Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The History of Modern China

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

From the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, to the Chinese Revolution and Civil War, through the Long March and the rise of Mao Zedong, to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, all the way to Deng's Reform and China today, Professor of East Asian and Global History Dr. Ken Hammond walk us through 200 years of Chinese history to highlight in detail how modern China was forged through centuries of class struggle, resistance, rebellion, and revolution.  After listening to this mega-episode you will have a profound, and deeply inspired, understanding of the rich modern history of China, and be much better able to understand its present and future.   This series originally aired on Guerrilla History in the Spring of 2024 Support Guerrilla History HERE Learn More, Follow, and Support Rev Left Radio HERE

You don't remember den, Ben, who? 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 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-host,

Sanri Hakimaki, unfortunately not joined by my usual co-host, Adnan Hussein. We are, however, joined by a special guest host who will be familiar to many of you, listeners. I'm pretty sure that we can say that at this point. Our guest host is Brett O'Shea, who, unless you missed that last episode that we put out, Brett has at this point officially left the show, but to demonstrate that it was on amicable terms, Brett is coming back to co-host this series on a guest hosting basis. So Brett, it's nice to see you again, although there hasn't really been any gap since the last time I saw you. Absolutely. It is a little weird to hear that, you know, the guest co-hosting, but I'm just happy to continue doing whatever work we can together, loved our three and a half

years together, and just really want to drive home the point that it's certainly not the end. It's just a change. So happy to be here. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, knowing that Adnan is not able to make it today, I couldn't ask for a better guest host than somebody who I've been hosting the show with for the last three and a half years anyway. Now, we do have a returning guest, and this is the start of an excellent mini-series that we have planned, which we've actually been planning for the last almost half a year. But before I introduce the miniseries and the guest, I would like to remind listeners that you

can help support the show by joining us on patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Any contributions there are what allow us to continue to make the show. You can also follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore where you can keep up with the work that each of us are doing individually, as well as what the show is putting out collectively. As I mentioned, this is the start of a mini-series, which is going to be a mini-series on modern Chinese history. This is a continuation in many ways of the last conversation that we had with our guest, Ken Hammond, when he joined us for discussing his new book, China's Revolution and The Quest for a Socialist Future.

Ken is a professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, and as I mentioned, a returning guest of the show. Hello, Ken. How are you today? Very good and glad to be here. Absolutely. So I guess before we enter this episode formally, I just want to let the listeners know that we have four episodes planned of this series. I highly recommend if you haven't listened to that last episode that we did with Ken, which will be linked in the show notes and it's titled China's Revolution and Quest for a Socialist Future. Listen to that episode first because that is an overview of modern Chinese history.

It's about an hour and a half and we really do a rather brief sweep of modern Chinese history. The purpose of this series is to take four discrete events and to try to dive in a little bit more on a granular level. Today's episode is going to be focusing on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, but we have future episodes as well in the series which should be coming out in the next three weeks on the Chinese Civil War, particularly the Long March, the Cultural Revolution, and the Deng Reforms. So if you are interested in any of those topics, do be sure to stay tuned, as those will be coming out in the next week. three weeks. And I also highly recommend you, if you know any students, particularly middle and high school students who are studying world history, when these events in Chinese history come up, these would be a really good supplement to the garbage that they're hearing in schools, to put it bluntly. So Ken, today we're going to be talking about the Taiping and Boxer rebellions.

We did talk a bit about these rebellions last time. So I don't want to cover the exact same things that we did in that episode, but we do, of course, have to start by saying, all right, let's focus on the Taiping Rebellion first, because chronologically it comes first. Can you lay out what the socioeconomic and material conditions were like within China at that time at the origin of the Taiping Rebellion? That way we can then understand the events that unfold from there. Sure thing. Sure thing. Yeah, I mean, the Taiping Rebellion arises at a moment that is one of tremendous sort of turmoil and upheaval in transition in 19th century China. You know, China, as we've talked about before, had for a long time been this very powerful,

very prosperous economy, society that was widely engaged in global exchange, global trade. But with the arrival of industrial European imperialism, you know, that begins to change. change, and it changes quite rapidly. We talked a little bit last time about the opium war, the origins of that, the British, and the importation of opium into China that leads to a very serious crisis, a crisis, a social crisis with millions of people becoming addicted, a crisis of, you know, sort of supply of opium. The smuggling opium was illegal in China, so there's a big criminal organization that arises around that. And that eventually, as the Chinese try to regain control of that situation and suppress the opium trade, the British go to war. They send the Royal Navy out and they shell the coast of China, shell various cities and all this. And that leads to the surrender, really, the capitulation of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu government and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 that opens up more ports, legalizes. new forms of trade with foreigners, especially the British, and that leads to significant disruptions in what had been, you know, a long-established set of economic relationships and patterns within China.

One of the effects of that, one of the specific effects of that, was the disruption of internal, you know, transportation routes, let's say, communication lines, which had been focused on the single port of Guangzhou in southern China, what's also called Kenton. And now, with the opening of other ports, what had been a single line, kind of line of transmission, which involved a lot of employment for people along that path, you know, carting goods, in many instances, literally portering goods, carrying them on their backs up over some of the hills and the passes on the way down south. A lot of those people are cast out of employment. A lot of those people lose their positions. There's other disruptions going on in the economy as low-cost manufactured goods

start coming into China from the West. And that disrupts primary producers. It disrupts artisan producers, craft communities, things like that within China. So this opening up of trade You know, it's obviously what the imperialists want, what the British want, but in terms of its impact on ordinary working people in China, it generates a lot of distress and a lot of, well, frustration and anxiety and anger on the part of many, many people. In that context, one particular grouping in southern China, a grouping of people that are called the Hakka, which is an ethnically Chinese community. community, but they have a particular historical position that we don't need to go into in great detail. They were late migrants from the north to the south. But they were very heavily engaged in these transport routes, these connections,

these internal shipping lines, if you will, and many people in the Haka communities in southern China wide up losing their employment, losing their livelihoods. And this creates obviously a lot of stress. So we have both, on the one hand, the influx of low-cost European manufactured goods, disrupting production activities, and, you know, a lot of that employment, but also these changes in the internal organization of trade, in the internal organization of the movement of goods that has a particular impact on the Haka community in the South. Yeah, I was wondering if we could take kind of a step back. And, of course, a lot of listeners who might not know the details of Chinese history will, especially our listeners, be familiar with this formulation of the century of humiliation. And of course, you mentioned the opium wars, which is more or less the sort of informal beginning period of that century of humiliation. I was wondering if you could contextualize the Taiping rebellion in the context of that century of humiliation. I know you touched on it a little bit. And then you were also mentioning, of course, the political economic sort of dimensions of this bubbling conflict. I was hoping. you could also touch on the cultural and religious dimensions at the beginning of this of this conflict. Sure. Well, what happens that what gets the Taiping rebellion or begins the Taiping movement

is actually it's centered around without getting into a sort of great men of history mode, but it is centered around a particular leader who emerges in the later 1840s. There's a gentleman named Hong Shō-Tuan, and Hong Shō-Tuan was himself a member of this Haka community, and, you know, so he had relations into that larger social sort of nexus in South China. Like many families and many young men in China, in imperial China, Hong Shot-Tren had ambitions of perhaps passing the imperial examinations and going to on to serve in the government as a way of personal enrichment, personal benefit, but also to bring honor to his family, things like that, all these things within the traditional

sort of political culture of the society. But like the vast majority of people who tried to sit for the exams, Hong Shotran sat for the primary level exams. There's a three-tier system of examinations, and he kept sitting for the entry-level exams, but he kept failing. Every three years, there was a three-year cycle of these, and every three years he would go to Guangzhou, the great fort in the south, which was the center for the local exams that he was taking. But he wouldn't pass. 90% of the people who sat for the exams at any given level didn't pass. It was a very, very steep gradient to select people to go to the next level. And obviously this was very frustrating.

His family had invested a lot in allowing him to study and allowing him to prepare. And so that's very frustrating for him. And after the fourth or fifth attempt, he has kind of a psychological breakdown and spends like six weeks in a dark room trying to get over things and all that. Now, while he had been in Guangzhou, one of the things about Guangzhou at that point is that this is where foreigners were allowed to come and trade. So there was a significant presence of Westerners in the city, including missionaries. They weren't allowed to go further into China, but they were there in Guangzhou.

And so Hongshuan, at a certain point, had encountered at least one of these missionaries who had given him some religious tracts, some Bible tracts or something like that, which he hadn't paid much attention to. he took him home, put him in a drawer. But while he's struggling with his sort of psychological issues after yet another failure of the exams, he comes across these. And as he's recovering, he's reading again, he realizes that while he was sort of in this darkened room for a while, he had had what he comes to think of as visions in which he had

encountered this strange pair of beings, you know, an older gentleman with a long beard and a younger fellow who had talked to him. And he hadn't really understood what was going on. But after he reads these Bible tracks, he decides that this was an encounter with God and Jesus. And what they had told him was that he was Jesus' younger brother. And that just as Jesus had brought God's message to the West, it was his mandate to bring it to the people of the East. And that is, that's sort of what starts his career, his program that builds into the Taiping movement. He, you know, once he has this realization, he starts to talk about this, he starts to read a little more. He never seems to have gotten deeply educated about Western

Christianity, but he starts to go down that path. Yeah, Henry. Yeah, just to follow up here because this part is something that we did cover a bit in the last episode, but something that I think could possibly be expanded upon. So we did mention the story of Heng Chuo Chen and how he thought that he was the brother of Jesus Christ and that he was supposed to bring Christianity to the East. But one of the things that was a little bit unclear to me in both me trying to read more on the subject as well as from the discussion we didn't really touch on this aspect of things, which was how widespread was this kind of Christian missionary work within the Qing dynasty? Because when you look at most of what's written about, at least most of what I've seen

about the Taiping rebellion, the focus geographically is all within a rather small area of the Qing dynasty, kind of in the southeast of the Qing dynasty. But I'm curious as to whether or not there was this kind of dispersal of Christianity to other parts of the Qing dynasty, because that, of course, would then play into how the Taiping Rebellion would unfold, as we'll probably discuss in the coming questions. Yeah, at first, of course, the missionaries were restricted to the sort of port area in Guangzhou, you know, what they call the factory area, where the Western businesses were. there warehouses, all that kind of stuff.

Once the Treaty of Nanjing is signed and these five other courts going up all the way to Shanghai are open, missionaries can go in there as well. And bit by bit, they extend their activities deeper and deeper into China, into the interior of China. So while this is unfolding, while the Taiping movement itself is getting underway and beginning to grow, Christian missionaries are also coming into China through what are called the Treaty Point. ports, these ports that had been opened after the Treaty of Nunging. And there are more and more of them as time goes by as well. Later treaties, treaties with other countries that open additional ports. So there's a growing influx of Western missionaries, primarily Protestant missionaries, some Catholics as well. That's actually going to be, that's more of a factor when we talk a little bit later about the Boxer Rebellion, is this sort of blank.

of the interior of China with Western missionaries. In the context of the Taiping's, that becomes important as they achieve greater success, and particularly as foreign imperialists are looking at China and initially thinking, oh, here's this movement taking place which presents itself as a Christian movement. Maybe we as Christians should align with them. Maybe we should support them. In the end, as we'll talk about perhaps, that doesn't really work out very much. But there is that sort of initial encounter.

But it's a sign perhaps that the penetration of the missionary endeavor into China, even by the 1850s, has not, it hasn't gone that deep yet. That's going to be something that becomes much greater in the 60s, 70s, 80s going on down to the latter part. Right. That was actually the reason why I brought it up, because I know that. that when we talk about the Boxer Rebellion, we will talk about how this coverage of missionary, quote-unquote, work was much more widespread across the Qing dynasty. But I hadn't been seeing much in terms of missionary, again, quote-unquote, work that had been going into the interior of the Qing dynasty. And I was just curious of whether or not there was literature on that that I hadn't been seeing or not. but it sounds like essentially what I was seeing was essentially what was the case.

But then what I want to know is, again, we talked about Heng Shua Chen and how he had these visions and came to this understanding that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. How did it going about building these kind of communes that you described in the last episode that we did with you? How did that work? Like, functionally, how does one come to this realization that they're the brother of Jesus Christ and then go about in this, you know, this particular area recruiting people into kind of a movement. How does that work? Well, with Heng Shui, what happens, of course, he has, he's embedded

in a social network of families, right? His family, he's in this Haka community. They have a shared sort of cultural niche in the South. And initially, the Taiping movement is largely confined to the Haka community. It eventually, you know, once he really gets going, it spreads out and encompasses many, many, many more people, but non-Haka people as well. But initially, it's pretty concentrated in that community. And so what happens, this is part of a pattern that we see,

not just with the Taiping Rebellion, but in a number of responses of, I suppose what we might call traditional community, communities that were well-established, in particular locations that had, you know, their, you know, whatever features and characteristics, you know, had come down over time. We see this in Korea with what's called the Toghok movement. We see it down in Vietnam with the Kau Dai movement of as the impact of Western imperialism begins to be more disruptive on established orders and hierarchies and ways of thinking,

And as, you know, the Qing dynasty or, you know, the Joseon state in Korea or the Nguyen dynasty down in Vietnam, as those political hierarchies are exposed, are, you know, shown to be dysfunctional, shown to be ineffective, shown to be not defending and caring for the interests of the people and not really even able to defend, you know, the elites against Western imperialist depredations. people begin to question the cultural order in which, you know, they have been living. And so there's a kind of, perhaps there's a sort of window of opportunity or a little crack in the cultural facade that allows new ideas and new interpretations to be introduced. And so in all three of those movements in East Asia, the Tonghak and the Taiping and the Kaudai, what you get are these sort of hybridized ideologies. if you will or mythologies where East Asian actors, agents

present themselves in a sort of interacting way with Western archetypes with Western imagery and the Taiping is the greatest example of that because

what Hong Shochuan talks about is equality is sharing is building a society. I mean, Taiping means great peace. And the full title of the movement is the Taiping Tianhua, the heavenly kingdom or the heavenly land, really, of great peace. And so that's the appeal, that things are going badly in South China.

People are suffering. People are really facing a hard time. And he comes along and says, well, it's not just, you know, this isn't just something that's internal to, you know, this particular situation in China, this is a real crisis. And it's a crisis that we can only address by turning in new directions, right? And so the appeal is, look at the Christians. And of course, he doesn't, as I say, he doesn't have a profound understanding of theology. But apparently he knew something about the idea of the early church and the way in which, you know, people pooled their resources, shared their goods and things

like that back in early Roman times and all that. So he presents this idea of let's come together. And in many ways, the Taiping Rebellion is seen, you know, by historians in contemporary China, China today, as a kind of foreshadowing of the communist movement because it evokes this idea of commonality, of shared interests, of people pooling, you know, what they have so that, you know, those with a little more can take care of those with a little more. to less, and, you know, kind of level it out, kind of make it a more, well, more viable response to these conditions of social and economic turmoil engendered by the, by the, you know, penetration of imperialism. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, of course, you know, dialectically, we understand religions as like these processes that unfold over time and then they move into new geographic or cultural areas. They, and this has always been true, adopt certain aspects of the already existing culture while introducing this new aspect. And so we've talked about his sort of religious

revelations. We've talked about how that Christianity informs this now sort of more egalitarian political impetus. I'm wondering what Chinese, already existing Chinese cultural, spiritual, philosophical traditions, this Protestant Christianity was mixed with. And what sort of Christianity that gave rise to that might be distinct from, let's say, you know, European forms of Protestantism? You know, I think that the, you know, to the degree to which the Taiping movement can truly, you know, be said to have some sort of ideological or cultural formation that resonates with Western Christianity, I think that's fairly minimal.

I think that Hong Shuo Tchuan was able to appeal to long-established egalitarian ideas that come up throughout Chinese history and popular movements. you know, going back a couple of millennia, there's a, there's a recurrent pattern of an appeal to sort of, you know, spiritual powers, you know, supernatural beings, whatever, you know, whatever you, however you want to characterize it, that will come into a world, a world of injustice, a world of inequity, a world of suffering, and raise up the lowly and cast down the mighty and all that. Of course, that resonates with certain things in the rhetoric of Western Christianity, not obviously to be very much in the practice. But it's that kind of message that is embedded

within the millinarian tradition, the rebellions, you know, the White Lotus movement, the Yellow Turban movement, the red turbines at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. These were all egalitarian movements calling for the transformation of the existing social order. Taiping, what makes the Taiping different is that the face that's put on that is this idea of Hongshotuan as the younger brother of Jesus.

But it's not, it doesn't articulate with what would the Western missionaries were saying. You know, they were doing their thing. But it rather, it is this, it's this dialectical hybridization of

these traditional popular movements insurrectionary movements, which had a very clear political agenda of egalitarianism and the equitable distribution of goods and all that, moving away from the whole imperial model. But now with this, in the context of the impact of imperialism and the disruptive presence of imperialism, reaching across that gap to appropriate something from this clearly more powerful system. and trying to assimilate that into a Chinese cultural matrix. Really fascinating. I want to turn to the rebellion itself because if we don't get to it, we're just going to talk about the Taiping rebellion for two hours

without getting to the boxer rebellion, as I sometimes fear that we can get bogged down too much because it is so interesting and so such a rich history. But one thing that I want to, when I ask you, can you explain how the rebellion unfolds, kind of kicks off, unfolds and comes to something of a conclusion over the period of about, what, 12 or 14 years? One of the things that's really interesting that I also would like to make sure that we hit is in those early days of the rebellion, the movement was rather, I don't want to say rather small, there was a lot of people in it for what it was,

But as the rebellion starts to sweep up to the north, they start to pick up more and more followers as they go north, despite the fact that they're in basically constant, you know, armed conflict with the Qing dynasty's armies. And one of the things that strikes me is really interesting is that in a time of outright warfare, you're still able to not only maintain your level of support as you're being attacked by the government and the army. army of the government, but you're actually able to dramatically expand the number of people who are working alongside you as you're entering new areas. It's not like you're drawing from the same community that we're in from the beginning. Like that, that dynamic is particularly interesting to me that they're entering new area, new area, new area, new area and picking up new supporters along the way while at war. That's really fascinating. So, Ken, can you talk about the rebellion itself as well as that aspect of the rebellion, how they were able to keep reaching out

to essentially new people in new areas. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, the movement gets started, as you mentioned earlier, as this kind of rural commune movement. And at first, the idea seems to have been to sort of disengage from the established political order and to kind of go about their own business. At first, you know, they weren't raising a banner of rebellion.

And at first, you know, there was a much smaller, Not an insignificant number of people, but nothing compared to what was lying ahead. But that disengagement meant that they didn't want to pay taxes to the imperial state. They didn't want to be conscripted for labor service, things like that. So they were effectively in a kind of low-intensity state of rebellion. And that, of course, resulted in legal hassles. Heng Shua Tren actually gets imprisoned for a little while. comes back out, resumes the leadership of the movement.

And it's by that point in the early 1850s, right, by about 1853, that he and other leaders around him who have emerged by this point is not just him. You know, he's not some sort of, you know, dictator. He has built a cohort of leadership around him that they decide that they're going to take this into a more active mode of rebellion because they come to understand that, you know, the Qing state is collaborating now with the imperialists. The imperialists are continuing their, you know, intrusions, and that what's needed is a transformation. What's needed is a revolution, right? And so they launch what becomes this great military campaign.

And exactly, as you say, it basically goes north through central China, up from Guangdong province in the south where Guangzhou is and Guajjo province just west of there. That's sort of the heartland where it begins. And now it's going north for a while basically tracking along what had been these old trade routes down over the mountains in the south and then up through Hunan province all the way up to the valley of the Yangsa River when they kind of turn east and move down towards the coast. But that's an ongoing process, as you say. I mean, once they launch into rebellion, they're fighting the whole way.

But they're also winning the whole way. And that, I think, is the key to, you know, to the dynamic that they come out of this sort of rural, communal, you know, establishment that they had tried to build up. And they start to spread their message, you know, through going out into communities and talking and organizing. but also, you know, they're facing resistance every step of the way. And now they're not taking that anymore. They're not just trying to be, you know, we're going to try to create this sort of alternative model. We're going to try to overthrow the existing order and take that message out. And, you know, there were lots of other people.

The people that they were coming into contact with were going through the same turmoil, the same loss of employment, the same disruptions of the economy, the same disruptions of the economy, the same intrusions of Western power, that had generated Hong Shuo Tren's concerns in the first place. So they're, you know, they're encountering a receptive audience. And, you know, there's this very positive dynamic all the way through the 1850s as they go north and eventually established themselves at Nanjing, which had been one of the old capitals of the Ming dynasty, still a very important economic.

and political center on the Yangtze River, a little bit west of Shanghai and all that area. And once they establish themselves there, that's the culmination. That's the fruit of this military campaign. But it has been a campaign going sort of from success to success. And as people see them achieving these military victories, and as people hear the message that they're putting out,

this idea of a sharing egalitarian society, that has a lot of popular appeal. You know, and as I say, we've seen this with rebellions at different points in history that sometimes were succeeded in bringing down a dynasty. That doesn't happen in this instance, but it's a pattern that is not unique to the Taiping uprising.

So yeah, I think it's the combination of, you know, everybody likes a winner, but also the message was the appeal. And so people were like, I'm going to go with this, I'm going to throw my lot in with this, rather than just stick with the establishing order that was clearly failing to protect the country from imperialism, or Western imperialism, and clearly unable to resolve the economic contradictions that were being generated by the hollowing out of the domestic economy by, by, you know, industrial imports. So it's a, it's a, it's a, a dual line of advance, or dual lines of advance that, that I think allow the Taiping to achieve their success in

their northern campaign and the establishment of the, their center now at Nanjing. But before you continue with explaining what happened during the rebellion itself, I just want to pause for a second here. As you mentioned that, a lot of people were willing to stick with the winner and the people who were willing to resist against Western imperialism. This is something that we've been talking about a lot in recent days talking about the Palestinian resistance to Zionist imperialism. and one of the things that we've been reflecting on in terms of what groups within Palestine are receiving the most support from the Palestinian masses, it is the groups that have the most resolute defense against Zionist imperialism and at the current historical juncture. Those are Islamic groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad.

