in line with, like, you know, people that are against war and, you know, respect sovereignty and all of that. And then on climate change, I read that it was from Bloomberg, actually, that China has built and is developing more renewable energy infrastructure than every other country on the earth combined currently right now.

So even on that front, while the left is talking about the Green New Deal but can't do shit about it, passing it or whatever, and it's still getting demonized by the right, China is actually making these fascinating moves. And then the big difference that I see between the West and China, regardless of the question of, is China socialist or is China socialists? or not, is this idea that capital in China is subservient to the state. In the West, the state is subservient to capital. And that change alone makes so much difference. So with all of that in mind, I kind of want to just talk about climate change in particular and kind of what China's goal is, especially in the face of historic flooding, I think, that has happened in the last year or two in China. So on the climate front more broadly, can we talk about the moves that are to make on that? Yeah. So I think a lot of the specific things were like the policies were released

maybe a year or two ago, like the peak carbon emissions by 2030 and then carbon neutrality 2016. They believe that was announced a few years ago. Now those targets were reiterated at the Party Congress and China's investments in solar as well as nuclear energy as well have been you know, continually like increasing the amount of nuclear power that they're putting online to is just incredibly rapid. And this is also in the context of the Europe that's dusting off its old coal plants, it's wood burning stoves and stuff in the face of a massive energy crisis, which, you know, they're, the options there are limited, I suppose, but this is also a Europe that's placed terrorists on Chinese-made solar panels because, you know,

gosh darn, you know, those Chinese solar panels are just too cheap. And that's something we don't wrong, right? Like, God forbid, we have cheap solar panels to use. I have a question kind of related to BRI and then to sort of China's entry, you know, into the global system in terms of, you know, lending and being a trade partner with a lot of countries. I think the West likes to put a lot of emphasis on the value of competition. And I think it's interesting how much they seem opposed to having competition from China in all of these regards. And I'm wondering if you can speak to a little bit about, you know, what do you think is sort of the basis for this? In my mind, part of it has to do with the fact that the U.S. and the West in general uses their economic, you know, hegemonic

position to impose sanctions and coerce other governments into following kind of their political lines, lines that are advantageous to the West economically and so forth. And how does China's rise threaten the ability to use that coercive power? Yeah. So this kind of similar dynamic played out in the 80s with Japan when Japan just really leaped ahead of the U.S. in terms of electronics manufacturing you know there was actually like a very famous scene that some people may not know about but a bunch

of Republican congressmen they took these like Panasonic TVs and radios or whatever and they were just smashing them with sledgehammers outside the Congress building and this this is a part of the history that's very well studied in China but Japan

was basically coerced into signing the Plaza Accord there's a lot of impacts to the current evaluation and it's commonly attributed to as one of the major causes of what's called Japan's lost decade, the stagnation they had in the 90s. And, you know, kind of just really put them back in their place. Like, yeah, you're allowed to get rich, but only up to a certain point. Like, the U.S. has to remain top dog. And as the U.S. is kind of the guarantor of Japan security with all its military bases around, there really isn't too much that Japan can do.

But China is kind of in a different situation. You know, there's obviously no U.S. military bases in China. And beyond that, the Chinese domestic market is so large that they're able to kind of build up a lot of national champions just on the strength of that domestic market alone. And that's scary to the U.S. Like you look at a company like Facebook and the massive penetration they have in a country like India, doesn't have any sort of, like, ring fences or kind of domestic internet champions that's trying to build out, whereas in China, the Great Firewall has allowed, like, domestic alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, to be built, alternatives to

Uber, DoorDash, et cetera, all to come up. And because of that, like, China's shown the ability to build out all of these, like, domestic alternatives. And that's, that's really concerning to the U.S. because any country that doesn't have like standardized competition is good for the U.S. because U.S. companies always win. Like a French competitor to

Facebook is not going to go global. It's not going to be able to challenge Silicon Valley. And so competition works very well for the U.S. It doesn't with China. And that's why you see a lot of rhetoric and a lot of rollback on what used to be very supposedly

solidly held free competition free market principles by American capitalists. Like they're throwing all at that all at the window because they've run into someone that they can't use the same tactics on. Thank you for that. I do have a question, you know, there's a, I think a great deal of disagreement within, you know, the U.S. broadly, but particularly in the U.S. left about China. And I was wondering if you could speak to whether DSA has a position on the nature of China's