We can analyze whether or not that's a good thing or not. obviously on this show we are communists. So, you know, we would prefer the more communist-aligned groups to be at the forefront of the Palestinian resistance. But when analyzing why these groups have the support that they do, one has to come to the realization that people look at resistance against imperialism and are taken by success in resistance against imperialism. It's just a simple fact. And I just wanted to draw that resonance with what we're seeing today in things that we've been talking about in recent episodes and listeners, you can find many episodes that we've talked about Palestine in the recent months and a couple more that we already have

recorded, which will be coming out after this. But Ken, I feel free to continue with the narrative of what happened during the rebellion. I just wanted to pause for a second on that note. Well, I think that's an excellent point because, you know, people, when people who are suffering see people who are willing to fight for them and with them, along with them, not just, you know, we're going to take care of your problem, but we will, you know, we're part of you. You are part of us. This is our movement. When people feel that, yeah, they're going to, of course, they're going to embrace that, you know, as we see in Gaza and certainly as we saw, you know, in China with the Tai Ping movement. Yeah, you know, I mean, the trajectory, the historical, you know,

arc of the Taiping movement, of course, does not end with the victory of the movement and the radical revolutionary transformation of China into a heavenly kingdom. You know, the forces of the Qing dynasty are able. They have to go through some serious contortions of their own, but they do mobilize sufficient resources from the established largely Han Chinese elites, who had been somewhat marginalized in the dynasty, but now are given a little more free reign to mobilize local resources to protect their interests. You know, the egalitarianism of the Taiping movement is not just a rejection of Western imperialism. It's a rejection of the established hierarchical order within Chinese society. You know,

Imperial China, late Imperial China, or early modern China, historians used different categorizations, was an economy that was in many ways a commercial capitalist economy. It was an elite that was partly based in sort of urban manufacturing production, but also in commercialized agriculture. A lot of agricultural production was commodity production for markets, long distance. interactions of market areas within China. It was an exploitive economy aimed at capital accumulation and the extraction of value from labor. And people understood that too. It's not just an anti-imperialist thing, but it's also seeking to change the indigenous economic order and hierarchies as well. And so, you know, once that is demonstrably clear, you know, those elites are going to mobilize themselves.

You know, there may be tensions between the ethnic Chinese and the Manchus, you know, that go back to the 17th century and all that. But they're all exploitors. They're all, you know, in a shared class position. And that is one which is antagonistic to the interests of, you know, the agricultural proletariat, as Chairman Morrow called the peasantry, to the, you know, the workshop workers, the artisan craftsmen manufacturers, all this, there's a, you know, there are class contradictions. And the Taiping movement, you know, is a, it is a class movement.

And so, you know, once that dichotomy is clear, once that contradiction is fully manifest, the ruling elites, the ruling class, they're going to mobilize their resources. And the Manchus and the Han are like, yep, you know, we're in this together. And so once that happens, then, you know, they are able militarily to isolate and defeat the Taiping movement. You know, the Taiping's are a movement that, that for, you know, for all the good in their ideology, it's a, it's a mystical, you know, it's a kind of false consciousness, you know. And it is not, you know, they're not a communist movement. They're not a movement which has the ideological clarity of a disciplined party

and an understanding of the dynamics of modern, you know, modern capitalism. They don't have a fully developed analysis and all that. They're working within this more, you know, cosmological, you know, framework. And, you know, they're simply not able to be to mount. a completely effective movement. And so ultimately, by 1864, the movement is, is militarily defeated. There's some offshoots that try to hang on for a couple more years, but it's basically over by the middle of the 1860s. It has this great run and seriously challenges the power of the dynasty, but it is not able to bring about an effective political transformation, you know, do basically to. limitations and its ideological.

Yeah, and of course that just highlights, you know, the utter essential nature of really good materialist analysis and thus revolutionary theory that, of course, emerges a little bit later. We've seen many movements, even in the last several years here in the United States, that because of their lack of theoretical coherency, because of the lack of guidance of revolutionary theory and all the hard-won insights of previous revolutionary iterations, we find ourselves in the U.S. sort of trapped in a sort of spontaneity that is often and easily co-opted and ended and beaten down with brutal, you know, state force, etc. So I think it's something that those of us today interested in changing the world for the better, you know, learn from these historical movements and internalize this importance of revolutionary theory. I know we're going to get to the Boxer Rebellion here and I only want one or two more questions on this. But this is not, The Taiping movement, of course, is not merely a rhetorical movement, not merely an insurgent movement,

but as you said earlier, they did capture territory. Was there an ability to start to implement certain policies? And if so, can you talk about in those areas where the Taiping movement did control? Is it just about fighting war, or did they get the chance to put into practice some of their ideas and make policy for a limited time? Oh, yeah. Well, that's, of course, that was a significant part of the appeal. It wasn't just talk, but it was the combination of what their program was, in a sense, what their goals were, what their ideals were, with the practical application of those. Yeah, I mean, the Taiping community, you know, was one that tried to establish a much more egalitarian economic order, socio-economic order, you know, a kind of leveling.

of society and, you know, helping those at the bottom up a bit, taking, you know, people in large, to a large degree, willingly, you know, contributing assets and resources that they had to try to achieve a kind of more balanced, more equitable society. Of course, that's taking place in the context of conflict. So, you know, it was, it was hardly a, you know, a pure utopian Bing Group kind of thing. But they did do very practical efforts to implement those kinds of

policies, you know. And they did have significant achievements. And that too, of course, is a significant part of their appeal. That people saw that these people were living, that the masses of the Taiping movement. And of course, we're talking tens of millions of people.

You know, this isn't just, this isn't a little elite or you know group muscule somewhere. This is a mass movement, right? And it was a mass movement that was living the idea, living the goals. Now, having

said that, it's also true. A couple of things need to be recognized. One is that like many egalitarian, but in many ways, essentially spiritual movements, you know, there were some

problematic aspects to this. For one thing, as a rejection of the traditional Confucian hierarchical family system, the Taiping adopted policies of sort of gender segregation that men tended to live in sort of male dormitories, women in female dormitories. On the progressive side of that, child care was socialized, right? Children were raised collectively. You know, and so, you know, that was, that was a critique and rejection of the, the traditional family hierarchical organization, but it was, you know, that probably, you know, there might have been some tensions and contradictions that that emerged around those policies. There was also, and this is the critique that you hear all the time from, from bourgeois historians, that, that the leadership did tend to, uh, uh, uh, a assume as time went by a more commandist kind of attitude, you know, of trying to, again, in a context of intense conflict, of warfare, of defending there, what they had accomplished from

increasingly intense attacks and onslaunts, they're, you know, it became a more top down. And because there was a top down, a more hierarchical at the core. at the center movement. And that, you know, that may have contributed in the long run to some alienation and disaffection as time went by and as those contradictions intensified. You know, we don't want to portray the Taiping rebellion as a perfect thing. It's a flawed historical process. But one in which what we want to look at and what we want to emphasize are, you know, the sort of the foreshadowing to the glimmerings of hope. And of course, that that profound spirit of working people to fight for a better, a better society, you know.

Those are the things that I think that we need to draw out and learn from, as well as the contradictions and the mistakes that contributed to its ultimate failure, although the overwhelming reason, of course, was military defeat by the reactionary forces. So I want to wrap up the Taiping Rebellion. I know Brett will transition us to the Boxer Rebellion. have one other brief question. It's related to something that you had said earlier. But we can be brief on it because I know that we've been talking about the Taiping Rebellion for about 45 minutes already. So one of the things that you would, and of course, we could talk for many more

hours, but we do want to be respectful of your time today, Ken. One of the things that you had mentioned is that, of course, the Taiping Rebellion is in many ways a Christian movement. And one might think that being a Christian movement, that this movement might get some sympathy from the Western imperialists who were on, you know, mostly the coastal areas of the Qing Empire, but that of course is not what happens. Can you tell us about why there was this dynamic of this Christian movement that was being directly confronted by the Western imperialists in collaboration with the Qing dynasty? and how that obviously then resulted in the crushing of the rebellion.

Yeah, there is a moment where the British in particular, but, you know, the Westerners in general, as they become more aware of the nature of the movement, as they, you know, they hear about Heng Shuo Tuan and this idea of that it's in some ways a Christian movement, there is a, you know, there's, of course, as a, as a imperialists. They're calculating what's going to be the most beneficial for their interests. And there are those who think, you know, well, look, these guys are against the Qing. We would love to see a new regime here, a new government here, which was more sympathetic to us. You know, we've defeated the Qing militarily. And of course, they fight a second opium war with the Qing dynasty right in the middle of the Taiping rebellion. So, you know, this is all. You have to put this into the geopolitical context. They're thinking maybe we should ally with the Taiping movement and maybe get rid of the Qing dynasty and have them be a new government that we could work with more closely because we're all Christians here, right? And they actually send a diplomatic delegation to meet with the Taiping leadership, but that doesn't go well.

It doesn't go well partly because they're not comfortable with the idea that Hong Shuo Tuan thinks that he's Jesus' younger brother. That's difficult for them to embrace theologically. But I think perhaps even more so because they see the radical egalitarianism that is both the theory and practice within the mass movement. And so they decide, well, you know, we don't like the Qing Dynasty. Maybe, though, what we can do is leverage this, is use, you know, the menace of the Taiping rebellion. and they do actually commit some military forces, not so much to defeating the rebellion as to defeating

as to defending the imperialist enclave at Shanghai. You know, the Taiping never get into Shanghai. They never approach Shanghai. They get as far as Sujo and they don't really threaten Shanghai because the Western military deploys itself in that area to defend the city. So, you know, they extrad. further concessions from the Qing

by not supporting the Taiping. It's obviously it's a very cynical effort on the part of the imperialists. But they back away pretty quickly once they recognize both

the theological problems but more importantly I think the political problems of this, of their egalitarianism. Yeah, so fascinating. I'm learning so much genuinely did not know much about the Taiping movement at all before prepping for this episode. And I just, I could sit back and lose myself as being a listener instead of a co-host.

But I just wanted to make a couple of points really quick and then move into the Boxer Rebellion. I mean, one point, as you were mentioning earlier, the commandous nature that the Taiping movement eventually took under the external pressure of, obviously, war, conflict, etc. This is something we see in almost every egalitarian revolution attempt, the French Revolution we saw it, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution. immediately this sort of shift towards a more commandist centralized structure becomes the object of criticism for people who want to diminish those movements. Oh, look it, they're doing this again. They never, of course, contextualize why that's happening. And I think, you know, Mao is somebody that studied other socialist experiments as well as new Chinese history incredibly deeply. And he, I think a lot of his leadership was premised on this idea of trying to find that interesting balance, that dialectical balance between top-down leadership, which is essential, and bottom-up revolutionary mass energy, which is also

essential. And when one of those two things gets obliterated, the movement as a whole can suffer. So I just think it's worth a pondering on for a second, for anybody listening. But I also want to say that, you know, it is a truly bloody war. This is no small kerfuffle. I mean, this is 20 to 30 million human beings dead at the end of this. It's the bloodiest civil war, one of the largest conflicts of the century. and, you know, in terms of deaths, I'm reading on Wikipedia, it's comparable to World War I. So this is just a massive amount of human suffering that, you know, we should never just wrinkle over. We should take a second to reflect on that as well and to think about the psychological and cultural legacy of such moments of upheaval and bloodshed, really.

So I just wanted to mention that. But let's go ahead and move into the Boxer Rebellion. So the Taiping Rebellion, just for people chronologically, roughly 1850 to 1864, a couple holdouts until 1871, and then you have about 20, 30 years before the formal beginning of what we now know as the Boxer Rebellion. Can you kind of fill in some of that gap between the end of the Taiping movement and the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion to sort of contextualize this next rebellion that we're going to get into? Sure, there's two, I think, sort of two dynamics that we want to think about for that, for that phase, the period

between the end of the Taiping Rebellion and the rise of the uprising of the boxers, which begins around 1898 or so. On the one hand, there are, of course, the continued encroachments of Western imperialism. You know, there are more treaty ports being opened, more concessions being extracted from the Qing dynasty. And as we had touched on earlier, this is the period. where the the activities of Western missionaries just sort of roll over China like an incoming tide, you know. Pretty soon there are Western missionaries, you know, in every province, every, you know, rural area in remote mountain communities out in the southwest and the northwest and all this, there's a swarming of missionary activity. supported, you know, from home, they're all writing letters home and, you know, more and more money being contributed by congregations, you know, all over in the West.

So this is, this is a major, a major endeavor. And of course, it's, it, that's running in tandem with the economic penetration, that, you know, Western goods, now it's no longer just imported Western goods coming in. But now, you know, the Western powers are establishing, often in collaboration with Chinese capitalists, productive activities, new productive activities, new technologies coming in, things like that. So, you know, the impact of imperialism is simply deepening, you know, and the hollowing out of the domestic economy, and the hollowing out of political sovereignty, you know, it just progresses steadily throughout this period. So that's one dynamic that's going forward. The other is the contradictions within the imperial state in terms of how to deal with that. They do.

There are those within the imperial state, both a few amongst the Manchus, mostly amongst the Han Chinese officials, who want to mount to figure out how to mount an effective resistance, what's called the self-strengthening movement. And prior to that, the what are called the Tongueur reforms. Tongue is the title for one of the periods when there's a particular emperor in the 1860s. And they try to make some reforms. They try to learn. You know, one of the big questions, of course, is what makes Western imperialism so powerful?

And they try to figure that out. They send delegations off to Europe, and they get. You know, they establish a translation bureau so people can read Western books and learn about what's going on out there. Because they're trying to figure out, you know, what can we do to strengthen ourselves so that we could stand up to Western imperialism? Because clearly, they had not been effective at doing that, you know, the discrepancies in military technology, but also just sort of different, different political cultures. you know, it just, they hadn't figured out an effective mode of defense and response. So there are those who are pushing for that,

the self-strengthening movement in the 1870s and 1880s, building, you know, new, modern, more modern weapons systems, they establish an arsenal, they establish a shipyard, they're starting to construct more modern infrastructure, building railways and things like that. So there are efforts of that, going on. But it's a very contradictory thing because other elements within the political elites, and this is predominantly amongst the Manchus, but certainly amongst some ethnic Chinese

officials as well who don't want to upset the apple cart. They don't want to embrace significant reform or change institutionally or even more importantly in terms of the political culture because they see that as threatening their class interests, their power, their privileges. And so they put obstacles to these kinds of reforms. And they oppose these kinds of developments, the self-strengthening movement and things like that. So the system is paralyzed in some ways. It's locked up in terms of really mounting an effective response. And so that's kind of an internal dynamic that's going on.

And just to mention, because it becomes significant as a trigger for the boxer movement, is that Japan, which is forcibly opened by American imperialism in the 1850s, goes through a political transformation in the late 1860s, what's called the Meiji Restoration, and then embarks on a very, very rapid program of modernization and in many ways westernization that allow Japan to become a modern industrial economy with a modern industrialized military capability so that in 1895, Japan is able to militarily defeat China.

They fight a war, they fight most of it in Korea, and it's kind of over-control of Korea. But the Sino-Japanese War is an even further humiliation for China It's one thing to be defeated by the Western barbarians. You could at least say, well, you know, we didn't understand how powerful they worked. But for the Japanese to defeat China, the Japanese had always been seen as a sort of secondary country, you know, and now they defeat China militarily. This was an even greater humiliation, and that's part of what precipitates the political and social crisis in the later 1890s that that's the context for the boxer rebellion. Well, why don't we get into that? What was that context that precipitated the boxer rebellion? And then also, as we get into the rebellion itself, one of the things that I think will be quite interesting for the listeners to keep in mind is the role of the Qing dynasty vis-a-vis the boxer rebellion, because it does shift over time from the beginning of the boxer rebellion to, of course, when we have the eight imperialist.

alliance come rolling in that role of the Qing dynasty does shift quite a bit actually so as we discuss the precipitation of the boxer rebellion where the base of support was again recruitment methods kind of the same thing that we talked about with the Taiping rebellion how did they get their following how did they mobilize people and then the early stages of the boxer rebellion while also talking about those things can you let us also know what was the the of the Qing dynasty at that time vis-a-vis the Boxer Rebellion. Sure, sure. I mean, the boxer rebellion, of course, the first thing that we have to take note of about it is the reason that it's called the Boxer Rebellion.

It's called the Boxer Rebellion because the original impetus for the movement comes out of a kind of martial arts tradition. Right. The boxer movement originates in the western part of Shandong province, which is, if you have an image of the map of China in your head, there's that peninsula that sticks out to the east into the sea north of like where Shanghai is and all that. That's Shandong province. And the western part of Shandong province was a pretty poor area economically. I mean, even within the context of the hollowing out. of the Chinese economy, this area was particularly hard hit, right? Particularly difficult. There were long traditions in that area of, as they were in many, many parts of China. This isn't something that's unique to Western Shandom, but of martial arts traditions. And in many instances, they were bound up with these kinds of popular rebellions that we talked about earlier in terms of, you know, this idea of a transformation in the social hierarchy that was needed. you know, raising up the lowly, casting down the mighty, all that.

The boxers, you know, practiced a particular form of martial arts discipline, and they were an organized presence in the village societies of Western Shandong. Okay. So that was just an established thing. Shandong province had a particular imperialist sort of, I suppose you could say, which was that the Germans had acquired the concession of the city of Qingdao on the south coast of Shandong province. And Qingdao, of course, is famous because the Germans established a brewery there. And, you know, that's still around, thank goodness.

You know, so Qingdao beer is, you know, a sort of national label that gets exported all over the world. But that German concession becomes the sort of launch pad for, you know, for their missionary activities in rural Shandong province. And, you know, this is part of that wider process that we've talked about of this wave of missionary activities sweeping across the empire. In Shandong, as in many other places, the presence of the missionaries was very disruptive in rural society, in part, and in Shandong, apparently in large part, because it created contradictions within the village communities themselves.

People who embraced Christianity, Chinese people who accepted Christianity, who at least presented themselves as Christians, found themselves in privileged positions. And the missionaries actively promoted this. There were economic benefits because the missionaries would share, you know, resources, food, other kinds of things, clothing donations from, you know, wherever. But they also became socially and economically and politically privileged. Because the Qing state was, you know, deferential to say the least, to Western imperialism,

local officials, county magistrates and such, if there was a conflict between people, people in a particular village or in a particular area. And one party were, you know, regular Chinese and the other party were Christians. The officials were going to rule in favor of the Christians because they didn't want to upset the missionaries. They didn't want to upset the Germans. They didn't want to upset the Qing hierarchy. And of course, this generated tremendous frustration and resentment for the vast majority of these village communities who were not Christians. A relatively small number of people accepted Christianity because, of course, it was a fundamental break

with very, very deep traditional values in local society. But those who did, who were often called by their neighbors, often called rice Christians because they were sort of getting extra food benefits by allying with the imperialist missionaries. You know, they were the subject of significant resentment. But that resentment was really primarily directed at the missionaries, at the Germans, at the foreigners, and at the collaborationist stance of the Qing state. So, 1895, China's defeated by Japan. It's a big national humiliation. Everybody's aware of that. Ramps up further sort of, I suppose we could say, patriotic feeling amongst people.

1898, there's a grief, last just about three months, reform effort in Beijing, that fails and is suppressed by the sort of reactionary Qing authorities. But that sends a sort of ripple through much of Chinese society that, you know, things have got to change. And in that context, the boxers have begun in, you know, this martial arts grouping in Western. Shandong, they've begun to challenge the power and the privilege of the Chinese Christians, of the missionaries, and of the government officials who are, you know, supporting Western imperialism. And they are becoming increasingly rebellious. They're building larger and larger units. And they're now challenging, you know, attacking missionary churches, attacking facilities that the missionaries were operating, attacking local water.

called Yaman, the government offices. And at first, at first, the Qing state sees the boxers as rebels that need to be repressed. Because at first, the boxers, they start to raise political slogans. And at first, the slogan is, expel the barbarians, overthrow the Qing. And of course, the Qing leaders are like with that. That's not cool, you know. But as the rebellion grows and as it begins to manifest itself as a truly, you know, mass movement, and as the leadership in Beijing, especially in the wake of the suppression of the reforms in 1898,

they're beginning to think, you know, we've got to do something. You know, these imperialist powers, they're just, they're just bleeding us dry. maybe, maybe we could use this popular movement. We could use the boxers as a force to drive out the imperialists, drive out the Westerners. And so now the Qing state throws its power behind the boxer movement. And now the boxers, you know, willing to accept that, changed their slogan from, you know, expel the barbarians overthrow the Qing to expel the barbarians

support the Qing, right? The idea being that we're going to, you know, the Qing dynasty officials and our movement will work together to get rid of the imperialists. And this grows through 1899 by the beginning of 1900, a large cohort,

a large force of boxers march from western Shandong. It's not that far. Shandong is very close to Beijing. But they make their way there. They come into the city. And remember that at this point, Beijing is still an ancient walled city. So they come in through the gates. They're in the city. And they lay siege to what's called the legation quarter, where the

foreign, basically the foreign embassies are located. And, and, you know, they want to get at them. They want to destroy the foreign embassies. And they have the backing of the Qing state. Interestingly, the Qing do not make available to the box. Boxers, Imperial military forces, right? So the siege of the litigations is carried on by the boxers themselves. The Qing state is kind of hedging its bets at this point. And we have to recognize that the support for the boxers by the Qing, yes, it's a sincere effort, I believe, to unite to oppose the imperialists. But it isn't that, again, as with the Taiping, the Qing state is still a ruling class state, and they're not interested in the popular, you know, egalitarianism of movements

like the Taiping or the boxers. So it's a complex political landscape, but the kind of thing that we see in revolutionary crises historically, where, you know, bourgeois elements and proletarian elements may align, but that doesn't mean that the bourgeoisie gives up its own interest. So here, of course, it's not a bourgeoisie so much as the imperial state. But, you know, there's a, you know, the VED diagrams overlap considerably, but not totally, right? Let's just say it that way. So that's the context in which, as was mentioned, the eight-power expeditionary force, this alliance, this grand alliance of imperialism, comes to the capital, comes to Beijing, breaks up the siege of the legations, slaughters thousands of boxers, and many ordinary Chinese, imposes, you know, know, penalties on the imperial state, this huge financial indemnity that further bankrupts the

Qing regime and kind of puts, you know, one of the last nails in the coffin of Imperial China. Just very briefly before Brett goes in with his question, I just have a little question. I know I think that this is somebody who we brought up in the last episode, but if not, it was somebody who was brought up in your book, which it would be hard not to. that would be the Empress Dowager at the time. Can you talk just a little bit about who that was and her relations to both the Western imperialist countries over time? Because she did kind of rule for about 50 years, you know, and there was changing relations with the West throughout those 50 years. And then how her relations to these kind of rebel groups throughout her reign kind of were up until this point when we're talking about the Boxer Rebell.

and when we're going to be talking about, you know, the massive influx of foreign troops. Yeah, yeah, the Empress Dowager, whose name was Tsushi, it's a hard name to pronounce, but Tsushi. There was a reason I didn't say the actual name of her. She had been, she was an empress, obviously, and her husband, her emperor husband, passed away as a young man. and so she was around. She didn't have a son who succeeded to the throne, but one of her nephews succeeds to the throne, the Guangchu emperor, the last, well, the penultimate emperor.

But she becomes the real power behind the throne. She is able to manipulate him when he's a young man, and then even when he reaches maturity and tries to take the reins of government into his own hands, He's the one that launches this brief reform effort in 1898, but she is the one who works with reactionary elements in the military and the government to stop the reforms. Some of the reform leaders are executed, and the emperor is effectively placed under house arrest. So she really comes to be the controlling figure in the Qing government. And yeah, her view of things, you know, evolves over time.

She had been part, she had been a bit of a supporter of the self-strengthening movement, but she's always watching out for the interests of the Manchu nobility, right? And so as time goes by, that's why she suppresses the reforms. She thought that that was going to lead to the erosion, the loss of power of the Manchung nobility if the government was modernized and made more rational and effective. And by 1898, 99, she's the one, she's really kind of at the heart of this shift in the view of the boxers, you know, calling for a lying with them to help try to expel the barbarians. She really wanted to, to, you know, get the Qing dynasty back onto a very traditional, very, you know, reactionary basis, but reassert its authority.