political system, whether it's capitalist, socialist, authoritarian, all these other different words that get used to describe China. Yeah, so the DSA as an organization does not. And that's because the SAs and the DSA International Committee's primary goal is to avoid escalation with China, avoid this new Cold War that's already started, and to de-escalate from that and to find more ways for the people of the U.S. and China to work better together and to, you know, to prevent escalation and mistakes that might lead to war or other things. Now, individual DSA members probably all have their own opinions on China, but I think it makes a lot of sense for DSA to be focused on a kind of tangible policy-oriented, like this is what we can do as a left organization

in the U.S. But I think it's also very healthy to have those. internal discussions on China they can be very educational and there's certainly a lot to learn about China for for most people in the US and I would just happen to say like regardless of one's position on the on the socialist left we all should value the socialist experimentation right and and it takes many different forms it takes different forms in Yugoslavia versus Cuba versus you know China and all these things China has done a very very unique form of socialist experimentation with communist party control over the development of the means of production with a long-term goal and ability to pursue that goal of moving more

robustly into a socialist mode of production and social social relations when the time has come. When those productive forces are up enough, when they can have militarily and economically enough sovereignty and power to be able to do that because if you try to do that before you have that. You'll get quickly isolated. Your economy will be strangled and you will be overthrown. And China has done this brilliant strategy of integrating their economy into the global economy such that if you try to take out that, as I say often, that jango block, the whole tower comes crashing down. So regardless of what you think, it's a fascinating experimentation in communist leadership and the development of productive forces toward a socialist ends. And I'm

quite excited about it. And one of the things that makes me very excited, and this is my question, to you is Xi Jinping and his seemingly genuine ideological commitment to Marxism and Leninism. So can you say anything, just anything you want about Ji, his outlook, his leadership, and where he wants to take the country going forward? Yeah. So, you know, this is a very lazy type of analysis, but I see it on Twitter. People will count the number of times she's mentioned Marxism. And they're like, wow, he mentioned it 23 times and he only mentioned the market.

times. But it's very clear from the trajectory of the party where he's taking it since he came to power in 2012 that at the very least he believes that he is a Marxist and he is taking China in that direction. Now, you know, people may, reasonable people may disagree on whether that's the best course of action or if there's a better way to go about it. But it's very clear that they're not putting on some grand facade to, you know, to fool the power brokers in the United States that they're actually socialist. Like what political capital is that getting him in the West, really, to claim to be an avowed Marxist?

So, you know, with that framework, I think that opens up a lot of productive conversations around China or for people on the left, right? Because then it's not really just, does he believe it or does he doesn't, but it's, more focused on the specific policy actions they're doing and how that fits into a Marxist framework. Well, maybe following on from this a little bit, you know, I'm, of course, very concerned about the U.S. looming, it seems, U.S. Cold War on China and how this can be opposed, why it needs to be opposed. And I guess the context for this also is a sense that this sort of proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine situation, you know, presents some examples of how an potential enemy

of, if that's the way the U.S. foreign policy establishment and government sees it, can be kind of drawn into this kind of multi you know this kind of great power competition which the new u.s. defense policy really sees russia and china as you know potential peer competitors that need to be contained rolled back etc and so i'm quite concerned with the implications of what we've been watching on whether some similar situation with taiwan could be you know made into Casas Belli and so on. So I'm just wondering what you would say is the approach to take vis-a-vis the ramping up of bellicose action and rhetoric by the United States towards China.

What position should we have and how should we be trying to oppose this in our contemporary political discourse domestically? Yeah. So for me personally, at least, I think the education aspect of clearing up common misconceptions about China, demystification of this coverage is very important. For me personally, I also think that it's very important to shy away from the, well, the China also does bad things like that kind of framework because ultimately it's not very strong. And when push comes to shove, like we've seen with, you know, progressive members of Congress relating to funding Ukraine, it's very easy to get pressured into, like, a position that

you may not have originally wanted to take, like, the, comparing the rhetoric that they had back in February relating to funding Ukraine versus now, it's very concerning that just in a matter of months, like, how much someone can be pushed to the right, just based on coverage, really just, like, the media coverage and pressure, too. So it's an imperative that we push back on that as much as we can. One, it's happening now so that, like, months later, when there actually is some sort of escalation or something that you've already started that process. Now, unfortunately, a lot of it is outside of our control, but something that I think can be comforting is that, you know, China is not trigger-happy. They're not looking for

to respond to escalation. Like, all of the coverage here was like, oh, with Pelosi, goes to Taiwan, you know, they're going to respond. It's going to, it's going to kick off war. And, you know, nothing. China certainly did not start firing at Nancy Pelosi's plane. And I think that, you know, we should feel comforted that that China is not gone, like, trigger happy like the, like we are. Unfortunately, you know, that is going to be read by someone the right that, like, oh, we can keep on prodding them because they don't respond. but, you know, for us on the left, we should use that as evidence. So, like, hey, look, they're not looking to start a fight. They're not looking to take over the world.