And if they could, if they could drive out the imperialists or at least put a lot of pressure on the imperials, back them off. she was willing to take that risk and obviously in the end that didn't work out so well but that was that was she's she's a key figure in that in that moment yeah I mean I hope listeners who you know might not have had all these details fleshed out from Chinese history are now starting to understand why this period of time is called the the century of humiliation but also underneath that humiliation is this anti-humiliation of the dignified Chinese people in various forms rising up and trying to fight against you know first in egalitarianism and then you know more explicitly foreign imperialism and that's kind of

something i kind of want to just take a second to reflect on and correct me if i'm wrong here but the tai ping movement's ideological orientation is is fundamentally about a more egalitarian um china with these really intense religious um you know this the religious content this christian protestant content to it the boxer rebellion is now and sort of anti-christian because this missionary process has spread out all over china you were talking about all these and unfairnesses, and then so you can think of the boxer rebellion as a much more explicitly anti-imperialist, a movement, which I think is interesting. But you talked about the eight-nation alliance, their eventual victory over this, almost like a national liberation movement, which we'll see again about a half century later, which is very interesting. But, yeah, ultimately, in this instantiation of the conflict, the eight-nation alliance more or less wins, plunders, the country.

treaside in the city, does summary executions of, you know, fighters and non-fighters alike. What is the immediate fallout politically for China in the wake of this sort of defeat? And then how does this legacy of this defeat go on to influence and direct, you know, political and social movements and upheavals coming in the next several decades? Yeah. I mean, the immediate impact, of course, is the treaty that's imposed. in 1901, the indemnity that is part of that agreement, what was called the Boxer Protocol. They don't call it a treaty, the Boxer Protocol. And the indemnity, the indemnity, you know, is a huge payment to the eight powers, to each of the eight powers, you know, sort of paying the expense of their invasion and oppression of China. You know, it's like you got to invade us and we're

going to pay you to do so. It's, you know, it's pretty, pretty bad. But, and, of course, politically it's, it's yet another tremendous humiliation for the Qing dynasty. It does seem to have precipitated an awareness on the part of at least some elements within the Qing leadership that they were going to have to at least consider making some serious changes. And you get in the following years, in the last decade of the dynasty, you get some efforts at reform and modernization. They abolish the old imperial examination system in 1905. They begin a process of developing sort of consultative assemblies, not legislative assemblies, but consultative assemblies in some of the provinces, Hulon province as a pioneer in that regard. They set up a plan

for sort of constitutional reform, although the framework that they're thinking of, they're projecting that they might try to have a more democratic republic in place by, like, and remember, this is the first decade of the 20th century, they're talking about maybe getting that up and running by 1956. So it's, to say the least, a long-term program or vision. All of that, of course, is way too little too late. The dynasty, the imperial system itself has been demonstrated its bankruptcy.

Revolutionary movements, nationalist movements, Sanyat Sen, who becomes the great nationalist leader, has already been at work back in the 1890s, the first decade of the 20th century. You know, the dynasty is kind of rolling along with its wheels about to come off in this final decade. All that falls apart. You know, the Empress Dowager and the Guangzhou Emperor die within about 24 hours of each other in 1908.

A little boy, a little, you know, three-year-old boy becomes the final emperor, the last emperor. Finally in 1911, mutinies break out in the armed forces and the dynasty just collapses. And, you know, that moves us into another phase, the abortive. efforts to establish a republic, the warlord era, all that. We'll pick up that, I think, as background for the Civil War episode when we get to that. But the defeat of the boxers and the imposition of the boxer protocol and the indemnity really are kind of the final humiliation, not of China, but of the imperial system. There's bad stuff still to come and plenty of it. but but that's kind of the final turning point after which the dynasty is just in

sort of crash mode until it until it disappears yeah and you mentioned the last emperor of China that's something that I think we'll have a passing note on when we talk about the aftermath of the civil war because his his existence in revolutionary China in the People's Republic is very interesting he does not have the end that you would have expected for an imperial ruler of a country after a communist revolution takes place. So listeners, stay tuned for that in the next installment of this miniseries. But what I do want to mention is that, and I had mentioned this in our previous episode with you, Ken, but it's worth reiterating that in, at least within the United States' educational system, which is

what I am familiar with, because I was, I haven't lived in the U.S. for six years. but that's the educational system that I was raised in. When we learned about the Boxer Rebellion in school, and I know that I will be far from the only one who will have been given this portrayal of the Boxer Rebellion, we were told that they were basically crazed fanatics, these psychopaths brandishing fisticups against any foreigner that they came across. Whereas as we've laid out in both that last conversation and this conversation,

that's not at all the case. And in reality, there was actually a fairly substantial anti-imperialist almost ideology that was underlying the rebellion. And the thing that I'm kind of pushing towards at this moment is that raising popular consciousness is a very important thing when we think about the role of these rebellions. Yes, the Boxer Rebellion was crushed by the eight-nation alliance of Western imperialist states. However, the legacy of the Boxer Rebellion did quite a bit to raise anti-imperialist consciousness within the country. So I'm wondering, Ken, if you can talk a little bit about what the legacy of the Boxer Rebellion was in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, you know, after it was crushed by the Eight Nation Alliance of Western Imperialists.

And then what the lasting legacy of the Boxer Rebellion was and what role that played in maintaining something of an anti-imperialist popular consciousness within the country writ large. Yeah, I mean, again, the immediate aftermath was not good. Lots of boxer fighters who had come to Beijing were killed. Once the imperial state, the Qing dynasty, was sort of recaptured by Western imperialism. you know, boxer communities in Shandong were repressed. You know, the fate of the movement is fairly bleak in the immediate aftermath. But, you know, the legacy of the boxers, you know, lived on, shall we say. These popular movements did not go away.

There were other uprisings in other parts of the empire. There were other, you know, popular movements that, you know, carried on persisted as the 20th century gets underway, and as more, how shall we say, more sophisticated political organizations began to emerge, like Sanyat Sen and what's called the Tongbong Hui, the sort of broad coalition of anti-Ching and anti-imperialist movements around the country, as those movements became more, more, as I said, sort of more sophisticated in their ideological propagation and their public communication, the imagery of the boxers, the idea of the boxers, as fighters, essentially as Brett was saying, fighters for national liberation, you know, that takes deep root. And, of course, once the communist movement gets underway, they are looking back to, to, to, to, for. foreshadowing to predecessors, to, you know, people who were, who were part of the struggle,

but at a moment when, you know, for material and ideological reasons and circumstances were not mature for the success of a revolutionary movement. But now, you know, as the movement is building, as the movement is growing, you don't want to just abandon them. You don't want to just toss them off to the dustbin of history. You know, you want to emphasize that this movement now is an extension. is a culmination, is a fulfillment of the dreams, the hopes, the aspirations for egalitarianism, for justice, for equity, for national independence, for liberation that we can see in these earlier episodes. And so the legacy of the boxers is certainly one that is presented very, very differently in education in 20th century, China, not just in

the People's Republic, but even in the during the years of the revolutionary struggle. This is a legacy of national pride that, you know, was widely embraced as history marched on, shall we say. Yeah, absolutely. Very fascinating to learn about the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions and see how those threads of, in the former case, egalitarian economic structures. And in the latter case, you know, really hard-nosed anti-imperialism, those threads are picked up later from Chinese society and different movements. but specifically ultimately the Chinese Communist Party, which is very, very cool to sort of think about. As a way to wrap up this conversation, I'm wondering, you're mentioning the miseducation of people in the West about these historical events. And I'm wondering what

ultimately you hope people, young people, people in the West, people interested in changing the world, right? What ultimate lessons can we today in 2024 extract from these periods of Chinese history? Well, I think, I think. think that actually this pairing of the typing and the boxers as we've talked about it today kind of sets up, you know, the messages or the lessons, the things that we need to attend to, which is that on the one hand, of course, for us, you know, the people that I work with primarily here in the United States, you know, we're trying to figure out how to carry forward a revolutionary program here in this country. And given the critical role of the United States,

in the global imperialist system. You know, revolution in the United States is something that is in everybody's interest. So we have these sort of, again, kind of dual tracks that we want to advance along of building a movement that will, you know, educate people and organize people around issues of economic justice, about the equitable distribution of the fruits of labor to those who actually perform the labor, about building. building a socialist economy and a socialist society. But as part of that, we have to recognize that for us, and certainly for people in other parts of the world,

anti-imperialism is at the heart of that struggle, you know, that American imperialism needs to be defeated both at home and abroad. And that is the endeavor that, you know, this work forms a part of. So, you know, the lessons coming out of the Taiping and the Boxer Rebellions, even though they were historically defeated, is that, you know, this will for progressive, radical, revolutionary change is something that oppressed people, working people, have shared and fought for and died for, but also lived for, you know, throughout history. And as we, you know, as we follow those traces in the past, you know, I think we want to be inspired and we want to take resolution to devote ourselves to our struggles with the same kind

of determination and forbearance that these predecessors did. Beautifully said. Absolutely. Terrific conversation on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions. Listeners, as I had mentioned at the top of this recording, this is the beginning of a four-part mini-series that we're conducting with Ken on modern Chinese history, which is an extension of our past overview of modern Chinese history that we did with Ken in the fall of last year. As mentioned, also at the top of the recording, the next episode is going to be on the Chinese Civil War, which I know I am really looking forward to. Ken, is there anything that you would like to say as a teaser for that conversation,

something to get people excited for that next installment about? I'm sure that you have a lot to say, but, like, you know, give a 15-second pitch to get people excited. Well, guys, you know, the revolutionary struggle is still felt by people in China today as one of the great epic stories of human history. And we're going to talk a lot, I think, specifically about the Long March, you know, which is a tale of, talk about the tale of inspiration and heroism and sacrifice, but also of perseverance and ultimately a victory. So I think that, you know, it's the superheroes without the superpowers.

Yeah, absolutely. I know the long march was kind of the event of the Civil War that I am the most excited to talk about because as you mentioned, it's a very inspiring story despite incredible hardship and incredible, seemingly insurmountable odds. Really one of the most inspiring events in modern human history in my book and we'll certainly talk quite a bit about that in the next episode of this miniseries. So listeners, be sure to stay tuned. we may have one episode between this one and the next installment of this mini-series. It's kind of to be worked out whether or not we'll have these four episodes one after another or maybe we'll have something interspersed in between that Adnan and I are doing in the interim

because we have a lot of things recorded already that we have to get out in a timely manner at some point. But this was a great conversation, a great way to kick off this mini-series. Again, listeners, our guest was Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University and author of the book, China's Revolution on the Quest for a Socialist Future. Ken, can you just let the listeners know how they can find your book? We'll kind of pitch it at the end of each of these installments for you. Yeah, the book is available at this point from the publisher, which is 1804 Books.com. 1804 Books is a radical and revolutionary publisher based in New York City. and I'm really delighted to be working with them.

I'll put in a little advance plug that we hope by the end of this year to have another volume out on China and the world. China's foreign relations, 1949 to 2024. And I can guarantee you that when that book comes out, you'll be back on the show whether you like it or not. I am always glad to be here. Well, I'm glad to hear it, but regardless, you're back on the show when that book comes out. Brett, as my wonderful guest host for this episode, which I'm going to have to get used to saying, because we are going to have you back again, both for the rest of this mini-series, as well as periodically in the future, can you let the listeners know how they can find your podcasts? And it's going to be really hard for me to remember to say, not say your other podcasts, because now those are your podcasts. Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, thank you so much, Ken. Like, you're a really brilliant teacher. I mean, just to, to often. the top of your head have all this history in there it's fascinating the way you deliver it is

wonderful i was actually just kind of thinking i'm like where have i um you know heard him before outside of guerrilla history and it's because i've i've actually listened to the great courses from yow to mao five thousand years of chinese history so if you want five thousand years of chinese history ken is your man and there's a great course the series out there uh for you so very very cool um as for me you can find everything i do at revolutionary left radio dot com yeah brett i knew you did that course. I didn't know that you didn't recognize that Ken was kind of forgot. There you go. Now we put all

of these pieces together and I'm looking forward to seeing you again when we continue this mini series with the Chinese Revolution. Listeners, you can find my co-host again, it's going to be hard to remember to say this, but my co-host Adnan, who was not able to make it for this conversation on Twitter at Adnan

A-H-U-S-A-I-N. Check out his other podcast The M-A-J-L-I-S. It's available wherever you get your podcasts and is focused on the Italy-East Islamic World Muslim Diaspras and a lot of great episodes that the Mudgellus has put out. I highly recommend it. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-N-N-N-N-N-E-C-K-1-995. It was recently added to the editorial board of Iskra Books, so I'm also going to highly

recommend everybody. Check out IskraBooks.org and follow them on social. media because I've already involved with several projects that are going to be coming out. And whereas they had six books come out last year, it's looking like there's going to be more like 20 that come out this year from ISCRA. So definitely a growing press and something to keep your eye on, especially considering that we make all of the PDFs available for free. Listeners, hint, hint, all of the PDFs are available for free, although you can also buy

the print editions. As for Gorilla History, you can help support us 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 follow the show on Twitter to keep up with everything that's coming out from each of

us individually as well as the show collectively at Gorilla underscore pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. You wouldn't remember Dinn-Bin-Bin-Brew? 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 at Aft is 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-host, Sanry Hakimaki.

Unfortunately not joined by my other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. He's a little under the weather today, but we are hoping that he'll be back for the next time that we convene. Fortunately, we are joined by a guest host, who the listeners will be very familiar with, as not only was he also the guest host of the last.

installment of this mini series, but Brett O'Shea was also co-host of guerrilla history for the last three and a half years until just recently. So again, we're joined by guest host Brett O'Shea, who is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Ranked Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. It's nice to see you again. Hello, yeah. Nice to see you as always. And I'm very, very excited for this entire series and particularly this installment. So this will be a good time. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad that we were able to twist your arm into coming back for this series. That's a joke, listeners. Brett was more than happy to come here.

I did not threaten him in any way. Before I introduce our guest again, who again is returning for this mini-series and introducing the mini-series that we're in, I just want to remind you, listeners, that you can help support the show and allow us to keep up and running and releasing more episodes like this by going Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're doing individually. and collectively at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, Chiu-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Pod. As mentioned already, this is a continuation of a mini-series,

and specifically, it's a continuation of our ongoing modern history of China miniseries that we are very blessed to be hosting Ken Hammond for. So Ken Hammond, again, is professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University, author of China's Revolution, and The Quest for a Socialist Future and a returning guest on the show. Hello, Ken.

It's nice to have you back on. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So this is part two of our planned four-part mini-series on modern Chinese history. Listeners, if you haven't listened to either the kind of introductory episode that we recorded before we knew we were going to be doing a miniseries on China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future, go back and listen to that.

And then part one of this mini-series should have come out either. one or two weeks ago at this point, and that was on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellion. So if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that first, as we are essentially picking up more or less where we left off with that episode. Today's topic is going to be the Chinese Civil War with a particular focus on the long march, because that is something that I've wanted to devote an entire episode to, basically since the show has started.

So Ken, when we're talking about the Chinese Civil War, and as we talked a little bit off the record, there's always this tendency to try to think, well, how far can we stretch back to the past when we're analyzing? You know, we're historical materialists. We always think how these things relate to previous events and how the material conditions of society and how those material conditions came about influence specific events. When talking about the Chinese Civil War, we could go back a long way to lay their roots for. it. But I think we should pick up in 1911. So I think that I will just leave it open for you here, because as I said, we did leave off kind of at this point in the last episode. Can you tell the listeners why we are picking up in 1911? What happened in 1911 and why this is laying the roots for the Chinese Civil War? Well, the 1911 is the year of when the Qing dynasty finally

enters its stage of collapse. The dynasty had been tottering for the last decade since the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion that we talked about last time. There had been some, you know, too little too late efforts at reform of the imperial state, but that was just not, you know,

the pressure for change that had been building up through the late 19th century and in that first decade of the 20th century. It just finally reaches a breaking point. And what happens is in October of 1911, the military, the imperial army, was an arena within which the revolutionaries, the folks hoping to overthrow the Qing state, have been doing a lot of organizing. You know, it's always good if you have military forces that are politically engaged and are not going to be prepared to fire on the popular movement. if that movement starts to express itself. The Qing state, though, was worried about, you know,

the influence of nationalist revolutionaries, the people, you know, basically organized around Dr. Sunyat-sen. They were worried about their presence in the military, and in one particular place in the city of Wuhan, what is today the city of Wuhan, their rumors started to spread that the authorities were going to arrest, members of what was called the Tong Meng Hui, the

revolutionary organization who were in the military. And in an effort to block that, there's a mutiny. And the leaders, there were in fact, of course, Tongman Hui people in the military,

they rise up. They bring their other fellow soldiers with them. They take over the not just the military base there, but they take over the city. They get a local, progressive sort of political leader to agree to front their new government. And they very quickly proclaim that the province, Hubei province, which is the area surrounding the city, is going to separate itself. It's going to

secede from the Qing dynasty. And this is a huge, you know, shock, but very, very quickly over the following a couple of months, about half of the provinces within the empire declare their independence, declare that they're leaving the dynasty. And mostly these are along the Yangs River and in the south, but by the end of the year, by the end of December, it's clear that this is a very, very serious crisis for the

dynasty. And by January, when Sanyat Sen, who had been out of the country, he'd actually been in the United States on a fundraising tour when he gets the word. He's on a train between San Francisco and Denver. When he gets the word that, you know, the revolution has broken out, this mutiny has broken out. He gets back to China in January, and then the sort of terminal crisis of the dynasty takes place. And the little boy, last emperor, he abdicates. And that's it. February 15th, 1912, the Qing dynasty is over, and the whole imperial system is gone. Oh, feel free to go forward. Can I raise my hand just because, as an aside, and you brought it up when you said that Sonia Tsen was in the United States, I was just going to point out that specifically he was on his way to Denver of all places,

which I don't know why. Just I find that particularly amusing. I know Denver's a big city and all, but you don't expect the person who's coming out of a Chinese revolution to be, you know, coming out of it as being one of the leaders to be in Denver when the revolution is taking place. Anyway, that was just an aside. I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Oh, no, no, no, no problem. You know, well, that is it. I'm always fascinated by that, too. He was on a fundraising tour. and in fact goes on, you know, from Denver to Kansas City, St. Louis, winds up in New York, takes a boat over to London, you know, raising money for the revolution the whole way, speaking to overseas Chinese communities. There was a significant Chinese community in Denver, people who had been working in the silver mines up in the Rockies and all that. So he's drawing on those communities. But he returns, you know, once he gets to London, he then moves pretty quickly back.

to China. And when the arrangements are made for the emperor to abdicate, the fellow who represents the imperial state is a military leader named Yuan Shur Kai. And Yuan Shur Kai had been, in the late years of the dynasty, he had been a real force for modernization of the military. So he's in control of what's called the Bayang Army, the northern, most modern, most modern. units within the military. But he sees the writing on the wall, and he also, or sees an opportunity for his political advantage. So the plan, the hope of the revolutionaries, was that Sanyat-Send would become the president of a successor state, of a republic that would be established. And indeed, he does, when he gets back to China, he is proclaimed as the first president

of this incipient republic. But the deal that Yuan Shurkai brokers, in order to negotiate a peaceful transition of power, so that there doesn't have to be fighting at this point, San Yansan agrees to step aside and allow Yen Shirt Kai to become president. But this is all very provisional. And the idea is that there will be elections held to, to put together a constituent assembly, an assembly with a mandate to draw up a constitution, to create a new governmental infrastructure. So it's a very ad hoc situation there starting in

February of 1912. As that goes forward, elections are a deed held. And the nationalists, but this time the Tongmeng Hui has sort of reconstituted itself as the nationalist party, the Guomindang, they win, you know, a majority of seats in the new legislature of the Republic. But Yuan Shurkai is not, he's not really playing fair at this point. He doesn't want to have the nationalist be the dominant force. He doesn't want to surrender the presidency back to Sanyat Sen. So when the National Assembly is about to convene up in Beijing, Jing. A number of things happen. The leader, the formal leader of the legislative party, if you will, the Guelman Dog, is assassinated. He's blown up on a train platform down in Shanghai. And Yuan Shurkai declares that most of the delegates elected by the Guelmandang are ineligible to take up their seats. So he basically urges. the legislature, before it even has a chance to convene, and then has the left-over legislators

elect him to be president. And then a couple of years or about a year after that, he then proclaims himself to be president for life. So it's a very, it's a very abortive start to these efforts to create a republic. You know, the dream, apparently, initially at least, for many people, had been to create a sort of liberal Republican state modeled on, you know, Western bourgeois democracy. But that goes off the rails very, very quickly. Uynchukai doesn't last that long in April of 1916. He tries to stage an imperial restoration with himself now as the new emperor. He gets fancy imperial robes made and he puts together a sort of like a,

a cabinet of officials, but gives them all titles from the old imperial system. He actually goes down to the temple of heaven, where in the spring, every year the elder emperor would go and sort of do these rituals to start the agricultural calendar. He goes down and does that, but he doesn't get any traction. People, the massive people in the capital, you know, are kind of laughing at this. And so his effort to become a new emperor collapses. He leaves the city and he dies about six weeks later of people say of a broken heart. But whatever collapse he went through, you know, he's off the stage. But that's in many ways that's a good thing.

But it also meant that there was now no longer a powerful political center. Sanyat Sen had a lot of the five. following, but, you know, the organization of the Guamandong was not really prepared to assume national leadership at that point. And so this is the moment from 1916 for the next decade that China really fragments into what we call the warlord era, where there are, you know, 20 or more different military strongmen, some of whom control a province, some may control two or three provinces. Some provinces are divided between a couple of warlords. It's a very chaotic period. There's lots of fighting. It's very tough on the ordinary people. This is the period, the end of the teens and

the beginning of the 20s, when the livelihoods of people, especially in the countryside, are just ground down to their absolute, you know, base, rock bottom level. And people are struggling every day just to just to survive and hang on. So this, you know, the end of the imperial system, this abortive effort to start a republic, and then the collapse of that and the fragmentation into, you know, this warlord era, that's what sets the stage for what will become the emergence of the Communist Party

and the socialist revolutionary struggle. So we can move on to that unless you have a particular topic or question you want to get to first? Sure. I'll just add some. I have some thoughts for sure. One thing is, it's just fascinating because when we look back over these transitions towards liberal democracy, towards capitalism, they're never these sort of clean breaks that just happen and then this thing is installed and then we move forward. There's always this stutter step, this reaction. I mean, look at the French Revolution, you know,

compared to other bourgeois revolutions, very left wing. But then there's also the Thermidorian reaction and that gives eventually rise to Napoleon, which, which in some ways carries forward the French Revolution in serious ways, but in other ways betrays it and ends it becomes Emperor of France himself. And I think we should keep that in mind when we're thinking about socialism and the transition in that direction, which is it's never going to be a perfect, clean, you know, first attempt we succeed approach to transitioning in that way.

So I think that's interesting. Another element that jumps out to my mind is, you know, in the West we're enamored with the Roman Empire. That lasted. I mean, you know, the exact dates are, of course, fuzzy, but about a thousand years. And I think one thing that we should pause and reflect on is this 1911 revolution and everything that happens after is the end of over 2,000 years of this chain of imperial dynasties in China, over 2,000 years, which is hard to wrap our

minds around. And I think that that, of course, is going to, you know, influence the way people think and influence that transition in really interesting ways. Just for some chronological orientation for listeners. At the time of the 1911 revolution, Mao is about 18. The Chinese Communist Party is going to be created in about a decade out from this, and then the Civil War about 15 years out from this, so just people can orient themselves. But my question is, in this transition period, Mao is growing into adulthood. Do you have any insights into his experience during this time, his thoughts, and how his political evolution, sort of of took place in this 1911 up through the 20s of Chinese history?

Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, in many ways, Mao's story is kind of a microcosm of what happens for many, many young, educated Chinese who were passionately hoping and seeking a path forward to create a China that would be, you know, more just, more equitable, able to stand on its own feet again, able to stand up to Western imperialism and, you know, to go forward and, and solve these dreadful problems that were, that were oppressing the Chinese people. You know, that combination of domestic oppression and imperialist exploitation, you know, was just, as I said, just grinding people down, you know, to, to the rock bottom. Mao in the teens, you know, goes through, he's, he's affected

by and actually it becomes a part of what's called the new culture movement. The new culture movement was, in many ways, it's often portrayed as a rejection of traditional thought and traditional political culture, and it certainly is. But it's not a complete rejection. It's an effort to both draw from the outside world, new ideas, new inspirations, new ways of doing things, but also to work with elements from within the Chinese tradition because the Chinese tradition is a vast and complex field

and there were certainly progressive elements within that we had things like the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion which were egalitarian and anti-imperialist movements right in recent history for them but also reaching deep back throughout Chinese history popular uprisings calling for social justice and economic transformation and all that. So Mao wants to,

Mao and the new culture movement, they want to draw on both, you know, new ideas coming in from the outside world, but also on radical and progressive elements from within the Chinese tradition. So the new culture movement, and people, figures like Chen Du Shoe and Li Dajao, Tzai Yuan Pei,

who is the chancellor of Peking University, they're writing, they're publishing, They're putting out newspapers and journals, the journal New Youth, that's addressed at, you know, young people who are trying to find a path forward. Jo-in-Lai, who's studies in Japan for a little bit at this time, is another. So these young people are requesting for new ideas. And Mao, we can see a very interesting political development. He starts out trying to grapple with things like China's weakness. This was a big theme, the weakness of China.

it. And he connects that up, not just to sort of political institutions and an economy that's been, you know, radically transformed by imperialist penetration, but even down to the level of the individual. And he gets very involved in promoting sort of what I suppose we would call physical fitness. You know, the idea that young Chinese people need to be strong. They need to be strong physically. They need to be strong physically. They need to be strong morally, they need to be strong mentally, and he writes a number of essays about that. He's also, as many budding socialists and communists were, he's very concerned with gender issues. There's a famous essay that he writes about a young woman who commits suicide rather than be forced into an arranged marriage that she didn't want, and Mao writes about that, and that becomes an issue for the new culture people and all this. And then, of course, in 1970, we have the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. And as news of that starts to come into China, many people who had been involved with the new culture movement, including Maldzadal,

start to read about that. And they start to be more and more interested in what Lenin is saying. And, of course, then they go back and they start studying more deeply about Marx and angles in their writing. So now we see Mao and Joanne Lai and other people like that, as well as the leaders of the new culture movement, particularly Chen Du Shuo and Li Da Jal. They're getting involved in Marxist study groups. So they're getting together and reading translations of the manifesto and the critique of political economy and the civil war in France and all these classic political writings. And they start thinking about, you know, going forward along that path. The Bolsheviks, of course, once, you know, once things kind of go forward a bit in Russia, you know, the Bolshev revolution

had hoped, had been premised in many ways in Lenin's thinking on the idea that it would be a trigger for revolution in Europe and of spreading world revolution. That, unfortunately, doesn't happen. There are uprisings in Hungary and in Berlin and in Spain, but, you know, they don't flourish. They don't lead to the kind of global revolution that Lenin had hoped for. And so now the Bolsheviks set about creating what we come to call the Third International or the Communist International to help support budding revolutionary movements in the, you know, wherever they're going to be around the world. But also, Lenin, of course, writes about imperialism as the high.

stage of capitalism. And so they recognize that the colonial world, the world of imperialist exploitation, is critical if global revolution is ever going to be on the agenda, that you have to break up the dominance of the European and North American imperialist systems in order to be able to advance the revolutionary struggle. So they're looking at all these kinds of ideas and all these writings. This is, of course, in the context of the First World War, which ends in November of 1918. And then we have the Versailles Peace Conference, at which the victorious bourgeois states totally betray the rhetoric of democracy and self-determination for people, which they had used for propaganda purposes during the war. Now at the Versailles Peace Conference, in the specific issue of

China, they take the former German colonial possessions that we talked about last time as one of the triggers for the boxer rebellion. And instead of returning them to Chinese sovereignty, they give them to Japan. Japan had occupied Qingdao at the beginning of the war. But, you know, China and Japan were both allied with the Western powers. China had sent tens of thousands of workers to France to help their economy while the war was going on. And yet the bourgeois victors, they just totally betray China. And that, when news of that arrived in Beijing on May 4th, 1919, that triggers the first big national anti-imperialist movement,

huge boycotts directed primarily against Japan, but also a lot of agitation about Western imperialism because it was the Western powers who had betrayed China. China at Versailles. So all of that, you know, the Bolshevik revolution giving a new inspiration to Marxism and socialism, the Versailles Peace Conference revealing, you know, so starkly the bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy, that combination gives rise then by 1920 and especially 1921 to the efforts to form a communist party. The international in Moscow sends advisors out. They work with these Marxist study groups, and they finally convene in July and August of 1921, first in Shanghai,

and then they have to shift to a lake down in Jujan for security reasons. But that's the first Congress of the party. And Mao Zedong is right there. He's one of the delegates, along with 11 others. representing at that point a total membership of about 65, but it starts to grow very, very rapidly once they sort of make their presence known. Yeah. Yeah, just hop in for a second. So as we had mentioned, Yuan Shikai died in 1916, and this opens up what was widely called the warlord era. And it's in the backdrop of this that we have. The, the foundings of the communist party, but also at the same time, we have a lot of changes happening within the Womontong.

And so I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about how the conditions within China influence the formation of the Communist Party, as well as changes that were happening within the Guamantong. And specifically, as you had just mentioned, which was a statistic I was planning on bringing up, at the foundation of the Communist Party, there was only about 60 members of the Communist Party. and there was a grand total, if you're looking at the first national Congress, only 13 people who actually were able to make it to the Congress.

So we're talking about a very, very small foundation, which rather quickly actually started to gain quite a bit of grassroots support. But if you can talk a little bit about how that warlord-era kind of condition of the country influenced the way that the CCP was founded as well as changes that were happening within the Kuomantang and what were the changes that were happening with the Kuomintang because that will obviously play a pretty major role of how things are going to unfold as we get farther into this history. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the beginning of the 20s is it's such a crucial moment. you know, China is just being kind of torn apart by these warlord rivalries, different conflicts between individual warlords. There are alliances of warlords that get together. They're fighting for control. One of the sort of ironic aspects of it is that whoever controlled the city of Beijing was seen by the imperialist as the national government, even though they might only control the city and its immediate environment, its hinterlands,

but because that's where the foreign powers had their embassies and all, whoever was in control there was seen as the national government. And sometimes the city would change hands, different warlords would take control, but then they became the national government. So that was kind of a strange aspect of that period. but for the for the you know both the the the communist and the nationalists this is a moment 1920 21 22 where they're they're they're trying to figure out the path forward and that's a very complicated analytical challenge for I'm going to talk about the nationalist first because that's a little more straightforward and then and then we'll talk about the problems that the Communist Party faced. The nationalist, you know, Sunyat-San had been the nationalist leader for a long time,

really since the 1890s. But he was a great mobilizer and a great fundraiser. He wasn't necessarily the strongest organizational thinkers, shall we say. So when the international sends advisors out to China, they not only work with building the new Communist Party, but they also work with the nationalists. Sanyat Sends ideology, Sanyat Sends political thinking, was, you know, sort of moderately socialist. He talks in what he calls the three people's principles of one of his basic writings. He talks about what's called people's livelihood.

And the idea, as he understood it and as he propagated, it was a kind of basic. socialist perspective on having those who labor and those who produce value share in the social distribution of the wealth that they're creating. You know, it wasn't, he didn't have a historical materialist analysis. He wasn't a communist. He didn't have a Marxist, you know, approach to things, but he did have this sort of general progressive socialist, you know, ideology. So he was open to working with the representatives from the international, and they worked with him to transform the Gormandan, interestingly, into a Leninist party, that is to say a party that operated on the principles of democratic centralism, a party that enforced discipline so that it became a more

effective and efficient organization. And, you know, that greatly strengthened the nationalist party and created or began the process of creating the conditions that would allow them by the mid-1920s to launch the effort to reunify the country, to bring the warlord period to an end, and to create, once again, an actual functional national government. So that's going on, and that's an important thing to have on the table. But on the side with the communists, this gets very, very complex because the question was, okay, we're going to organize, we're going to have a communist party. And the ultimate objective, of course, is going to be to have a socialist and communist revolution. But in China, at that point, the industrial proletariat, the sort of industrial working class was a very,

small proportion of the population of the economy. The agricultural economy was still overwhelmingly, you know, the place where most people lived and worked. And although it was a commercial agricultural economy, it was a capitalist agricultural economy, nonetheless, it wasn't the industrial proletariat. And the Bolsheviks, in their, you know, from their point of view from their perspective, viewed the industrial proletariat as the only class with the potential to be a revolutionary class. They viewed the peasantry drawing on things that Marx had written about in the context of France as a petty bourgeois strata, which could not be relied upon. It might align itself with the working class, but it might go over to, you know,

the bourgeois elements as well, depending upon, you know, particular circumstances. So that was sort of a fundamental perspective. And what that meant was that in this context of the early 20s, the international advisors urged the communist leadership to form a united front with the nationalists. They viewed the nationalists, basically as a bourgeois party, a bourgeois nationalist. party that was deeply connected to the to the Chinese capitalist element. And of course, there were patriotic capitalists. There were capitalists who were anti-imperialists because they wanted a free field for their operations within China.

And they, you know, and they saw getting rid of imperialism as a way to, you know, clear the path for their capitalist development. Okay. So, you know, Ken, one could say that they hadn't reached. the highest stage of capitalism at that point. Well, absolutely, absolutely. But that was sort of the class position, the economic position of the nationalist party. They were nationalists, and that's what they called themselves.

And so they wanted to, they were anti-imperialist at that point because they wanted to create the conditions for the national bourgeoisie to be able to flourish. So the international advisors advocated a united front. That united front is created. That becomes actually a great thing for the communists because it gives them the opportunity to organize within the Guamandong, but also continue on their own. And they become a great force in the labor movement. Trade unions begin to be organized, and a lot goes forward.

But Sanyat Sen passes away, and in the mid-20s, about 1925, beginning of right beginning of 19th, I think it's February of 25. And the leadership that emerges within the Nationalist Party after that comes to be dominated by Chankaj Shek. And Chankajek is a rabid anti-communist. He is deeply involved with financial capital. He marries into the Song family, a TV Song was. becomes the finance minister of the Guamong government once it gets constituted. And, you know, they're deeply embedded with Chinese financial capital.

Plus, there's a kind of unholy alliance with a lot of organized criminal groupings, especially in Shanghai. So this creates a very difficult situation because in 8th world, well, in 1926, Chonkaishech launches what's called the Northern Expedition, which is a military campaign. The military, the nationalist military has been built up. The nationalists had been in control of one province. They were basically like other warlords in some ways. They had Guangdong province in the south. They built up their military forces there with advice from the international as well.

They helped with organizing the military. and then in 1926 they start this northern campaign retracing in many ways exactly the course that the Taipei rebels had taken you know back in the 1850s so if it's a you know it's a history repeating itself kind of kind of moment and they are they are you know the northern expedition

the goal is to to subordinate all the various warlords to Guelan authority to create a unified national government led by, dominated by the nationalist. And they're able, you know, they're pretty successful at this to begin with. They either fight with and defeat particular warlords, or once they demonstrate their military capabilities, they get other warlords to sign on and agree, yes, I'll, you know, I'll accept the authority of the nationalist.

By April of 27, they've reached central China. They now have control over Wuhan and the Yangtze River Valley, and they're coming to Shanghai, Shanghai, of course, was an international city. It was a concessionary city governed by the foreign imperialists. But it was also a city where the Communist Party had its greatest strength in the factories, in the labor unions. And it was a city where the criminal gangs had a tremendous amount of control and influence. So when Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalist Army are approaching Shanghai, the communists stage an uprising to seize control of the city

so that their expectation is they can welcome the nationalist forces and then they'll have a significant position in Shanghai and in Central China going forward. But what Chiang Kai Shack does is he stops, he stops outside of Shanghai and a combination of the imperialist police forces and gangs from the criminal organizations stage of counter coup and thousands of workers are killed. The leadership of the party is decimated.

Many of the important leaders are either killed a right or arrested and later killed in prison. It's a terrible blow. This is a split. This is the split between the national. nationalists and the communists. And that throws the party into, you know, disarray to say the least. Now they're not, they, you know, the United Front is over and the question is going forward

then, you know, as Lennon would say, what is to be done? What are you going to do at this point? How are we going to move forward? And this leads to a period from 1927 until about 1933. where the party really struggles with trying to adapt to the conditions, the realities of life in China and figure out how to create a viable revolutionary movement. And it's at this point that Mao Zedong begins to emerge, and by 1933, will emerge as the key figure in the Chinese revolution. because Mao, who, you know, during the United Front, like most of the members of the party,

has also joined the Golan Dong, has had a position. He's made director of the Peasant Bureau, and he's out in Hunan province, his home province in Central China, working with peasant unions, farmers unions. And he writes, of course, his famous report on the peasant movement in Hunan, in which he, and he does this in a number of us, other writings as well. But in that report, he makes a critical breakthrough, a critical theoretical leap that becomes the foundation of the success of the revolution, which is that he writes about the vast majority of the agricultural workers. He calls them agricultural proletariat. And he divides

this up in various ways. And it's a very, very clear analytical profile. of the situation in Houdan, and he writes other reports about other areas eventually in which he does the same thing. But this categorization of the majority of agricultural workers as agricultural proletarians is critical because what it does is it positions the peasantry, the majority of the pestetry, not all the peasants. There's rich peasants and, you know, various categories that he deals with. But maybe 70% of the agricultural workers, he characterizes as proletarians. And so if they're proletarians, they are the natural allies, the brothers in arms of the

industrial proletariat. So even though the industrial proletariat is relatively small, the agricultural proletariat is huge. And so bringing those forces, those class forces together is the key to advancing the revolutionary project. And it takes time. You know, he produces this report. that doesn't mean that the leadership of the party suddenly goes,

oh, yeah, of course, let's go with this. There's internal struggles. There's changes in leadership, you know, figures who had been important from the start, like Chen Du Shoe, wind up being purged. Li Da Jiao is killed by the nationalist. There's, you know, it's a period of turmoil, the late 20s, at the very beginning of the 30s. But by, you know, by the early 30s, Mao has established,

the first of what they call the red base areas, the Jiangxi Soviet, an area in the remote mountainous part of southern Jiangxi province, which has about 10 million people living in it, so it's not like just it's some little rural thing. And that's where they begin to experiment with land reform, with reform of the gender system, with a number of productive activities to try to create an economic base for the party, that becomes the focal point, and it's not the only base area, but it's the biggest and the most significant one to begin with. That becomes the focal point of the struggle, because in the cities, the party has to be underground. It has to be very careful about its work. But in the Soviet, in the, in the Jiangxi base area, they're able to,

it's like a laboratory for socialism. It's a laboratory. It's a laboratory. for adapting Marxist theory to the realities of Chinese society. I mean, yeah, we have so much to learn from the Chinese Communist Party, the way they organized, the theoretical innovations that they've made, the creation of red bases, the sort of pre-figureative experiments and territories that they did control. So the civil war lasts from the 20s through the 40s until the communist win, of course. In that midterm period, we have World War II. And we have the second united front against Japan.

We'll get there in a second. But leading up to the second united front between the nationalist and the Chinese communists in order to defeat the imperial Japanese, we have the long march. So, you know, during this period of time from the late 20s and the early 30s, and just brilliantly and expertly laid out for us, we have this ongoing civil war. We have certain territories that are claimed by certain sides, big cities outside of communist control.

They have to operate in an underground. fashion, Mao makes this theoretical breakthrough with the agricultural proletary to combine them when the industrial proletariat, build their numbers, they're experimenting, and all of this leads eventually to one of the most famous periods of the last century of Chinese history, which is the Long March. So can you kind of talk about leading up what the, you know, the events were leading up to the Great March, and then we can get into the Long March itself and talk about that? Sure thing. The John Shee-Base area, you know, the become really the center, the most important node within the revolutionary movement by 1931-32.

And as such, it becomes the focus of what the nationalist called their bandit suppression campaigns. They characterize the communists, you know, not as a rival political force, but just as sort of, you know, bandits, vagabonds in the countryside. And, you know, that's all just for propaganda purposes. But what the Nationalists did was launch a series of encirclement campaigns, as they called them, where each year, beginning in 1930 or so, they would build, literally build a whole ring of fortifications, these sort of concrete bunkers around the base area. And they would control those areas and they would fight it over those things. And then the next year, they would push in a little further.

I'd build a new ring. So every year, they were tightening the ring around the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the shi Soviet. And by the late summer of 1934, uh, they realized the communist leadership began to realize that, that they, they just couldn't hold out. They were going to, you know, they risked being basically overrun by the nationalist forces. and so in in October they made the decision that that they had to to break out there was a heroic unit that was tasked with launching an attack on the nationalist forces on the northeast corner of the of the base area but that was a that was a that was a a a deception because the breakout takes place on the southwest corner and about 120,000

fighters, mostly men, they're relatively few women, but about 120,000 fighters, break out, break through the nationalist lines, and start what will become the long march. Their goal, well, they weren't entirely clear to begin with on what the goal was going to be, but their goal becomes reaching another base area, one even more remote than the Jiangxi Soviet, the base area in northern Shanxi province in the northwest of China. At that point, it had not yet settled in the area of Yanon. Yenon will become the focal point of the northwest base area, and that's their ultimate destination. But it takes a year, it takes a year for them to literally walk from the south, you know, south-central China, southern Jiangxi, they go west, they loop around a few places. They have to cross marshes. They have to cross high snowy mountains. They have to cross rivers that run through deep gorges. They're instantly harassed and, you know, attacked by national.

forces, they're bombed with, you know, by airplanes. It's a, it's a, a, an amazing epic movement in, in the midst of which, at the, close to the beginning of it, January of 35, they reach a town in, in Guajjo province called Zunyi, and at that point, they, they, they paused. They stop for a little while, and they have a meeting, what's called the Zunyi conference. And it's at the Zunnii Conference that Mao Zedong's ideas are finally accepted by the leadership of the party. And Joe Enlai becomes his closest supporter. At first, Joe Enlai is proposed to become the new leader of the party, but he doesn't want to do that. He, you know, Joe Enly is the consummate organization man, and he wants to be able to preserve his ability

to guide the party, but he doesn't necessarily want to be the number one leader. He supports Mao Zedong. Mao doesn't become chairman of the party at this point. People often think that that's what comes out of the Zonni conference. He becomes chairman of the military commission of the party. So he becomes, in effect, the military commander of the Red Army. He doesn't formally become chairman of the party until 1945. But his ideas, the idea of accepting the agricultural proletariat as a revolutionary class,

building the movement based upon the unity of workers in the industrial and agricultural proletariots, that becomes now the guiding ideology of the Communist Party of China. So the Juni conference is where that political transformation takes place, and then, of course, they're back on the road. By October of 35, they reach northern Shanxi. Only about 18,000 of the original 120,000 who set out on the Long March arrived in northern Shanxi. Some had died along the way. People died in fighting.

People died trying to cross, you know, these harsh conditions. Some people had to drop out because of injuries or illness. Some people left along the way, you know, because they they couldn't take it. Some people left for ideological reasons. But 18,000 arrive in Shanxi, and that then becomes from the end of 1935 until for about a decade until 1945. That becomes the critical base area. and Yenon, once they finally settle in Yenon, that becomes the new laboratory for socialism. And, you know, the kinds of things that had been experienced on the Long March, those 18,000, and others, you know, even others who had survived but hadn't necessarily made it all the way to northern Shanshee.

those men and women, because there were a number of women who made it the whole way, they were the heroes. They were legendary. When I first lived in China in the early 1980s, there were still a lot of Long March veterans around. And, you know, when one of them would pass away, you know, there would be national mourning. These even people who were just ordinary fighters, ordinary soldiers who were just, you know, walking and carrying their packs and, you know, taking part of the struggle that way, not glorifying the leadership, but anyone who had been on the long march, these were the heroes of the revolution. And, you know, that was just, it was an amazing thing to know that they were, they were there around you. And I've met one or two over the years, you know, and it's just such an amazing, inspiring experience. to talk to someone, to meet someone who had gone through all that. And that it creates this ethos within the party, that even people who weren't on the long march, but who were dedicated revolutionaries, the people who were in the other base

areas, the people who are operating underground in the cities, they identified with the spirit of the long march, that the revolution itself is a long march. There's the long march of the physical experience. But there's also the long march of the dedication to the revolution, that there are victories and there are defeats, that there are times that we're rising and there are times that we have to drop back. And, you know, to have that epic tale as the inspiration for the revolution, I think it's something that gives the Chinese revolution a quality that in many ways is still with us, you know, that when Xi Jinping these days talks about, you know, staying true to the original mission of the revolution, he's he's hearkening back. to that Long March spirit, if you will. And I think that that still remains a powerful inspiration. And not just, you know, I mean, at this point, there's not a lot of Long March veterans.

I don't know that there are any Long March veterans still around. But, you know, for the Chinese people, this is still something that is very, very much alive in their hearts and in their political consciousness. So, yeah, the long march is quite the, quite the tale. There's, there's, you know, thousands of stories. And of course, they've made movies about it and there's books about it. And it's something that that is a very, it's a very living presence in China for the people and for the party, of course, all the way to the present moment. Now, I mean, absolutely, you know, remarkable that there was anybody that was able to make it up to shun she given what they were what they were facing and i believe it was in

the last episode i said it's one of the most inspiring moments of modern human history to me and i'm really glad that we're getting to have this conversation even though man we're at an hour already and uh we haven't we haven't gotten all that close to uh the end of this episode yet but before we move on you know at risk of making this episode way too long we look at at the long march today and think of how inspiring it is and how, you know, incredible, heroic these individuals that were embarked on the Long March, much less the ones that actually made it to Shanshi, but even just the ones that decided to embark on this march. Because if you look at the plans of the Long March, man, I mean, it takes a special kind of person to even just look at the

plan and decide that you're going to try, much less the ones that were actually able to make it to Shanshi their destination. You know, just looking at, and listeners, you know, I highly recommend. If I remember, I'll try to link something in the show notes. But even if I don't, just Google the long march and you'll find images of the planned march. And I'm telling you,

that is remarkable. But Ken, what I'm particularly interested in, and briefly, because otherwise this episode will never end, I'm really curious about what they were experiencing at the time, not in terms of the hardship that they were facing, but

what were things like when they would come across people on the long march on the way to shanshi how were they i don't want to say greeted that's probably the wrong word but how how were their interactions with ordinary you know not the nationalist troops not the people that were trying to hunt them down but just ordinary chinese civilians on their way to shanshi what were they viewed like this you know it's this big moving uh you know like guerrilla forests going up north uh it's very interesting to think about what the people that are just in the villages of, you know, rural China are thinking and experiencing as they see this group going through their village.