And, you know, hopefully they're to continue to be this patient with us. Yeah. Now, to jump in as we get towards the end of the time that we have, I'm going to ask the question. I think that most people were probably waiting for, as it non-said, the top, this has not really been covered at all in terms of the National Congress. It really hasn't been covered in the West at all. If people had seen much about it in the news, at least mainstream media, it was probably surrounding one specific event.

And that was the quote unquote removal of Hu Jintao. So this got a lot of press in the West and was used as evidence of some like power coup that was taking place where Xi Jinping was using. it to, you know, consolidate his grip of power within the Chinese Communist Party and, you know, consolidate all of his power and eliminate any dissent within the party. This is the narrative that was being spun in a lot of the Western mainstream press. So, you know, since this is pretty much the only thing that many of our listeners probably have seen about the most recent National Congress, thus far, I think it would be remiss of us to not at least mention this

event, as well as your thoughts on it. Yeah, so I think this is the, it really starts with the Western media's habit of trying to look for some sort of defining moment, like the Pelosi clap at the State of the Union. Let's just keep watching this. Maybe we can find something just like that. And they're really short of ideas because before this event, they're focused on she's being having two cups of tea in front of him rather than one. And how many times he took a sip of tea during his speech?

So they're really grasping at things. And, like, you know, there was no coverage of who when he was first year, the first couple of days other than to point out, like, gee, he's aged a lot. He's, his hair's all great. Yeah, he's old. And, you know, like, they all covered who didn't help being let out. But no one covered that, like, hey, afterwards he came back for the closing. He came back and voted.

So it's probably the oddest kind of coup or power play to descend. Briefly, let listeners know who Hujentau is as well as what happened. He was the previous general secretary, the Communist Party, is Xi Jinping's predecessor. And so he was seated next to Xi Jinping during the Congress. And, you know, he's really up in years, but definitely made an effort to be there. And frankly, if he hadn't showed up and just said, oh, I'm old and I'm sick or something.

That probably also would have been read as like, wow, you wouldn't even let his predecessor attend the party Congress. But, you know, really the simplest explanation is that he's old, he's not been in good health, and it's likely something like dementia, Alzheimer's, and they had to take him out to deal with things. There's like a footage of him trying to like take the papers and documents of the guy sitting next to him instead of his own too, beforehand. But it's good to know that he was feeling well enough to come back and attend the closing of it. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's good that so many China watchers suddenly care about the guy that they used to call the dictator of China, you know, just a decade or so ago. You know, I always, I'm sorry, Brett, I know that I said that I would let you hop in now, just briefly, you know, I have very, very elderly relatives. I'm glad that the press isn't

watching me walk them around and, you know, lead them to where their apartment are because otherwise I would be claimed that, you know, I'm bringing them to the gulag or something like that. You know, I am based in Russia and I am leading these elderly people around by the arm, you know, seeming, you know, sometimes they don't really know where they are. They don't know where they're going. It's a very scary situation. I'm just glad that the press isn't following me around the way that they do the Chinese Communist Party. Anyway, Brett, go ahead. Yeah, I love the image of a Henry walking Joe Biden around. That's nice. his eyes are falling out and his hair is okay anyway okay the u.s media is just incredibly

unsurious and is ironically enough the number and their hysteria over disinformation they're the number one purveyor of disinformation so often but i just wanted to kind of say first of all thank you both for co-hosting and being a guest on this on this show we learned a lot we really really are thankful this is a really important event and it's a it's a flashpoint in a much broader context that's going to only become increasingly important but i would just say as my closing thoughts is what emerges from, you know, this Congress, but also just, you know, the Chinese Communist Party more broadly, is a unique vision for the future of humanity put forward by China. And that vision is fundamentally about sustainability. It's about national sovereignty. It's about peace whenever peace can be met. It's about egalitarianism, this attempt to reduce inequality and the control that the rich have over everybody else. And on the political and global scene, China is repeatedly, a competent, mature actor, whereas the U.S. is a belligerent actor on the global scene. And the vision that the U.S. really has, I mean, in effect, is one where they dominate the world, no matter what,

where private profits are prioritized above the well-being of human beings. And that's going to necessitate, as it always has under capitalism, endless war and endless conflict, which, of course, we have plenty of corporations here in the U.S. who make a nice penny every time a bomb is dropped or sold anywhere in the world. So what emerges for me is China's vision is a human vision for a human future, and the U.S. vision is a belligerent vision for a U.S. dominated corporate dystopian future. And that's what's really on the table. So anybody on the left or otherwise who buys into this anti-China propaganda is buying

into an anti-human agenda and making an enemy out of some of the most one of the most peaceful, mature countries with real power on the planet right now. So those are kind of my closing thoughts. Yeah, excellent. And I just want to echo Brett's sentiment as we leave that I'm really grateful to both of you for coming on and educating us and, you know, taking us through this conversation to make a little bit more sense of what happened at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. So thank you both very much. Faye Young, can you tell the listeners is how they can find you on Twitter or anything that you want to direct them to.