Yeah, that's a really good topic to address a bit because it's really critical to understanding how the revolution worked and how the revolution was able to build solidarity with the people. Because, you know, this is the period where the Reven Army puts into practice, you know, know, it's, it's policies about relating to the people. The idea, you know, they used to talk about how the people are the sea and the, and the communists are the fish, you know, and the fish can't live without, without the sea, you know, but you have to, you know, the Red Army and the Communist Party have to be the extensions of the people, you know, and so this is when the ideas of the discipline of the Red Army,

The idea, you know, don't take a single thing without paying for it. You know, the units would come into a village and, you know, maybe going to be going to spend the night, right? And just as a sense of what these conditions were like, you know, they would, they would, and this was with, you know, the agreement of the people, they would take a door off a house and put it on a couple of saw horses. And that would be the bet, you know, a soldier would sleep on a door like that, right? But the Red Army guidelines said, when you get up the next day and you're going to be on your way, hang the door back up, you know, clean up after yourself. Take care of yourself. Pay for the things you have. Don't impose yourself.

It's funny, just a couple days ago I was in a conversation with a young comrade here. Something about the American Constitution and the provision in there about. the quartering not, you know, barring the quartering of troops. And he was like, what the heck was that about? And I was like, well, that's what imperialist armies used to do. You know, they would come in and take over people's homes and just, you know, ransack them and just, you know, live off the fat of the land, as it were. That's not what the Red Army did.

The Red Army respected the people because it was the people. It was the extension of the people. And that worked out in a couple of ways on the Long March. Of course, when they were encountering, you know, rural, villages of Chinese, of Han peasants and everything, that was one thing, and that generally went pretty smoothly. But because of, you know, the nature of the Long March, they passed through a lot of areas that were pretty remote, that were pretty rugged, and that many of them were occupied by non-Han minority populations. And that could sometimes be a tense situation, because, you know,

many of those people had not had a very positive experience of their relationship with the imperial government. And so now here was an armed force arriving in their midst. Was this going to be another occupation army? Was this going to be another force of like the imperialist government, the imperial government? No, you know, the communists had to stop. They had to work with people. They had to, you know, embrace local customs. You know, if they could find people, if they had members of the party, or they could recruit people as translators so that they could work with these communities as they encountered them. This was a challenge, and there were points of friction. There's no, you know, there's no, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to pretend it was just

a succession or a big group hugs. This was a challenging endeavor. But the party addressed that and the Army, the Red Army addressed that by putting into practice these principles of being a people's army. And that's all the people, you know. They weren't an army of the Han Chinese. They were an army of the Chinese people as they lived there in those places in that time. So, you know, the relations with the ethnic minority communities, you know, they basically worked that out as they went and obviously succeeded in building that unity. And that's something, again, that's something that we have to bear in mind today, that, you know, China is a multi-ethnic state. state. And it's a state which respects the identity, the traditions, but also the contemporary realities of, you know, 56 different ethnic groupings. And yeah, and that that tradition, that respect is based upon the ties, the cooperation, the relationships that were built in the course of the long march.

Yeah, it's, it's so, so fascinating. Just for people who are, you know, in the U.S. and might not have a really extensive knowledge of, of, of, of, you know, China. You know, it's roughly, China is roughly about the size of the continental US. So, you know, I just did some quick math while you were talking. And you started from Atlanta. You walk to Phoenix. And then you walk from Phoenix to Seattle. And then you walk from Seattle to Minneapolis. And you're still not at 6,000 miles, which is how long the long march was. Just kind of put it in perspective for an American. That is, I mean, all the detours and all the setbacks and you're being attacked. And mountains and rivers, just like you would have been in the U.S. as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you just can't fathom what these people went through. So I just wanted to make that clear. So at the end of the long march is more or less the about a year out from the beginning of what is known as the second United Front, which after years and years of fighting, the nationalist and the Chinese communists come together once again in a relationship of convenience to fight the imperial Japanese. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the second United Front. And then if you also have a moment or thought about this, during this entire time, the entire Civil War, what was the posture or the assistance from the Bolsheviks up north, right? Did they play a significant role throughout this conflict? Obviously, they prefer the Chinese communist to win, but I'm wondering how far they went to try to assist them. But then also really focus, I think, on the second United Front is the important thing here. Yeah, well, those are two related topics. So let me, yeah, let me, you know, the second United Front comes about pretty straightforwardly, be in some ways. The Japanese, you know, Japan had its own trajectory of modernization and tries to position itself and does position itself as one of the imperialist powers by the late 19th century. You know, they fight a war with China in 1895 over Korea.

They annex Korea in 1910. They invade Manchuria in 1931 and separate that from the rest of China, setting up a puppet state there. They, you know, the Japanese had this vision of their own imperial dominance. They were opposed to Western imperialism, but only to facilitate the expansion of their own imperialism. and they saw China, at least, you know, the army elements in Japan saw China as the great arena for their expansion. They wanted to gain control of China, the wealth that they knew could be produced out of China, the resources that they could gain access to. So Japanese imperialism has its own very clear and direct agenda. and by 1936, they are positioned on the northern borders of the rest of China.

In December of 36, there's an incident, what's called the Xi'an incident, when Chiang Kai Shik goes out to Xi'an in northwestern China in the southern part of Shanxi province. So the communists are at Yanon in the northern part of Shanxi province. Xi'an is the capital of Shanshi province in the south. And there's a warlord there, Zhang Shōlyang, whose father had been a warlord and had been assassinated by the Japanese. John Shou Liang is violently opposed to the Japanese. Of course, they blew up his daddy. He's a little upset about that.

And he's very critical of Zhang Kai Shack. He says that, you know, why are you devoting? your energies to fighting the communists who are, you know, just patriots, as opposed to resisting Japanese imperialism. And Chiang Kai Shet goes out there to have an out with

Zhang Shrilyang. But Chong Shul Yang kind of puts him under house arrest, locks them up. And then invites the communists to come down and have a little chat. So Joe N. Lai flies down to Shian. And Joe and Lai

and Zhang Shriang and Chiang and have a little set to. And as a result of that, John Kaishek agrees to the second United Front to fight against the Japanese. And then he departs and goes back to his capital at Nanjing, taking John Shwe Liang with him, and they keep, the nationalist,

keep John Shwellian under house arrest until the 1980s. Even after they retreat to Taiwan in 49, they take him along, and he's finally released only after China. Kai Sheck dies, and then he's released in the 1980s. That's crazy. That's a crazy story of his experience. But the second United Front is formed. That seems to have convinced the Japanese military leadership. They were happy with the nationalists and the communists fighting each other

because it divided China could be more easily manipulated. Now the United Front, they see that as a problem. And so just six months later, in July of 37, the Japanese launched their invasion. They come down across the Great Wall Line in the north, and they invade via Shanghai up the Yangza River. And that starts the war of Japanese aggression. And of course, they occupy a considerable portion of China, particularly in the sort of northeast quadrant of the country, but also the ports along the south coast. They, of course, occupy Hong Kong eventually. And, you know, they establish themselves there and try to try to exploit China as much as they can. But it's not a walkover by any means. The communists in the north wage a prolonged guerrilla

war against the Japanese. And the nationalist forces do fight the Japanese. And the nationalist forces do fight the Japanese. They keep them from controlling much of the South. But John Kai Sheck still has his main focus on the communists. He very famously at one point says that the Japanese are like an irritation of the skin, but the communists are a disease of the gut. So he accepts the Second United Front, and the nationalists armed forces do resist the Japanese. We don't want to, you know, pretend that they just sat back.

But Chankajek also hoards a lot of military equipment that is supplied mostly by the United States with an eye to being prepared to fight the communists once the Japanese are defeated. Chankajic knows that the real contest in the Pacific War is between the United States and Japan, and that eventually the United States will defeat Japan. And America's industrial strength so far outstrips what Japan can mobilize, even with, you know, the territories that it occupies in 1941, that eventually, you know, the Americans are going to crush the Japanese. And, of course, that's what happens. So Chankajek knows that he can sort of ride it out. And so, you know, they resist further Japanese expansion, but they don't really do much to attack the Japanese in the areas that they're occupying.

That work is done by the communists fighting behind Japanese lines, out in the villages. You know, the Japanese controlled the railways and the cities, but the countryside was largely in the hands of the communists. And the communists did a lot of work to present themselves, as they were, as the real defenders of China, right? And this belt further solidarity with the masses of the Chinese people, who saw Chiang Kai Shack, you know, kind of sitting it out. When the war comes to an end, of course, you know, the Americans drop atomic bombs on Japan. That's not a great thing either. But it does bring the war to an end in August of 1945. There's a brief period, end of 45 and into 46, where there are efforts at creating a coalition government.

Joe Lai spends a lot of time, first in Chongqing, the wartime capital, and then in Nanjing, when the nationalists moved back there, trying to negotiate a, you know, trying to invert the United Front into a coalition government. And there's various interim agreements who reach. The Americans send in George Marshall to try to negotiate some of that stuff. But the contradiction between the nationalists and the communists is just, it's too. real. You know, the nationalists are a corrupt bourgeois party that has embraced the Western imperialists by this point, working hand in love with them. The communists are revolutionaries who want to create a new different order, a socialist China. That contradiction isn't going to be resolved, and that that is what leads by 47 to the outbreak of the actual civil war. But let me

step back just a moment from that and address the other question that you raised. Because it's a thorny one. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, not a, not actually a very, a very, a very nice tale. Stalin, uh, and, and the, the, the, the Soviet leadership didn't really embrace Mao's ideas about the peasantry as an agricultural proletarian. Uh, they, they, they accepted, uh, the need to, to, to provide some support to the communists, but given the position of, of, of the communists in Yen and other isolated basin areas around the country, they couldn't provide a lot of direct support to, to the communist forces. But that, I mean, that's one set of material realities. But the sad part of it is that the, you know, Stalin and the Soviet leadership continued to see

the nationalist party as basically, you know, the viable force. for future development in China. And they provided military assistance, advisors, financial assistance to the nationalist government. Now, in part, of course, that was because the nationalists were eventually fighting the Japanese. The Japanese were part of the Axis Powers. Even though Russia and Japan signed a mutual non-aggression treaty

back in 1939, clearly, you know, the Soviets wanted, you know, Japan not to be prevailing. Because if Japan was successful, that would be a boost to Hitler and Mussolini and all that. So that gets bound up in the geopolitics of World War II. But the Soviet Union continued to provide assistance to the nationalists all the way down to 1948. Once it became clear, especially by the end. to 48 with this great battle of the Hawaii campaign where the communist forces, the Red Army finally just crushed the nationalist forces, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of

nationalists soldiers deserted to the Red Army side. This was the real turning point. At that point, the Soviet Union cuts off its support to Chiang Kai Sheck and really begins to throw support back to to the to the red army and the and the CPC but it's a it's a problem it leaves a legacy that at a of mistrust between Mao and Stalin and between the two parties between the Soviet party and and the Chinese party which you know as as as as you were saying and a little while ago you know revolutions are not they're not something that that you lay out a schematic and you just assemble it and everything works perfectly. They're human. They have their flaws. You know, that relationship has its ups and downs, you know, even after liberation,

as we know, through the 50s and beyond. But a lot of the legacy of tension between the Soviet Party and the Chinese Party is based on this long support for the nationalists, for the Gwomenon. that was based on, you know, really on Stalin's mistrust of the peasantry as a revolutionary force. I know Brett and I both have brief follow-ups for this section of the conversation before we move into the closing of it. I guess I'll go first, which is you actually had mentioned more or less what my follow-up was, but I just want to nail you down a little bit more on this specific point. You talked about how a lot of weaponry was being set to the nationalist, the fight against Japanese imperialism.

You talked about how Chinkajek was a very strong ally of the United States in this fight. And actually, you know, interestingly, again, I like to harken back to what I was taught during middle school and high school because it's just interesting to think about how students in the United States are taught about this history. And Mao, I don't remember being brought up at all. I don't remember the CCP being brought up at all in the discussion of World World War II, it was always Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese army, which is very interesting, because while the nationalist army, which was being presented in the textbooks, is just the

Chinese army as if there was one all-encompassing Chinese army that represented all of the people of China, which, you know, just logically thinking about it, that would be very strange then to see the changes that happened immediately after the Second World War ended, if there had been one all-encompassing army that represented all of China rather than two armies that were operating kind of in unison but separate from one another. It's very interesting because you see all of the weaponry being funneled to Shinkajek, but at the other, on the other hand, and as you pointed out, this actually ended up kind of working against them in the long run because the communists were just so much better and much more effective at fighting the Japanese.

You know, that people were able to see that the Red Army, despite not getting that sort of support from the Western allies of China in the fight against Japanese imperialism, they were just that much more effective. So if just briefly, Ken, and again, I know you touched on this. I just want to nail you down to a specific question on this topic. What made the Red Army so effective, whereas the Nationalist Army? again, was kind of sitting on the sidelines, and how did that impact the recruitment of new members of the Communist Party? Because that, of course, is going to play immediately into the way the things unfold after the Second World War ends. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, it sounds a little right, but basically, you know, the Red Army was a people's army. It was an army largely of peasant soldiers.

uh most of the soldiers uh certainly when they came into the red army were illiterate uh the party of course carried out a lot of educational programs uh but you know you're you're fighting a war uh you know that's that can't be the the you know people aren't spending 40 hours a week doing their homework you know uh so you know the the red army was a people's army it was based upon the people It was a volunteer army. No one was drafted or conscripted into the Red Army. They respected the people. We talked to be, you know, I mean, hang the door back up after you sleep on it.

You know, pay for the food that you get. You know, don't see the people as a resource to be exploited, but see the people as your hosts, as you're the people for whom you are fighting, right, in a very, very concrete way. the Nationalist Army was largely a conscript army by the time of the Civil War after World War II a lot of them hadn't been paid their equipment was not kept up some of them didn't have uniforms, some of them didn't have shoes you know it was so much

there was so much corruption in the nationalist system in the government and in the military There were units where, you know, there were all these names on the roster, but half of them, you know, were dead or out of action, and the officers were simply taking their pay. I mean, it was a rotten structure. And, you know, when they encountered the communists who were dedicated, seasoned fighters from having confronted the Japanese for so long, a lot of the, a lot of the, a lot of the national. Nationalist soldiers just laid down their arms and put their hands up and went over to the other side. And many of them became dedicated fighters for the Red Army, you know. So it's really just, it's really a basic contrast between a people's army and a conscript army of a corrupt, of a corrupt government, a corrupt regime.

It's not a lot of mystery to it, you know. And so that made, that made the Red Army. Army an attractive thing. And of course, when liberation comes, when the Civil War comes to an end, when the Red Army enters Beijing

in January, February in 1949, you know, there's wonderful footage of the parade. You know, they come in, the Southgate, the central Southgate, and they march right up through what the area

called Chenman into, you know, the heart of the old city, the old capital. And literally, you know, I mean, Beijing at that point had a population of about a million people. And when you see the footage of this, it looks like all million of them are standing on the streets, cheering and waving flags and, you know, it's liberation. You know, we talk about liberation. And that's what it was. liberation from Japanese imperialism first and then liberation from the nationalist, you know,

throughout nationalist government. So that's, you know, that brings the Civil War to an end, that that brings the revolution not to an end, but really to a beginning. And of course, the exactly we're talking about with regards to the nationalists, it plays out when they go to Taiwan and they initiate the white terror, which maybe we can touch on here in a bit, right? That rot and that. They're sort of clearly who are the bad guy's situation. It does play out after liberation and after the nationalist get pushed to Taiwan. Really quick, though, I do have just sort of a side question. You don't have to spend much time on this. But just I'm just out of pure curiosity. Do you have any insight into how the Chinese people writ large, maybe Mao Zedong in particular, or the Communist Party in particular, were reacted to the nukeying of Japan? Because obviously it's this horrific event in human history zoomed out. But it also ended, you know, Japanese. power and really settled that score for the Chinese, especially after all the atrocities Japan committed within China. Do you have any insight into the reaction on the part of China

to the nuclear bombs against Japan? Well, there was certainly an awareness that these weapons had been used. But in the context, Japan had also been subjected to a campaign of incendiary bombing, which actually killed more people than the nuclear bombing. And, of course, Germany, the same thing, the fire bombing of Dresden and other cities. You know, the brutality of the imperialist armies was clearly on display. You know, this idea of total war, of waging war, not just against enemy army, but against the civilian population. of the enemy countries. This is like the inversion of people's war.

And so there was an awareness of that. And, of course, the anticipation of that in the post-war confrontation with imperialism. You know, we have to remember that in the early 1950s, President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons against China in the disputes over some of the offshore islands that were still being held by the nationalists. You know, so there was an awareness of the incredible destructiveness of nuclear weapons.

But, you know, of course, Chairman Mao also very famously said that the atomic bomb was a paper tiger. And that gets ridiculed a lot. But what he meant, of course, was that, yes, it's a terrifying weapon. It is a weapon of mass destruction. but no weapon is going to destroy the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese people. That was what Chairman Mao was talking about. That technology is technology and the imperialists are willing to use it, but that China would survive and would triumph over that.

So that's the sense in which he says that the atomic bomb is a paper tiger. not because he doesn't take its destructive capacity seriously, but because he sees the strength of the revolution as able to overcome even so devastating a weapons. Yeah, terrific. So, Ken, I've got one question left for us today. I mean, I've actually got about a thousand, but I'll ask one, and then we'll close out the conversation

because, as I was telling Brett in the chat, we're at risk of making this a 12-hour episode if we ask everything we want to. So the question is, you know, you took us more or less to the end of the Chinese Civil War. Can you talk a little bit as we talk about the closing of this, you know, the Chinese revolution and the civil war? How did the Chinese Communist Party consolidate the revolution after the success of the Civil War? You mean after liberation? Yes, after liberation.

So, okay, we've talked up until liberation. So what happened at that moment, you know, I guess we didn't talk about the Kuomintang being. kicked out but oh okay okay but then you know take us after after that that liberation of sorry from the Japanese up through the end of the civil war itself which I know we had kind of like touched on in previous answers and then how was the revolution consolidated in 49 and and up up to 50 yeah yeah yeah I mean the struggle the the the civil war itself basically is is 47 48. Because by the beginning of 49, the nationalist forces are just disintegrating. And, you know, it's clear that the Red Army is going to prevail. The liberation of Beijing is probably the most symbolic turning point. And that takes place January, February of 49. You know, I mean, coming out of the war, coming out of all that resistance to nationalist aggression to Japanese, to Japanese. Japanese aggression. The Iran Army had tremendous popular support. The Communist Party also, the program of the party, the party in the areas that came under its control, you know, began implementing land reform already in 1948, taking land from, you know, wealthy landlords and redistributing it to peasants who needed more to survive, you know, an incredibly popular, you know, policy program. So, you know,

You know, the revolution as a political agenda just got, you know, tremendous popular, popular support. And with the victories of the Red Army, people came to see, you know, the Communist Party and the new socialist China. The new China, as they talked about it, Xinjianghua, you know, as something that was going to take place. They were, this was going to happen. And 1949, of course, is the critical year. Beijing is liberated at the very beginning of the year. The leadership establishes themselves out in the western hills, just a little bit outside of the walled city.

And, you know, they begin the construction, the process of developing a new national government. The Red Army goes on south. Shanghai is liberated later in the year. They cross the Yangtze River and start moving into the southern provinces. You know, it takes until, you know, 1950, well into 1950,

for all of the different parts of China to come under the political authority of the new people's republic. But 49 is the transitional year. They convene what's called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which is a mouthful. But that is a grouping of

people outside the Communist Party, and the CPPCC still exist. It's meeting right now, as a matter of fact, as we're recording this, along with the National People's Congress. That sets the agenda for creating the new government, trying to start constructing a constitutional order for the People's Republic. The People's Republic, of course, is proclaimed October 1st, 1949. This year, of course, will be the 75th anniversary of that. It's going to be a, an amazing celebration in China and for those of us supporting China around the world. Yeah, so there, you know, there's this vision of what the Chairman Mao talked about of what he called New Democracy, which was the idea that, you know, the communists weren't going to take over and become some dictatorial force. They wanted to build a broad-based new order, new political order. So the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the National People's, Congress as it was going to be constituted. These were going to be the mechanisms through which the government would come to be. And there would be, you know, they created different ministries.

And of course, there was the Red Army now becomes the People's Liberation Army. So this process of constructing a new political order pretty much occupies their time through much of 49, the summer and the early fall of 49, until the actual proclamation. in October. And then, of course, Chairman Mao gets on a train and goes to Moscow to negotiate the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty, which is critical for that first decade of development that lies ahead. I know we're going to talk about that period in the next episode. But that's that, you know, the infrastructure for that is what's created in 1949 and going into the very beginning of 1950.

Yeah, two quick questions as we wrap up here. How did the nationalists end up in Taiwan? What was the sort of deliberations around that? Why did the new Communist Party even allow them that? And then as we wrap up as well, I like maybe a recommendation for a movie with regards to the Long March because we could talk about it, we can read about it, sometimes having really good visual representations of a historical event like that really help people learn. So maybe that would be a cool thing you could do at the back end. But I'm particularly interested in Taiwan. Yeah, well, you know, the nationalists, once the negotiations for a coalition government broke down,

and once the Civil War got going in earnest, it didn't take them long, I think, to realize that they were not going to prevail. They begin preparing to evacuate to Taiwan. Taiwan, of course, had been part of the Japanese Empire. And so when Japan surrenders in August to 45, nationalist forces cross over to the island and occupy it to, you know, to displace the Japanese colonial government. And they begin to, you know, anticipate withdrawing there, certainly by, by 1947.

There's historical precedent, of course, for that. Ming loyalist forces all the way back in 1644 had withdrawn to Taiwan and resisted the Qing dynasty for a while there until around 1660. So, you know, I'm sure they were drawing on some of that precedent. But the people on Taiwan were not particularly thrilled about this. They, you know, saw the nationalist as corrupt and arrogant and oppressive. In February of 48, there's an uprising against the nationalist. And it is this which has put down so brutally, thousands, tens of

thousands of people killed, others put in prison. This is when martial law is declared on the island, February of 48, that isn't lifted until the late 1980s. So, you know, this is the foundation of what becomes this very oppressive regime on Taiwan, you know, where even well into the 70s and the early 80s, dancing was illegal because some weird, you know, you know, Christian precept that the nationalists embraced, you know, mandated that. It was a very weird regime that they established out there. But once they had suppressed this uprising in 48 and imposed martial law, they prepositioned themselves to get out.