Yeah, you know, I've got by Twitter. It's not always serious or politics focused. I'm a big A.C. Milan fan, as you can tell them, I'm a Zoom background, and so there's a lot of sports suite to. But, yeah, it's, well, maybe you can just post it with the podcast or something. It's a little long to spell out. But, yeah, you can definitely find me there.

And, yeah, I'm, I'm also a frequent guest on Carl Jaws podcast, although we discuss mostly Chinese history of all different errors and less about current events. Yeah, great. I'll be sure to tag you in both the promotional tweet that we put out for this episode as well as in the show notes. So listeners that want to follow the young, you can go into the show notes and click on it. Mira, thank you very much for being a guest host on the show. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you on Twitter as well? as a DSA International Committee, anything that you would like to direct them to on that front.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's been wonderful to be here and be part of this conversation. You can find me on Twitter at Snack Vampire. I think that's a pretty easy one to figure out how to spell. And then I really encourage listeners. If you are interested in working, you know, on international issues, if you're interested in organizing against U.S. imperialism, apply for the DSA International Committee. You know, we could use your help. We could use your input, your ideas. It's a big tent organization.

Come and join us. Yeah, I highly recommend that. And, you know, I know I don't like to like crap on organizations, but I will say DSA International Committee is one of the redeeming qualities of DSA as a larger organization. I know that that's going to ruffle a few feathers, but that's just my personal thoughts. That's not the institutional position of guerrilla history. I will say that. So also thanks to my co-hosts, Brett.

How can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcasts? You can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Excellent. Highly recommend that they do. Brett, this episode's coming out today. So can you tell the listeners what the latest things that have been out on Rev. Left and Red Menace are? Sure, yeah.

On Rev. Left in particular, I just did a Red Hot Take monologue style hour-long rant, dissecting some liberal media arguments on Russia, on Ukraine, on the United States, and on Cuba. So if you're interested in a Marxist contending with liberal narratives on these topics, definitely go check that out. And over on Red Menace, we're diving into some anarchist theory right now, critically, of course, but diving into Conquest of Bread by Krapakken. And that should be out in the next couple of days. It's already recorded. So keeping out for that. Yeah. And you also have a recent episode on Volushnav, the Soviet linguist, which my wife, who is a Russian linguist herself and I are currently in the middle of listening to together. So

It's a good episode, and we'll have some things to talk about after that, after we're done with it, I'm sure. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? Well, I'm just stunned that we have an institutional position of any kind. So, but I also just want to echo that was a great opportunity to talk with both of you. And it's a real pleasure. For listeners who want to follow me, you can catch me at Twitter at Adnan. A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and you could listen to my other podcast, The Mudgellis, which deals with the Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diasporic issues. And, yeah, you can find that on any, you know,

platform, M-A-J-L-I-S. And what do you, what have you got coming up next for us at not on the M-G-L-L-S? Well, we recently, we recently had Gene Bajelan talk about the Kurdish dimension of the protests in Iran. And we will have some cultural content coming up, including Muhammad Abdul, a kind of second round. He came and gave a talk here at Queens about his book, Islam and anarchism. And so we'll be, you know, putting that on the feed. Yeah, looking forward to that. And just since you mentioned that, you're surprised that we may have an institutional position on anything. As far as guerrilla history ever has an institutional position on anything, it should not be mine. My position should never be

taken as the institutional position of this podcast. I will put that out there right now. I dispute that we are an institution. We'll get there, Adnan. We'll get there. Maybe we're not yet, but we will get there. All right, everybody. As for me, you can find my personal positions on Twitter at Huck 1995. You can find more probably relevant and interesting things on the guerrilla history Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A with 2-R-S underscore pod. I still have people messaging the show all the time saying can't find the show on Spotify.

Just make sure you're doing it with 2-R-S. You can also support us on Patreon. Keep the lights on for our show and help us expand our coverage by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history against G-E-R-R-I-L-A history and subscribe to our newsletter, guerrilla history.substack.com. It's free. It's a good reading list and a roundup of all

of our recent work. And again, totally free. So until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.