And when the nationalist forces began to disintegrate, you know, they started forcing soldiers onto airplanes, onto ships, and taking them across to Taiwan to establish their military presence there. There were men, you know, who'd been conscripted from their villages, who, you know, who never saw their families again, never saw their wives, their kids. Not until after the ending of martial law in the 80s, was it possible for family reunions to begin? And there's a whole wave of that that goes on where people who had families that had been separated. And, of course, sometimes this was successor generations, the children of nationalist soldiers, going back to the villages from which their fathers had come and being embraced by the people there, because, of course, Taiwan is part of China.

And, you know, this was just part of the hopes at that point for national reunification. But, you know, the move to Taiwan is not a sort of, you know, glorious transition. but it's a really brutal evacuation, a forcible evacuation, of thousands and thousands of ordinary soldiers. And, of course, the looting of the mainland, you know, the treasures from the Palace Museum that had been taken by the nationalists when they evacuated Beijing, you know, wind up in the National Palace Museum in Taipei even today. You know, they, as these so-called Taiwanese nationalists and independent advocates, you know, they forget that they are the bearers of the traditions of Chinese culture in the National Museum there, in the Palace Museum there. So, you know, it's a very contradictory situation, obviously, and that legacy, of course, remains unresolved all the way down to the present moment, although people on both sides of the strait certainly recognize that they are all Chinese. Yeah, and then just really quick, I ask that question, just about a movie recommendation for the Long March. Yeah, boy, well, there are lots of good movies about the Long March in Chinese.

Feel free to recommend those. I was going to ask if you could. Yeah, you know, you kind of put me on the spot with that. I know there's a group actually up in Michigan that shows Chinese films online every week. And I sat in with them for a while last year when they were doing. a bunch of films about, including ones about the Long March, I'm going to have to look at my notes and

dredge up the actual names, but I'll get those. I can't produce them off the top of my head right at the moment, but there are many, many excellent films about the Long March and about the Revolution overall that are really, you know,

very much worth viewing. And as you say, they're very inspiring you know i think especially for young people to to see these these struggles and the heroism involved it's uh it's it's good to have that that sort of visual component to so i'll get back to you email please me we'll put it in the show notes uh listeners if you're interested in movies on the long marks just check the show notes and we will inevitably have recommendations from ken there all right we're going to wrap up this episode here uh brett my lovely guest host for this episode Can you let the listeners know how they can find your excellent podcasts?

Sure, yeah. Thank you again, Ken. Absolutely fascinating whirlwind of history. I am entranced every time you speak, and the depth of your wisdom and knowledge of these histories are fascinating. So thank you so much for spending time with us. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. Excellent.

And Ken, can you remind the listeners how they can get your latest book? Sure. The book is China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. and that is available from 1804 books in New York at 1804books.com. Terrific. As I said, unfortunately, our co-host Adnan, was not able to make it today, but you can find him on Twitter at Adnan A. H-U-S-A-N. Check out his other podcast, The M-J-L-I-S, which is on the Muslim world and Arabic

diaspora. Arabic world, Muslim diaspora. I got that backwards, but I corrected. myself. It's okay that none will not be that mad at me. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-U-C-K-1-995. You can help support the show. Keep us up and running by supporting us at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Squark to stay abreast of all of the latest things that are coming out from us individually as well as

collectively. And I will remind you, listeners, that this was installment number two officially, because we did have that kind of preamble episode that we did with you back in the fall, Ken, last year. But this is episode two officially of our mini-series on modern Chinese history. Stay tuned. Episode three on the cultural revolution will be coming your way in one or two weeks. So be sure to keep your ears peeled for that one. And until next time, Listeners, Solidarity. You remember Den Ben, Boo? 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 Hakimaki, unfortunately not joined by my other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, as he is still out of commission, but he will be back for the next installment of this series, he has assured me.

So listeners do stay tuned for that. I am fortunately joined by our returning guest host who has been joining me for this entire mini-series thus far. And again, listeners, if you're a longtime guerrilla history listener, he is not only going to be familiar as being a guest host of this series, but Brett O'Shea was also a co-host of guerrilla history for the first three and a half years of the show's history, which went up until just...

just a couple weeks ago. Hello, Brett. It's nice to have you back on the show. Of course, Brett is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and the Red Menace podcast. Absolutely. I'd love to be back. Hopefully, we'll make this a normal thing going forward.

So, yeah, and I'm very, very excited for today's topic, as always. Absolutely. So, listen, as you see, Brett has already been back three times as a guest host, despite having only left the show about two weeks ago. So, as you can see, this was a somewhat amicable breakup. We are still friends. We didn't, like, delete his phone. number in our phones. It's all good. And he will be back. No struggle sessions. No struggle sessions.

No, absolutely not. As I mentioned, this is a mini-series and we have a returning guest for it. But before I introduce our guest and the mini-series, I just want to remind listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this one by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. And you can keep up to date with what the show is putting out as well is what the hosts are putting out individually by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skore Pod. But as I mentioned, this is a continuation of our ongoing history of modern China miniseries

featuring the one and only Ken Hammond. Hello, Ken. It's nice to have you back on the show again. Good to be here. Thanks for having me in. Of course. It's a pleasure. And I know that we've really enjoyed the first two conversations.

of this series, and we are really, really looking forward to the conversation today. So to remind the listeners, Ken is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University and author of the book Chinese Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. And also to remind the listeners, since this is part three of our mini series on modern Chinese history, we did have kind of a preamble episode or an introduction to modern Chinese history back in the fall of last year with Ken title China's Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future. And then the first two installments of this mini-series were on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions as well as the second installment being on the Chinese Civil War and Revolution.

I highly recommend you pausing this episode and going back and listening to those if you have not already because we are going to be picking up more or less where we left off. Today the topic is going to be the cultural revolution. Now, before we talk about the cultural revolution itself, I think, as again, historical materialist, it's important for us to understand how these events feed into one another and how the material conditions of the society also feed into what unfolds and how it unfolds. So we left off in the last episode in 1949 upon the conclusion of the Chinese Revolution. I would like, before we get to the cultural revolution,

if you can pick us up at 1949 on the success of the revolution and take us up to the Great Leap Forward, which if we were going to have another episode of this mini-series, it probably would have been on the Great Leap Forward individually, but we will try to touch on it at least a little bit in this episode. So Ken, I know a lot of people will have heard of the Great Leap Forward, can you talk about how those conditions from 1949, until the beginning of the Great Leap Forward influenced not only the idea that they needed

to have a Great Leap Forward, but also the way that they visualized that unfolding and the way that it actually was implemented and unfolded. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Great Lead Forward is in many ways the culmination of a process of agricultural collectivization, the transformation of agricultural production from what had been a kind of commercial capitalist system where there are lots of large landlords and, you know, they were producing grain especially for the market, you know, so there was a process of, you know, wealth extraction and all that going on to try to transform Chinese agriculture

into socialist agriculture, collective agriculture. And so it's the great leap we can see as kind of, as I say the culmination of that. So let me fill in the background on how that developed and put that also in the context of what we call the struggle between two lines, which was an overall sort of dynamic within that first decade of the People's Republic from 1949 to 59 of questions about how the process of socialist construction overall in both the agricultural and the industrial sectors and across the economy, how should that process go forward, okay? When liberation comes in 1949, of course, Communist Party finds itself in a position of embarking on this great adventure of building a new country, building a new

China. And that's a lot of the rhetoric that's used at the time. And the goal, of course, is to create a socialist and eventually a communist society in which, you know, the value, the wealth produced by the work that people perform is equitably and justly distributed among those who have produced it, rather than being siphoned off into the pockets of, you know, the owners of the means of production or something like that. But how do you do that? How do you take an economy such as that of China? And in 1949, China was, you know, devastated. I mean, there had been years of war against Japanese occupation.

There'd been the civil war. There was a lot of destruction. There had been a lot of looting. Foreign companies had continued to extract wealth from the country. There were millions and millions of displaced people around the country. You know, refugees from fighting in different areas, things like that.

So they faced some very, very serious challenges. But there was a sense that they had a, you know, they knew where they wanted to they knew where they wanted to get to, but the process of building socialism, the process of going forward, how do you develop the economy? These were things that were, you know, being going to be debated. They could draw on some experience, especially, of course, the experience of the Soviet Union,

but conditions in China and the history of the revolution in China were different from those of the Soviet Union, from those of Russia. And so it was a matter of, you know, trying to figure out the best way forward. And as the 50s progressed, two basic orientations emerged within the leadership of the party and within the party overall. Of course, the foundation in terms of the agricultural sector was land reform. Land reform was begun. There, of course, there had been experiments with that all the way back in the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s, certainly during the Yanon period, and in the liberated zones in the northeast, when the revolution is approaching its victory in 1948.

Land reform begins in a serious way in 1948 and is carried through across the country by the end of 1952. Land reform involved basically, you know, taking land from landowners, landlords, who had vastly more land than they could cultivate and redistributing that excess land. left with their own plots of land. They were left with enough land to support themselves and

their families. But the excess land, the land beyond what they could cultivate, the land that they had, you know, had cultivated through tenant farmers or through day laborers or through, you know, what Chairman Mao described as the agricultural proletariat, that land was then redistributed amongst those people, amongst those who had no land or who didn't have enough land to support themselves so that there was a leveling out, a more equitable distribution of land, the primary asset of agricultural productivity, right? And that process, as I say, that's carried through by the end of 1952 on a nationwide basis. Parallel to that, there's also the transformation of the urban economy, the transformation of industry, transformation of banking

and finance. And this was carried out in an incremental way, you know, through the 1950s where the enterprises that had been privately owned are at first brought into a kind of public-private partnership, if you will. The capitalists who owned enterprises still got income from them for a while. They still participated in management. But people, you know, either employees coming up through the ranks or cadres coming in from the party, you know, learned to run these operations, learn to manage enterprises. And over time, the ownership of the enterprises was transferred to the state. Capitalists often stayed on in managerial roles.

Some chose not to. Some chose to retire or step away, you know, take the money that they had and, you know, not be involved anymore. But it's an incremental process of the transformation of ownership into socialist ownership on the part of the urban kind of, as I say, industrial. and banking and finance sectors. And that process goes on and, you know, we can look at various aspects of that, perhaps more in the next episode, the final episode where we talk about the reform period.

But it's in the agricultural sector, which is, of course, especially at the time of liberation, this was where, you know, 85 plus percent of the population lived and worked. China was still overwhelmingly an agrarian economy, a commercial capitalist agrarian economy, but, you know, a farming economy. And so what happened there was going to be critical. The production of an agricultural surplus beyond what was needed to feed people was critical for the development of the socialist industrial sector because that was the only place where resources for investment

were likely to be generated within the domestic economy. So making agricultural production more productive, more efficient, was a fundamental challenge and a fundamental task for building the socialist economy overall. And so by 1952, the party and the government and the people embark upon a process of agricultural collectivization. And this, again, proceeded in an incremental way through the 50s. At first, they formed what were called cooperatives, APCs, agricultural, producers cooperatives. And at first, these were very low-level things. You know, a few families in a village would get together and pool the tools that they had, pool their labor, you know.

They would each retain their own private plots, the land which had been allocated to them through land reform. But they would cooperate. They would function as a little collective to enhance productivity. And that worked. Fifty-two, 53, productivity. across the country rises. The harvests are bigger. There's more food available for immediate consumption so people can eat more and improve their own livelihoods. But there's also grain available now, surplus grain that can be sold in the international markets to raise money that can be used to invest in capital equipment for the industrial economy. So these two tracks are running in tandem with one another. By 54, 55, they move to what are called higher level APCs, agricultural

producers, cooperatives, where now a whole village, or maybe even a couple of villages will get together. And now they start to transform the ownership of land, not so much the ownership, but the management of land, into more collective units. So all the land will be farmed as a, as a, an integrated, you know, space. The little dividing areas, you know, historically, if you've ever looked at images of Chinese land ownership before liberation, before land reform, even villagers that had some land, there was all these little tiny strips of land, and they were separated from one another by these built-up walkways that you could go out, you know, to your little plot of land to work on.

Now they erased those. They leveled out the land, which increased the, the amount. amount of land that could be farmed, and also meant that the process of farming land could be carried out more efficiently, more effectively. And once again, there's a jump in productivity. Harvests are bigger again. Arvests are, you know, the amount of grain being brought in. Again, more food for people to eat and more surplus to be sold to raise capital for investment in the industrial economy. Finally, by 1957 or so, moving into 58, they start to move up to another higher level of integration to collectives, not just cooperatives, but collectives.

And now the ownership of land starts to be merged, starts to come together into these collective units. And these are usually based on groups of villages, you know, larger units than the cooperatives, but still, you know, basically smaller local, local collectives. And then finally in 58, there's in certain areas in Anhui province and Hube province in central China, there is a step towards a higher level of integration. And this is the beginning of the creation of what come to be called the people's communes. And a commune was a larger scale endeavor. Some of these could be the size of a county, right, that would encompass a number of townships, right? So you had different levels of sort of administrative organization, right?

And with the communes, the idea was that there would be a large-scale merging of productive activity. That you could mobilize labor, you could have the land in big fields rather than these tiny little plots. And you would get economies of scale that would ramp up productivity to an even higher level. And this is the point at which in the summer of 58, Chairman Mao is out, you know, not by himself, obviously, with lots of other officials, doing inspections. And he sees these first experimental communes in Anhui and Hebei. And he says, he says, people's communes are good, right? And that becomes a headline in the national media. And all across the country now, people are like, well, let's get with this, you know.

And so communes start to be formed. Producers, collectives start merging with one another. And pretty soon there are, there are come to be 75,000 communes spread across the country. Okay. That again increases agricultural productivity. The harvests in 58 are the biggest yet. Okay. So this is a step-by-step process of producing larger and larger units, productive units, to achieve economies of scale, to generate higher harvest, more food for people to eat, more surplus, to be sold to raise capital for investment. It's a steady progression. But then we get, that takes us to the threshold of the Great Leap, okay, because the Great Leap is going to start in the fall of 50A. 59, and into 1960. That's the, that's the parameters of what we normally think of as, as the

great lead forward. And the great lead forward, again, is the kind of, it's a kind of interaction or interplay between agricultural production, the drive to enhance agricultural production, and industrial development. Most industrial development, of course, was in big factories, in the cities, the automobile industry, the railroads, the, you know, building various kinds of equipment. It's largely directed at what's called heavy machinery rather than light industry, industry to produce more consumer goods. Certainly there's an expansion of consumer goods, but that's not the primary drive in this first decade. It's basically to build the machinery that would be needed to achieve a level of industrial development

where consumer goods could begin to be produced in greater volume. But at first, you know, it's focus on building the core industrial economy. But there's also, with the Great Leap, there's a vision that goes all the way back to Marx and Engels writing in the Communist Manifesto of overcoming, as they say, overcoming the dichotomy between rural and urban, between farming and industrial production, to try to create more integrated economic activity. And this comes to be ridiculed, you know, by the critics of China and of the Great League,

as, you know, the backyard furnaces, the backyard steel furnaces, right? And there were problems. There were technological problems and challenges, no doubt with things like that. But the vision, the idea of this, was not just building backyard steel furnaces, but was all kinds of primary production, primary industrial production, making goods in the villages as well, setting up little factories. And eventually, after an interlude, shall we say, that we'll talk about more, when the reform era comes, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, village township, enterprises become one of the leading edges in the early development of the reform period. So this idea that gets ridiculed when it's associated with the Great Leap actually becomes fundamental to the reform period when that's getting underway in the 80s.

And we can look at that when we get down the road to that episode. But that's what's involved in the Great Leap, an effort to further drive agricultural production, to further increase agricultural productivity, and to contribute to industrial development both by generating an agricultural surplus that can be sold for capital for investment and by diversifying investment to some extent into the villages as well. That's the vision. That's the goal. You know, there's all this rhetoric about overtaking Britain in industrial production and iron production in particular, you know, within a few years, eventually, you know, overtaking the United States, etc., etc. The Great Lead Forward, though, runs into problems. It runs into serious problems. It's not, you know, the critics, again, you know, they talk about the Great Leaf Forward as being this sort of intentionally produced famine

that, you know, Chairman Mao imposed upon the Chinese people. And this is just a nutty, you know, a characterization, you know, it doesn't make any sense on any kind of rational basis. and it doesn't accord with the factual reality of what took place. But there were very, very serious problems that emerge. And basically what happens, there's kind of two components to this. One of which is nature, you know, one of which is basically the weather. The 50s had been a prolonged period of really good weather.

Agricultural productivity is enhanced through collectivization, but it's also facilitated by the fact, that the weather was great. You know, they had the right amount of rain, the right amount of sunshine, the conditions, the material conditions for production were essentially perfect throughout that period of cooperativization

and collectivization. In 1959, the weather goes bad. There's too much rain in some areas, not enough in others. Probably, and I know the climate scientists, you know, look at all this kind of stuff, related to one of these El Nino episodes, out in the Pacific that disrupts weather patterns.

We see these throughout Chinese history, throughout Asian history. You know, now we understand the mechanisms of this a lot better than people did at that time or earlier times. But for a variety of reasons, the weather is bad. And so that's going to put a whack on production. But the other problem comes about through

what we might call the bureaucratization of the state and the party. In 1949, when liberation takes place, the Communist Party had about a million members. By 1959, it has over 10 million members. That's a huge expansion of the party in the course of the 1950s. And this was necessary.

The state, as well, goes through tremendous growth through this period because people were needed to run the enterprises, to staff the banks, to work, you know, managers in the agricultural sector. The number of cadres on the ground out there across the country has to grow if, you know, the building of the socialist economy is going to be properly managed or

managed at all. But that entails a lot of people coming into the party who, you know, are not necessarily fully motivated by a desire for socialism, by communist consciousness, by being devoted to Marxist theory and practice, people see the party as the guiding force of taking China forward. And they want to be associated with that. Many of the, millions of them, joining the party because they want to work for a new China. They want to work to build a better future. But others may have joined the party because they thought that was where the action was, because they thought it was good for their careers, because they thought that that would be materially beneficial to them. These are people that we think of as opportunists, careerists.

There were probably a lot of those that had come into the party as well. What happens, fall and winter of 58 to 59, and especially in the course of 59, is that as harvests are coming in, the central government, the planners, because it's a planned economy, have set certain targets for, you know, production.

As production comes in, most places are actually meeting those. targets, maybe even slightly exceeding those targets, but many cadres on the ground think, well, this figure is really good, but if I added 1%, it might look a little better, you know. And that, you know, 1%, okay, it's not a big distortion. So they do that and it goes up to the next level, maybe from the township to the county. And maybe a cadre there thinks, whoa, this, this looks really good, but it would look even better, and I would look even better, if it was just one percent more. So they add a percent. And then maybe it goes up to the provincial level,

and maybe they add a percent. And then it goes to the national. Pretty soon, you have distortions in production figures, which are problematic in the first place, because it appears that there's more grain in the countryside than there actually is. So the procurement level is increased, which is to say the amount of grain being taken out of the countryside for the cities and the markets is increased. And that extracts more grain than is sustainable in the countryside. This is why there come to be shortfalls of food in the countryside, because too much grain has been extracted based upon these distorted figures. The other problem is that those distorted figures then become the base for setting production targets for the coming year, for the coming

harvest. So you have problems both with too much grain being taken out and with expectations being excessively raised. So the harvest, the spring harvests in 59, where the weather has been bad, are not good. The harvests decline. But in order to meet targets, cadres, many cadres, report that they've actually hit those targets or even exceeded those targets. So once again, there's excessive procurement, right? And now people, more and more people are going hungry, right? This is the point in the summer of 1959 when the light, you know, the light bulbs start to go on. And it happens in an interesting way, which is that a lot of people in the villages are writing to their sons who are in the People's Liberation Army, and they're stationed in various places around the country. And they're writing to them and saying, things are really, we're having some trouble here in the village.

You know, there's not enough food. People are hungry. Some people have died, right? That word trickles up through the command of the People's Liberation Army. and it is they who begin to report this to the broader party. They're like, whoa, we're hearing all this bad stuff, you know. So you have a contradiction emerge between what people are reporting informally, you know, through these letters to their kids in the army. And the reports that are coming up through the bureaucratic hierarchy, right? They convene a great meeting in the summer of 1959, what's called the Lushan Plenum.

Lushan is a town in central China. and the party leadership meets there. And this is where some very serious confrontations take place. Pung de Huai, who was the defense minister and a marshal of the Red Army, a hero of the Korean War, as well as the revolution, becomes very critical of Chairman Mao. He associates the policies of the Great League with Chairman Mao, not incorrectly.

but he goes about his criticism in a somewhat problematic way. He writes a letter which he addresses to Chairman Mile, but he circulates it amongst a number of cadres at the plenum before he sends it to the chairman. And so, you know, he's kind of building a faction against Chairman Mao. The chairman, when he hears about this, and he hears about it before he receives the letter. He sees this as, you know, as a, as a, as undermining, not just the greatly forward,

but undermining his position. And so you have this political conflict that takes place at the Lushan Plenum. There's a lot of heated debate. There's a lot of discussion trying to figure out what exactly is going on, trying to get to the bottom of things, because, you know, these reports have come in and they've been accepted. but now the understanding comes to be that they're not accurate. So how do you get accurate reports? They have to send investigators out into the countryside.

And this begins a process that will culminate until 1961 of trying to get accurate figures once again. And that requires making a lot of cadres who have been reporting these, what they think of is just little distortions. They got to fess up. They got to face the reality that they have contributed to this very bad situation. Lots of people died. Now, you hear these ridiculous figures, 20 million, 60 million people died. That's ridiculous. But maybe 10 or 12 million people did die.

And that is a great disaster. Many good things are achieved in the Great Leap. There's a lot of infrastructure development, a lot of building of reservoirs for controlling flooding and things like that. And the legacy of those achievements persists all right down to the present day. So we don't want to see the Great Leap as a just a colossal failure. It's not that. But it is a failure in terms of the bureaucratic distortion of the reporting of these figures and the mortality that flows from that.

So we have to be honest about this. We're historical materialists. We have to deal with those realities. But it's not, you know, a famine imposed on the Chinese people by Chairman Mao for some phrased egotistical reason, you know. It's a problem within the functioning of the party, the party as a bureaucratic organization. And Mao has been critical of that. He's been fearful of that all along. He writes in the 50s he writes a big critique of what he sees as the excessive bureaucratization of the Soviet Party.

He's very critical of certain Soviet policies and actions, and he's fearful that that's what's going to happen in China. And now the experience of the Great Leap demonstrates that that's exactly the danger that has to be guarded against, that the party, we think about what we talked about in the previous episode, the party and the army as instruments of the people, not the people as instruments of the party, right? But that problem, that problem of bureaucracy, that's what emerges with the Great League, and that's what sets the stage for the struggles that are going to take place in the 1960s. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get there, I have a very small follow-up, and then I know Brett has a much bigger one than I do. Mine is mostly based on narrative and historiography, which is something that I think a lot about. And Ken, you're somebody who's intimately familiar with the state of historiography in both American academia or Western academia more generally, as well as in Chinese academic circles, which is something that I am not unfortunately privy to as I don't speak Mandarin. But what I'm particularly curious about, like I said, it's a rather small point is that when we talk about this point of inflating the numbers in terms of grain yield,

by, you know, a percent here, two percent there, whatever. The reasons for why that was happening are often speculated on. And in Western historiography, there's generally two competing narratives, which is, one, this culture of fear, right? You know, this is what anti-communists always point towards is that, well, of course, the people only go along with the communist regimes in these countries because there's this culture of fear that is imbued within the populace. where they have to unquestioningly think what would the party like to see,

and then they have to just act out of fear, you know, doing whatever they think that the party would want. And the second narrative that's often proffered in this example is that, again, with this bureaucratization that was beginning to take place at this point, and many individuals who were present within the party at various particularly local levels, just looking to use the party as a means for, again, self-promotion in terms of making a future for themselves by utilizing the party as an instrument in doing so, that they're inflating the numbers solely for selfish reasons. In terms of, look, my local branch was able to produce this much grain and therefore it

looks good for me and perhaps I'll be promoted to the regional body rather than just my local body and then perhaps eventually I'll be able to be promoted to the national body. you know, this is also a very common narrative that's presented, again, within Western historiography and narrative surrounding the reasons for this collapse, you know, perceived collapse of the amount of grain that was being brought up because it looked like this much grain was coming in. And it turns out that that was not the amount of grain that was coming in. So based on your experience with being able to be immersed within the historiographic traditions of both the Western

historiography and the Chinese historiography. What is the narrative within the Chinese academic historiography on this specific reason of why these numbers were being inflated? And is there any sort of consensus between the two looking at not just anti-communist

voices, but people who are genuinely trying to figure out why this is happening as to why this is happening? Yeah. You know, I think you know, the culture of fear narrative, of course, that's not something that really applies. I think there's more substance to the idea that there were, you know, sort of standard bureaucratic, you know, that's hard in my expression, but sort of bureaucratic butt covering, you know, that went on, that that went on, that, that, that, that, that, these little distortions that accumulate to become big distortions were motivated. They're not motivated by fear, but they're motivated in many instances, I think, by, you know, by ambition, by wanting to

look good, by wanting to perform well, but also perhaps by, you know, I don't know, maybe even an element of wishful thinking or something like that, you know, that if we can, if we can just, you know, drive this process forward a little more, you know, maybe we can achieve even greater things. I don't know. There's, you know, the party, of course, and the state, you know, they had to deal with this, and they did deal with it. In 1961, they convened a national meeting, what's called the 10,000 cadre meeting, because it was far beyond just an ordinary session of even like the central committee

or anything. This was a huge gathering. And they thrashed out, you know, the issues, the debates, what the concept, what had actually happened, how did it happen? Why did it happen? What could be done about it, all this. And that's, you know, those proceedings have been published and there's been lots of writing about that, lots of discussion of the Great Leap and the lessons to be learned from it. And I think, I think that, that, you know, the sort of mob and ground position, is largely that this was a result of bureaucratic distortion, that this was a result of systems of reporting that relied too much on a sort of predetermined infrastructure of information flow, that information flowed from the bottom to the top

without a lot of sort of internal checking up, you know, that there was maybe too much power concentrated in the hands of cadre up and down the hierarchy, and that there needed to be more integration with the masses and more oversight on the part of the party structure as a whole, right? It's not, you know, there's not a, there's not a simple, the one-size-fits-all answer to this. And, and, you know, there are debates within Chinese academia about this. but it is a topic that that is openly and regularly discussed, you know, it's not something that's taboo. Again, that idea that topics like this are taboo, part of that mythology of the culture of fear, I think that that's, you know, we can just set that aside.

These things are debated. There are discussions. There are historical reflections on this. but I think that it is seen as a result of the rapid development in the 50s, you know. I mean, so much had been achieved, there was this sort of inertia or momentum in development that I think that even cadres who weren't sort of self-interestedly distorting things may have been swept along with a tide of enthusiasts, things like that, you know. And I think that that's more the way in which it's reflected upon now. Although there are within Chinese academic circles and certainly within Chinese political circles, you know, there are elements these days that are strongly critical of the Great Leap.

See the Great Leap as an adventurous excess, you know. That's not the way that I think that I see it. And I think that that's not the way that a lot of, academics in China see it. But there are elements within the current political leadership who look back on that as kind of a disastrous

miscalculation, you know. So it's a complex historical issue that, you know, I have obviously my own views on, but I also recognize that there are diverse positions, shall we stay, in terms of how this is

presented in contemporary China. And of course, that's part of the, you know, the culture of academic debate and openness. You know, again, it's not a, it's not a sort of dictatorial truth that has to be adhered to by everybody. There are, there are differences of interpretation and opinion that continue to animate these discussions. Yeah, and this analysis, I think, is much more nuanced, more legitimate and more balanced than almost anything else that you hear. I mean, Henry was talking about listening to a BBC interview where just the worst sort of anti-communist nonsense is regurgitated.

And I've heard it many, many times myself when I look into these things. One of the things you touched on, Ken, is the sort of always implied intentionalism. And if you Google right now, like if you're in the West and you Google, like the worst dictators of all time, a lot of times you'll see like, Mao, Stalin, and then Hitler, and the implication in just that, in just that ranking is you're laying like, yeah, all these famines at the feet of these people as if they were intentional. I'm in a high-level college graduate course right now studying just the Holocaust. And we're learning the nuances and the ideological sort of reasoning behind the Holocaust and everything that preceded it and this brutal idea of the Nazis that are going to take over Europe, maybe the world, and that certain people, need to be exterminated. That's intentionalism. You know, they set up concentration camps to intentionally kill Jewish people, intentionally killed disabled people, Roma people, etc. And so I think it's it's Nazi apologism and Holocaust denial to say that that Mao and because of

the Great Leap Forward largely is worse than Hitler, which you will hear all the time in American discourse around this stuff. So people listening really take this. into your mind and remember this when you see that stuff, because this is how you push back on it. This is real academic honesty and legitimacy about this is a tragedy. 10 to 12 million human beings died, that is a tragedy. And we should have place in our hearts and in our minds for confronting that tragedy. But to say that anybody, just on the face of it, right, just logically, Mahal and the Communist Party fought this brutal civil war, fought this brutal fight against Japanese imperialism, did the long march.

for to try to, you know, end this century of humiliation for China. The people who are implying that this is intentional think those sane people who put their lives on the line to better China and create a better future for the Chinese people intentionally killed 10 to 12 million of their own people.

It's absolutely absurd and it's a fascist lie. That should be noted. Another thing to note is, of course, development is always a brutal process, right? Marx wrote Das Kapital looking at industrialism in Europe, looking at the depravities of that process of development look at the u.s the genocide and the

slavery are part and parcel of the development of the u.s. economy cannot be situated from that cannot be extracted from that so the slave trade and the genocide of the indigenous peoples was much more intentional than these famines were um so i just think those are things that are certainly um um worth noting but the bridge here the bridge to the great cultural or the the great proletarian and Cultural Revolution is this thing that Ken mentioned, which is this problem with the bureaucracy. Mao was very aware of this in the Soviet Union, and the great leap forward was in lots of ways a sort of testament to that problem. And then now the question is, how do we begin to solve that problem? And I think the things that happen next with the socialist education movement and then the

cultural revolution are attempts to solve this problem within socialist experimentation of this unresponsive or deeply flawed over bureaucratization of the party and of society. So can you talk about that as the transition to these other events and just sort of the immediate fallout from the Great Leap Forward, from the Thousand Codres Conference, and Mao's reaction to all of that, et cetera, kind of take us to this next phase of Chinese history? Sure. Yeah, I mean, well, the most immediate effect comes out of

the Lushan Plenum in the summer of 59 which is that you know the two sort of protagonists of the clash there Pung to Hwa the Minister of Defense

and Maud Zedong, the chairman of the party and the president at that point of the People's Republic they are both you know sort of I suppose we could say a political

compromises reach both of them stepped back, have to step back from their positions. Pung Dewei steps aside as Minister of Defense, Lin Biao is placed in that position. Pung Delai is put into a kind of forced retirement for a while. He eventually is given responsibility for industrialization, industrial diversification into the southwest part of China. part of moving away from just coastal development, but trying to move industrial development into the interior more.

He's placed in charge of some of those programs. Chairman Mao retains his position as chairman of the party, but has to step aside as president of the People's Republic. This is when Leo Shao Chi becomes president of the People's Republic. And the chairman is directed to kind of step back from kind of the day-to-day oversight, even of party operations. He retains the position of chairman, but he's supposed to, you know, sort of devote himself to maybe theoretical work, to, you know, to kind of, kind of a broader, a more remote, if you will, level of oversight. So there's a, you know, there's a, there's a,

a backing away of these two leaders from, from the positions that they had, they had been occupied. The, the policy, uh, there's policy. There's policy. changes. They move away from the, they don't dissolve the communes, but they devolve some of the administrative oversight down to lower levels, which is important because that does help to correct issues of reporting. It establishes greater oversight. There's this, you know, again, the bourgeois accounts of this like to emphasize the idea that people were encouraged to develop sideline production beyond what's going on in terms of the commune, the planned production and the commune, growing their own vegetables, engaging in various other kinds of sideline production activity.

And, you know, there's a revival. The weather improves again. 60, the 60's not very good weather either, but there's improvement in the harvest. By 62 harvest levels are back up to what they had been in 58, which were record levels. It's not just back to some sort of average, but back to record levels of production, which then go on to continue to increase as the 60s advance, even, even, you know, through the disruptions of the cultural revolution. We hear a lot about, oh, how bad the cultural revolution was. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But agricultural production continues to increase through the 60s.

So, you know, the immediate aftermath of hoping to grips with the Great Leap, you know, sees some course corrections and all then. but by the time we get down to let's say 1962 where the economy is you know pretty much back on track the chairman is still the chairman's still concerned about this problem of bureaucratization and at this point he's once again anxious about what's happening out in the villages what is the what is the nature of the integration between the sort of ground level grassroots-level cadres and the villages that they're responsible for. And this is where we get what's called the socialist education movement.

And the goal, the idea of the socialist education movement is to send cadres out, and not just cadres, but actually a lot of young people get involved in this as well. Urban youth, educated youth. Send them out to the villages to sort of check things out. And the idea is to investigate and see, are the cadres behaving in a way that's integrated with the masses, or are they behaving in this, you know, commandist, as they say, way, this top-down way of kind of telling people what to do,

and you better get with the program. But what happens is that when cadres and urban youth show up in the villages, when they're sent out, oh, they're given a banquet, they're given a kind of conducted tour, but the cadres try to minimize any actual sort of information gathering. And if there are problems, if they're confronted with problems, there's a tendency to blame those on what they call righteous elements, which often are either, you know, the descendants or the remnants of old landlords,

families, or perhaps people who had what was considered bourgeois education. And this is something that's called deflecting the spear point, right? Turning the, you know, the point of the campaign was to try to investigate the cadres. But the cadres try to turn that away and say, oh, look at these problem figures, you know, look at these rightists, look at these landlords, ex-landlords, look at these intellectuals, you know. and, you know, and don't, you know, don't look at me, right? So that's a problem, and Chairman Mao perceives that. He sees that go on.

And, of course, when we talk about all this, you know, it's not Chairman Mao acting as some kind of individual. You know, Chairman Mao represents the leadership of the party, represents significant numbers of people within the party. He's not, he's not some, you know, some individualist actor. So, you know, we use him. we talk about Chairman Mao does this or that as a representative figure of the position within the party that he represents, that he leads, okay? So he's frustrated with this, you know, and through 63, 64, you know, he's excluded from day-to-day oversight. He can't really manage the affairs of the party. And he feels increasingly

isolated, right? And that the views that he holds and that are shared by many people are sort of being sideline, sort of being marginal. And this comes to a head in 1965. What happens is the immediate sort of precipitating event has to do with an academic debate about a play. that had been written back in in 1960 called Haire Dismissed from Office. And it's a play

written by a scholar of a very, very famous scholar of Ming Dynasty history named Wuhan. And Hairee was a Ming official who had confronted the Wanli Emperor over certain

agricultural policies which he argued were damaging the interests of the people. people. He was dismissed from office by the emperor, but when problems in the agricultural sector intensified, he was eventually brought back and proven to be right. This play was written by Wuhan, who was also, by the way, deputy mayor of the city of Beijing. So he was an important figure within the party bureaucracy. And it was performed at the Capitol Theater, the big national

theater right in downtown Beijing, I think in January of 61 it was. I may have that off by a year, but it was either 60 or 61. But that play, you know, it was performed and it was discussed a lot. And then in 65, 64 and 65, there was an academic debate about the play. And the debate centered around whether that play was a political attack on the Great League Forward and on Chairman Mo. And some, you know, critics were saying, yeah, that's what it was. It was a veiled attack. This is a long-established tradition in Chinese political culture of using historical events to criticize contemporary affairs. And so this is what some people were saying, well, this is what Wuhan was doing.

Others were arguing, no, no, no. It was just a historical play. He's a historian. He wrote this play, you know? I mean, don't read too much into it. And Chairman Mao thought that this debate ought to be taken out to the menaces, ought to be taken out beyond, you know, just these little academic circles. And he wrote an article, which he couldn't get published, right?

They wouldn't run it in the People's Daily or the Guangbing Daily, which is the newspaper for the intellectuals. He had one of his associates. Oh, Chen, well, I'm forgetting the guy's name right now, but it'll come to me as we talk, I think. Anyway, he has him write a version of it, and they can't get it published. But they do eventually get it published down in Shanghai

in the Liberation paper down there. And then he tries to get it picked up by the national media, but there's still resistance to this. This is in November of 1965. So this is when he begins to think about the need for what comes to be called it a cultural revolution. Because he doesn't want these important political issues, these debates about the Great Leap, about the nature of the Great Leap and all this, you know, where Haire is sort of a surrogate figure for Pomda, why, right? and the onely emperor is a surrogate figure for Chairman Mao,

you know, basically accusing Chairman Mao of behaving like an emperor, you know. So this becomes this academic debate, but Chairman Mao says, look, let's just take this out to the masses. Why don't we have everybody involved in this? And the party is saying, no, no, no, we want to keep this to academic circles. And that's when the decision is made to go around the party to go directly to the masses. And this starts, by the time we're into the spring and summer of 66, you get the call for debate, you get these debates within the party leadership. You get the, what is it, the May 16th circular that calls for debate.

The party bureaucracy, the leadership, the core leadership, they try to control this. They send what they call work teams out to the academic institutions, especially in Beijing, to Beijing University. University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, the Aerospace University, the Aeronautics University, all of these areas, to try to control this discussion

and this debate. But then Chairman Mao starts to call for putting up big character posters, these large posters written in big characters and big writing, in which people begin to denounce the academic leadership, not the scholars so much, but the party bureaucrats within the university who are trying to restrain debate, right?

And this is what launches, you know, the great proletarian cultural revolution. Then we start getting the Red Guards, young people, college students, high school students, but also young workers, mobilizing, forming their own organizations. And by August, September, October of 1966, the Cultural Revolution is underway. And the objective, again, is to open up debate, to talk about bureaucracy, to talk about what the problems with the Great League were, what the problems with the socialist education movement were, what the problems with party leadership, bureaucratization, top-down commandism, what are those problems? Has the party become alienated from the masses? And if so, to the extent to which it has, how can we fix that? And so Chairman Morrow and his supporters, they basically try to make an end run around that bureaucracy and go back to the masses and say the masses have to supervise the party. You know, the party doesn't command the masses. The party has to serve the masses. the people. You know, that's the spirit that needs to be revived. And that's what the Cultural Revolution is intended to achieve, to unleash the direct oversight of the party by the masses, right? And that's what that's what gets underway. Yeah. And from the Great Leap Forward

to the Cultural Revolution, there is, as you just made very clear, this Mao and the Chinese leadership's interest in this sort of dialectical interplay between a horse top-down leadership you do need a communist party you do need a vanguard party but it needs to be wedded to this genuine bottom up put the revolution in the hands of the masses approach as well and that sort of two-pronged approach where you're trying to do the best leadership you can to serve the people and put the revolution in the hands of the people is i think what's so important about um the chinese revolution and everything that happened after that um now earlier we were talking about some lies about great leap forward and one of those lies and

I even pulled up Wikipedia just to see because lots of people get their information from this, and I think it's a nice little condensed version of some of these narratives. But during the Great Leap Forward, in the first paragraph, it says higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster. Again, implying this idea that Mao or the communist leadership would somehow like off with their heads or something like that, which you've already sort of addressed. And even the PLA leadership, you know, making this problem known as they saw it amongst their soldiers, I think speaks against that narrative. But on that same page regarding the cultural revolution, I'm going to read this exact quote. And I just would love to get your thoughts on this, Ken. They say, Mao did not retreat from his policies after that thousand cadres conference.

Instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and rightists who opposed him. And this is the important thing. It says he initiated the socialist education movement in 1963 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to remove opposition and reconcilate his power. So this is a great man of history theory that Mao launched these two movements specifically and exclusively to destroy his opposition. Could you speak a little bit to that? Because I think that's another big lie that we hear quite often. Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. It's that great man theory of history. The idea, you know, it's always talked about the cultural revolution and this whole phase is always talked about as if somehow this one guy, Chairman Mao, you know, could, could just do whatever he wanted and impose this, you know, by sort of by force of will, you know, which, of course, it's just a, it's a fundamental distortion of how, how human history, how social life actually works. You know, Chairman Marr articulates concerns. He articulates issues which had profound resonance for millions and millions and millions of people, right?

so you know the idea that oh chairman you know it's it's this it's this palace intrigue mentality you know that that there's this sort of cabal at the top of the party and all they really want is to is their own power you know that that they've they've seized control of china and and everything is about preserving their power and and and so everything is about fighting between these leading individuals, right? That whether it's Leo Shao Chi or Pang Dehai or Deng or, you know, Lin Biao, whoever it is, that it's all about personal ambition and personal power. And they use these mechanisms to impose their will upon basically everybody else. And that's, you know, it's just a ridiculous way of thinking about the dynamics of a country of, you know, approaching a billion people by this time.

You know, maybe 800 million people, you know, that somehow one guy is able to manipulate that whole situation. It's kind of ludicrous. But that is the message that is relentlessly promoted, you know, by, you know, by bourgeois historians and all that. Yeah, you know, the the very idea, I mean, attacking the communist. Party. He's not, you know, he's not just attacking individuals. He's calling for, for ordinary people to assert their power and assert their, their leadership, assert their supervision over the Communist Party, the Communist Party of which he is the leader, right? And, you know, you go back and you read through various accounts, he's always talking about, criticize me, criticize us,

you know, I'm going to make mistakes, and I need to know about those mistakes. And I need to know about those mistakes. You know, the little red book, which always gets ridiculed, you know, so much, if you actually read the damn thing, it's full of self-critical discussions. It's full of him talking about the need to serve the people, the need for the party to, you know, to support the people, to be an instrument of the people, not to be the dictators, not to be, you know, the power that tells other people what to do, but the party that takes the interest of the masses and tries to find

ways to implement, right? To serve them, to address those. So, yeah, that is, you know, that great man thing is definitely what bourgeois historians and politicians want us to believe. And, of course, it's

everything in our society, everything in Western, you know, bourgeois culture is aimed at individualism and, you know, not, don't be a sucker, don't be a fool, don't believe in, in, you know, movements and, and revolutions and, and leadership and stuff like that. Cynicism and passivity are the great tools that those with power use to keep others from challenging them. You know, only a sucker, you know, is going to buy into a political campaign or something.

It's, you know, all politicians are corrupt. All politicians are bad. all political systems, you know, oh my God, you know, except, of course, the ones that they control. Exactly. So that, that, that it's not just, it's not just, you know, obscure historical debates about things. This is, this is the, the political culture, the political reality in bourgeois society, you know, and all the mechanisms of propaganda and social media and TV, movies, whatever, is mobilized to do this. And so we wind up with this image of, you know, some sort of phrased, bloodthirsty Chairman Mao, you know, allowing millions of people to starve just because he's trying to protect his own bureaucratic interest when, in fact, he's fighting against the bureaucratization. He's fighting for people to be able to have influence and control over the party that's meant to serve their purpose, serve their interests.

Yeah, beautifully said. And that cynicism that Nye has. about don't trust anything. It really gets full-throated support in like paranoid reactionary and even libertarian ideologies where government as such is supposed to be seen with complete contempt and complete suspicion. They don't very often apply that skepticism towards corporate power, which is always very interesting to note. But yeah, it's this whole thing like government in general is bad. And that's like sort of this Reagan ideology that really promoted this idea as well. But I just wanted before I handed over to Henry just mentioned the fact that there, I think there's also a racist element, especially when we're talking about global South movements where they take this great man theory and really drive it home. These are brutal dictators. The people themselves are seen as mere ons with no agency. And we know as communist and socialist there is no revolution without countless amounts of people participating. And that's a little different than what we hear about the U.S. revolution or even the French revolution in which there are certainly. large figures, George Washington, Robespierre, et cetera, but almost never are the agency of the people

stripped away like they are in global South movements or communist movements, right? Nobody ever talks about George Washington as this brutal dictator. It's like, oh, the American people, average people stood up and fought for their freedom against the Brits. And even in the French revolution, which is way too left wing for most, you know, political mainstream thinkers. Yeah, people doing the storming the Bastille and stuff, right? There's not as much of a robbing of the agency of the masses as there are specifically in communist and global south movements, which I think is racist and worth noting. Well, I agree with that entirely, Brett, and that's something that I've brought up on several

episodes, including some which haven't been released yet, but we'll be coming out around the same time as these episodes. So, you know, we're totally on the same page there, and I'm glad that you brought that up at this juncture in the conversation. But I want to turn towards some of the major things that were happening at the beginning of the cultural revolution. we got kicked off and I'm going to throw out four for you can you can take them however you want them you can spend as much or as little time on any of them but I want to kind of lump these four

things together so that one we hit some major points but also that we're able to get into you know the middle of the cultural revolution after that these four points are bombard the headquarters uh which yeah I know that you're going to have fun talking about the 16 points the major, major rallies that Ma was hosting in Tiananmen Square with well over a million red guards that were present during the series of rallies that were being held, and then the conception of the destruction of the four olds, I think that these four things kind of really lay the groundwork for understanding what the justification and the way that the cultural revolution was going to be carried out from its inception.

And then, of course, things morph over time, inevitably, that always happens. But these were kind of the first four pillars as we got underway within the cultural revolution. So feel free to take it how you want it, Ken. I'm sorry, it's a huge question, I know, but, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff there, yeah. I mean, the summer of 66, as the struggle unfolds, you know, it's a classic scenario of, you know, the, for lack of other terminology, let's say the left within the party, Chairman Mao and those who supported his positions, his views, trying to initiate a critical movement, right? and the right, if you will, the bureaucratic fore,

trying to find ways to thwart that. You know, again, to deflect the spear point, as we said. And this is what happens when the work teams are sent out to the universities. Instead of looking at the political administration of the universities, the bureaucrats in the universities try to divert their attention to so, supposed rightist academics, right? You know, and not come to grips with these questions of bureaucratization and commandism within academia, you know?

The, you know, so that's where things like Bombard the headquarters come from, the idea that actually it's the headquarters that are the problem, right? and so he says it's it's it's right to rebel you know that that famous saying what he says is it's right to rebel against reactionaries it's right to rebel against reactionaries in positions of power so he's saying again this this is this is this is more of what we were just talking about he's saying the communist party the the political cadres who are in positions of authority need to be subject to criticism they need to be, you know, subject to the oversight of the people who they are supposed to be serving, you know? And so it's come to a point where they have so walled themselves off that it's, we got to bombard the headquarters. We've got to launch these attacks, you know, and things like the 16 points and other of those early documents. That's where a lot of the struggle is going on over, you know, what are we going to criticize? What are we going to attack?

What are the issues that we need to be concerned with? How are we going to take down this bureaucratic aloofness, this idea of, you know, hey, I'm in charge. Don't tell me how to do my job. You know, I'm, you know, classic bureaucratic mentality, you know. I mean, really, what they really needed to do in some ways was go back and read their Max Weber on bureaucracy. and figure out that this is something that's going to happen, and you need to put in place mechanisms to deal with, right? That's what this struggle is about,

that they'd made various efforts previously, you know, coming out of the Great Leap, the socialist education movement, and then they had been thwarted, right? So now, blow it up, right? Bombard the headquarters, take it to the streets, take it to these mass rallies. The mass rallies, you know,

that's a demonstration. It's, you know, again, the bourgeois distortions of all this, it's portrayed as this kind of mindless adulation of Chairman Mao. You know, you get a million red guards in Tiananmen Square, waving their red books and everything. And it's very dramatic. It's very dramatic footage, you know. But the point isn't the adulation of Chairman Mao.

The point is to send a message that says, look at these young people, look at the spirit that they have, look at what they want. They want the revolution. They want us to be true to the revolution. And that's a message that's, you know, that's directed at those, you know, at the people in, in power within the party, within the government, within academia, you know, within enterprises, you know, who are not listening, who are not listening to the masses. It's a message that says, we've got to break this down. And here are millions of young people. There's like eight of these mass rallies. So probably somewhere between eight and ten million young people who've come to Beijing.

Yes, they've come to see Chairman Mao, but they've come to take part in the revolution. They're going out across the country. They're visiting the historical sites. They're going to Jiangxi. They're going to Yan'an. They're going to places along the route of the Long March to reconnect. with that revolutionary tradition, with that revolutionary history

and that revolutionary spirit. And that's the message. That's the message is that, you know, bureaucrats, wake up, you know. These are the people. These are the people that you have to think about. Their future, their country, their revolution. And that's really what all of those steps

in the summer of 66 are about is getting that launched, you know, whether it's the big character posters or bombard the headquarters or, you know, Red Guard rallies or whatever, it's, all of that is part of this struggle to break out in a sense of this kind of bureaucratic, I don't really want to say straight jacket, but but this bureaucratic, you know, constraint on, on, initially on these young people in, in academic institutions, in schools. But more broadly on the society as a whole. Yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit more than the Red Guards, for example. It seems like a large group, but of course there are divisions within what are called the Red Guards. And there's also this idea that the great proletarian cultural revolution was on some level. Maybe people say a full-on civil war. Some people say a low-level civil war.

I'm wondering if you can address this claim of whether or not, you know, that term would apply or whether there's any legitimacy to such a claim and then maybe just like parse out who the red guards were, the different factions where, you know, certain red guards will be fighting against other red guards, et cetera, and trying to help us make sense of this sort of complicated period of time. Well, it is. It's an extremely complicated period. And, you know, the red guards were a spontaneous development. You know, people began to form these organizations. You have to think of it that these were young people who had grown up since liberation, right? They had grown up in the People's Republic of China.

They were relatively privileged, in a sense, for the most part, in the sense that they were students, they were in school. Their parents were probably, you know, they were urban to begin with, and their parents were, you know, were workers or maybe a administrators or professionals of one type or another. They had been raised in a culture of hope, of a vision of a better future, of a socialist future. I often think, and I've had conversations about this with contemporaries of mine, people who live through this, who were Red Guards, who were in the Cultural Revolution, in China. in some ways it's

similar to the experience that people like I had growing up in America in the 1950s and the early 1960s in that in that post-World War II era

you know fascism had been defeated you know World War II the mythology and the memory the real legitimate memory of that when I was growing up in the 1950s was that you know ordinary Americans working class Americans had gone off and defeated fascism, defeated Hitler, defeated Japanese

militarism. Now, of course, all that gets subsumed and distorted in the context of the Cold War, but there was still, there was still a kernel of feeling about that. And there was a sense of optimism. And that too was worked and distorted. It was part of, you know, a white supremacist culture that was still persistent. But, there was this faith growing up, this hope growing up in the 50s. We were taught in school about democracy, about American democracy, equality, right? The civil rights movement was getting going and to some extent that was inspirational as well. And so we were raised with this hope, that this belief, this faith, if you will, that America was a society that had its

problems but was struggling to achieve a more just an equitable society. And then we hit the wall in the 60s, right? Vietnam, Santo Domingo, racism, poverty. We became aware of those things, and that's what mobilized the youth movements, the student movements, the radical movements of the late 1960s. When I talk about this with my friends in China, it's the same thing. They were raised in a moment of hope, in a period of faith and belief. that the revolution had succeeded, that socialism was being constructed. And then about the time that they're teenagers or college students, they begin to see, you know, that it's not that way,

that there's still tremendous poverty in the countryside, that there's still struggles going on within the party, that the party is telling people what to do rather than saying, how can we serve you, you know? And so they have this political awakening that mobilizes millions of young, people to do the right thing, to reconnect with the revolution, to launch, in a sense, a new era of revolutionary struggle, to get the party back on track, to get the process of socialist construction back in touch with the very people for whom it was meant to, you know, to serve, right?

And so it's funny, I have this sense of a kind of parallelism of young people awakening from a, not a false dream, but a dream that was not fulfilled and struggling to move in the right direction at that point. And that, I think, is a lot of what goes on with the Red Guards. But these were people who didn't have a lot of political experience, who didn't have a lot of, well, just that. didn't have a lot of knowledge of the nuts and bolts, I guess I would say, of political organizing and political activism. So they were motivated. They were impassioned, right, to struggle, to go out and follow, you know, the leaders. Listen to Chairman Mao. Take those critiques seriously.

But there were different groupings. And what happens as we move through the fall. of 66 into 67, different groupings of people. There were different divisions within the Red Guard movement as a whole. There were some initially who were offspring of party cadre. But then there were others who were not, who came from outside the party, whose families weren't part of the party. There were workers' kids, especially the high school Red Guards, who weren't in college

yet and came from working class families, right? different divisions, different, you know, groupings within, even just within Beijing, students at Tsinghua and students at Beijing University or students at the Aeronautics Institute or other schools maybe viewed each other with a certain distance, you know? And so, unfortunately, there grows to be a lot of factionalism, even on a single campus at Tsinghua University, which is often referred to as like the MIT of China. It's a more technologically oriented university. There were factional conflicts on campus. And some of these became quite intense. Serious fighting, homemade weapons, people, you know, beating each other. I mean, it got pretty wild for a while.

And in a sense, that's because when you backed off the leadership of the party, you created, there came to be, I won't say a political vacuum, but a field of contestation, if you will. And people staked out positions that weren't necessarily the most sophisticated, the most well thought out. There were certainly individual ambitions at play once again. People who became leaders of Red Guard groupings, you know, could themselves be vulnerable

to those kinds of individualist self-interested feelings, you know? So the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard aspect of the Cultural Revolution, it serves a great historical purpose, which is to mobilize popular participation, to reconnect young people with the Revolutionary Heritage, all that traveling, you know,

made the trains free so young people could go anywhere in China for free. And they did. They explore it. They went out and they visited these revolutionary sites and connected with that. But it also unleashed the potential and the actuality of these factional conflicts. As people, you know, there's this saying that we use a lot in China about crossing the river by feeling the rocks, you know. You know you want to go somewhere. You kind of know where it is you want to get to, but how do you get across the river? You know, the, the water's flowing and you can't, you can't just splash across. You have to, you have to feel your way bit by bit. And in that process, there's, there's chaos, you know. And Chairman Mao,

you know, at one point he talked about, he said, there's great chaos under heaven. The situation is excellent, you know. Willing to embrace the chaos, willing to embrace, you know, willing to embrace, you know, some of the some of the disruptiveness, some of the literally out of control nature of the Red Guard movement for a while because it shook

things up, you know? And you can look at that, you can look at that cynically or you can look at it you know, in a way that accepts it as part of the complexity and the humanity of political struggle. It's not perfect.

It's not, you know, just you know, lift the blueprint out of a textbook and put it into practice. It's human. It's, it's messy. We have to, you know, we have to acknowledge and accept that as part of that, part of the whole dynamic that takes place. You know, the Red Guard phenomenon is actually a relatively short-lived phase of the cultural revolution. That's, that's mostly what people talk about. But really, it's, it's only about a year and a half, two years at the most. you know, before urban youth start to go out to the countryside, start to go down to the villages, right? And that's often portrayed is such a bad thing. Oh, my God, these poor kids that

were sent out to the countryside. But when you talk to people who lived through that, and on both sides, both the young people who went to the villages and people who lived in those villages, you know, the idea, a trope you hear a lot is, oh, these were just, you know, smarty pants urban kids who didn't know anything about farming, you know, so the peasants didn't really want them in their villages. Well, they didn't go there. They went there to some extent to take part in agricultural production, but they went there. They became the barefoot doctors. They became teachers. They became people who helped raise the level of cultural understanding, of medical knowledge, of services in the villages. There's several wonderful books.

of people who came out of the villages because they had opportunities that were created by the presence of these urban youth that were sent to the countryside. Many of them, you know, after 10 years, it became possible for them to come back to the cities. Lots of them stayed where they were because they'd become integrated

into those rural communities, into those village communities. Lots of went back to the cities, and that was great too. But, you know, the idea of the cultural revolution as this sort of just this chaotic mishmash that didn't accomplish anything. It's just wrong.

It's just wrong. It accomplished so much. But it ran its course, you know. And eventually, it achieved a lot of the things that it set out to achieve in terms of forcing the party to reconnect with the masses. If I can, let me spin out one particular tape. One very short.

addendum. You know, very famously, one of those examples of an urban youth who was sent to the villages was Xi Jinping, the current leader of China. He was sent in, I believe, 1968 or 1969 to a village. He went down, stayed there for a little while, ran away, was caught as a, you know, a dodger of this, of this movement, the down to the countryside's movement, was sent back to dig ditches for a while. uh after digging ditches he eventually went back to the village that he was originally assigned to and many people uh many chinese people and this is kind of i guess a narrative in china now i i have some friends from china who i've asked about this but and feel free to correct me if i'm wrong ken because you have many more contacts in china than i do but they've they've told me that the narrative in china

is that she's time in the village was one of the kind of foundational pillars that even today is viewed as one of the reasons why he is associated with having some sort of affinity for or connection to the rural population in China, even though he is from Beijing. Yeah, actually, that's great that you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time in Shirjad Huang, which is the capital now of Hebei province. And the village that Xi Jinping was sent down to is just, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 kilometers north of Shirjajuan. And I've been out there, you know, there's another town north of there. And then the villages are a little a little bit further beyond that. I've talked to people there, you know, and of course,

you know, these days, everybody's very proud of Xi Jinping and I'm sure people like to associate themselves with his rights. But that is the narrative. That certainly is the narrative that he went through a learning process. Imagine such a thing, you know, that maybe, yeah, he'd grown up, his father was a, you know, a cadre, he'd grown up in Beijing. He'd been in the Red Guards and everything. Then he, like lots of the Red Guards, you know, they went down to the countryside. It was rough, you know. It's no picnic, especially in those days, living out there in the villages. So a number of people who were like, oh, my God, I can't take this, you know, but then he gets back there. He buckles down, does the job, and it works, right? That's what sending people down was

about, whether they were cadres or red guards or whatever. It was like, look, we made the revolution for all the people. The peasantry were the leaders of the revolution. That was the force, the agricultural proletarians, as we talked about in the previous episode. That's the force that drove the revolution. We need to improve these people's lives. We need to work with them to improve their lives, you know. He got it, right? And millions and millions and millions of these young people got it.

Whether they stayed in the villages, went back to the cities, whatever. Not everybody, you know. I mean, again, it's that mix of humanity, you know, but once and lots and lots of these Red Guards were transformed by their experiences. in the countryside. I've been in cities, a number of cities in China where there are

cultural revolution restaurants where you can go and they have the decor, they have the posters and they kind of look like village places and the food is, you know, rustic food and all this.

And people go there because they want to reconnect with that. They want to remember that. There's a certain nostalgia for that. Even on people who went back to the cities and, you know, maybe went on to college and had careers and all that. There's not this sense, you know,

you hear this idea that the cultural revolution was this horrible trauma and nobody wants to talk about it or think about it. That's just nonsense, you know? It's a living experience. People have different views. Some people hated it. Some people had a terrible time. But once and lunts and lots of people learned from it,

grew through it, and remember it in very positive. ways. So, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to buy into that, you know, 10, 10 lost years narrative. That's just, that's just not the reality for, for, you know, vast, vast numbers of people. But let, oh, sir, go ahead, Ken, go ahead. Let me just talk about one thing. And, and then, you know, we can maybe, you know, move, move on down past, past the, the, the CR, which is the Shanghai commune, okay? That was the question I was going to ask. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, good time. Yeah, great. You know, we always say great minds think alike.

I was going to ask about seizures of power and the Shanghai commune and revolutionary committees. So I suppose that was where you were going to go anyway. Just go ahead, Ken. Take it how do you want. In many ways, I think that's the hub. That's the nut of the cultural revolution, you know. Getting it started, the summer of 66, the Red Guards, that's great. That's what releases the mode.

if you will. But it's the Shanghai commune where the rubber really beats the road. And what happens is, you know, Shanghai was the largest industrial city in China. It was China's great port, goods going out, goods coming in, passing through the port. And of course, it had this tremendous revolutionary history. It's where the party was founded. It's where the split with the Guelmandang takes place in 1927. You know, it's, Shanghai is, is this amazing place in China, in Chinese, modern Chinese history. In the fall of 66, as the cultural revolution is spreading and surging, workers in Shanghai start to mobilize. This isn't college students. This isn't high school students. This isn't red guard stuff.

Certainly there are red guards in Shanghai, too. But in Shanghai, it's the workers in the factories, on the docks, in the warehouses, that begin to mobilize. They're reading, you know, the newspapers. They're watching TV, listening to the radio. They're hearing what's going on. And millions of workers begin to join political organization. And by December of 66, they're raising issues.

They're raising questions about the party leadership, about the management in the factories, about managements in the workplace. And a delegation of workers decides they're going to go to Beijing to see Chairman Ball and talk to the Cultural Revolution Leadership. They get on a train

at the main Shanghai Railway Station and they set off. The train's going to Beijing. They get out to the western suburbs and the train gets stopped, gets stopped by the local party authorities. And the workers stay on the train. They say, we're not getting off.

We're going to Beijing. And the authorities say, no, you're not. This train is not going anywhere. They put it on a little shunting on a side track. And the workers stay on the train for days, right? This is called the Unding incident. And finally, the authorities blink. They don't allow the train to go on,

but they allow a representative delegation of the workers to go on to Beijing. The rest of the workers go back into Shanghai. That's December. January comes along. January 67, and we get what they call the January storm, which is workers' organizations marching, rallying, publishing their own newspapers. The organizations grow eventually those two huge workers' organizations, each with over a million members.

Right. There's issues within the workers' movement, younger workers versus older workers, migrant workers coming in from the countryside versus workers who have a Shanghai residency permit. There's different lines of tension within the workers' movement. But overall, this is a movement for workers' democracy, for the working class, the people, to have an influence, obviously, in political power. in political leadership. February comes along. February 5th, 1967, there's a grand mobilization

that two mass movement groups merge. They go down to the Bund, which is where the waterfront in Shanghai is, where the party headquarters, the municipal party headquarters building is, and they take it over. And they dismiss the municipal party leadership. They say, thanks a lot,

but we're going to take it from here. And they proclaim the Shanghai Commune, inspired by the Paris Commune from 1871, which had been the subject of a mass education campaign during the course of the early months of the Cultural Revolution. Everybody read the Civil War in France, everybody read about the Paris Commune, and now the workers in Shanghai proclaim the Shanghai Commune. They elect a communal leadership from their own ranks. It includes members of the party. It includes members of the former municipal committee. But it also includes ordinary workers who aren't in the party, who aren't in any political organization other than these mass movements.

And they become the municipal leadership, right? Well, amongst them, there are a couple of important cadres, a fellow named John Chun Chau and a felon in Yawin and a felon in Yaw-in-Yuan. and Yalu and Yuan had been very close to Chairman Mao. So they go to Beijing and they meet with Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution Leadership Group. And it's at this point, this is mid-February, that a crucial decision, maybe the crucial decision

in the Cultural Revolution is made. Because Chairman Mao says to them, look, of course, we support the country, of course. We support the workers. Of course, the working class should be the political power in China. But you can't get rid of the party. Getting rid of the party is like cutting off your head, right? There has to be leadership. There has to be structure. So let's think of a better way to do this. How can we do this? And they talk things out and these comrades go back to to Shanghai, and they have debates within the commune, and by the end of February, February 27th,

I believe it is, the commune decides to dissolve itself and to replace itself with what is called the revolutionary three-and-one combination. The three-and-one combination is the party, the army, and the masses. The army, because the PLA was a force for stability during these years, The PLA was also heavily politicized. That's where, under Lynn Biao's leadership, the Red Book is first put together, quotations from Chairman Mao, you know, and that had been issued initially by the political department of the PLA. So the party, the army, the masses, right? That's the three and one combination. And this is what comes to be called the Revolutionary Committee. And this is a new form of organization. Right? The idea be. This is a mechanism through which the basic objective of the cultural revolution, the supervision of the leadership by the masses, the party leadership, the state leadership, the people in positions of power, can be supervised by the masses. Now, this is a structured form that allows that to come into being, to come into practice. And over the following year or so, year and a half, one by one, the different provinces, the municipalities, different levels of administration throughout the country, struggle to produce three-and-one combination revolutionary committees. And that becomes, until April of 69, the Ninth Party Congress, that becomes the sort of interim system, the interim form of organization all across the country.

That culminates with the convening of the Ninth Party Congress in April of 1969, at which a new central committee is elected, overwhelmingly composed of people coming out of the three-and-one combination. workers are elected, peasants are elected, soldiers are elected, but traditional party cadres are also elected. The composition of the Central Committee coming out of the Ninth Party Congress is a new party. It's a new leadership. Obviously, there's carryovers. There's some people who've been in leadership previously, but a lot of fresh faces. And that, in my perspective, that is the sort of culmination of the actual mass political phase of the cultural revolution. It carries on. There's political struggles within the party, over the party line, over, you know, modernization, science technology, all these kinds of issues, cultural issues, the revolutionary operas, cinema, all this kind of stuff. Those struggles go on through the 70s, down until Chairman Miles passes in September of September of September.

But the decision, the reconstitution of the party, the re-engagement of the party with the masses, that this kind of given its institutional instantiation, if you will, at the Ninth Party Congress, that's really, you know, 66 to 69 is really the heart of the cultural revolution. Those later phases are largely confined to struggles within the leadership. And we can talk more about those if that's what we want to get into. Yeah, I think that that is probably, I'm hyper aware of the time that we're at. So while there is many, many things that I would like to hit on here, I do think that we should turn our eyes towards the interactions within the leader. leadership, let's put it that way. And also at the same time, I guess, this is not related, but probably something that we should hit on at some point while we're thinking about this in the

way that we're thinking about it is the excesses of the cultural revolution in this early phase. So as historical materialists, as we pointed out, we have to be acknowledged that there were excesses. We have to acknowledge that there were mistakes. Before we move on to the kind of end stage of the cultural revolution and the going out of the cultural revolution with Mao's death and gang of four put on trial I think it's important that we acknowledge

that yes there certainly were excesses and mistakes that were made but we have to analyze those in a way that it is constructive for us to thinking about the cultural revolution more holistically and also how to draw lessons from the cultural revolution. I think that this is as good at point as any to think about those before we move into that later phase of the cultural revolution.

So, yeah, I guess that's kind of two prongs that are unrelated, but both fit into this kind of this point in the conversation. Yeah, well, obviously, you know, we've already talked a bit about some of the chaos associated with the Red Guards. you know, there were certainly there were moments that got a little surreal. You know, this question of the rejection of the four olds, for example. You know, this idea was that part of the problem,

part of the bureaucratization, part of the way in which the party and the state leadership had been alienated from the masses, was that they sort of perpetuated old privileges, old ideas about hierarchy in society, about the idea that, you know, in imperial China, you know, you had the scholar officials, the literati, who were seen as a whole separate strata.

They were above everybody else. And so now, you know, some intellectuals, some party figures, some state administrators seem to be embodying those same attitudes, old mentalities about who should be in charge and how they should exercise power. So the critique of the four olds, you know, it kind of went off the rails in that

it came to focus too much on surface manifestations, you know, clothing or hairdos or books that somebody was reading or something like that. Yeah, that phase didn't like that. very long. That's a matter of maybe six or eight weeks, you know, where people were being criticized in the street for the wrong hairstyle or something like that. That did happen. That was wrong. That was bad. But it was, again, it was an excess of this revolutionary enthusiasm. And it was, in some ways, I think it was seen as at the time, certainly by the

leadership as kind of the price that had to be paid to get the broader mobilization going forward, whether or not that was a wise assessment. I think that's something that certainly can be debated. You know, there were other kinds of excesses. Some of the criticism sessions, the criticism sessions of even if people who deserve to be criticized got out of control. There were people who were beaten. There were a few people even who were killed. And, you know, that probably was not a great thing. So, yeah, we certainly need to acknowledge that, you know, the revolution, the cultural revolution, as a revolutionary struggle, it produced casualties.

And not all of those were justified, not all of those were defensible, if you will. But we need to see them in historical context, and we need to understand them as part of a human revolutionary process. It's a political struggle, political transformation. And as Chairman Mao said, it's not a dinner party. It's not refined. It's not polite. And in that passion and in that chaos, there's bad things that happen. And we don't shy away from those.

We don't glorify them, but we also don't say that they invalidate the enterprise, the goals. The goals were correct. The goals were good. And for the most part, the efforts to pursue and achieve those goals, you know, even as they, you know, ran over some rough ground, were well guided and well-intentioned and carried out. But there were things that were bad, that were excessive, that were inappropriate, that were destructive, that were destructive, that were destructive, that were destructive. that happened in the course of all that. And yes, yes, we certainly have to have to acknowledge that and be critical with that, you know?

Yeah, go ahead. Well, yeah, I was just going to say like that's absolutely the principled approach to all of this. You know, we're not in a cult. And if we lose our historical materialism, we lose our ability to analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly. we lose everything that is the open end of nature of socialist experimentation and the tradition that we honor you know nothing is perfect

we're messy human beings this is not news to anybody so we have to take all that on board push back against anti-communist nonsense take stock of real failures learn from them so they're not repeated this is what Marxism I believe is all about the and

the point of the theoretical contribution of the cultural revolution is still incredibly relevant you know, despite whatever, the good, bad, and the ugly of the actual way that the great proletarian cultural revolution played out, and there were plenty of all three, the theoretical reality is that that revolution in the superstructure, that putting the revolution in the hands of the masses, that deboracization, that not allowing the alienation of the party from the masses to take place, those are essential lessons for any socialist movement going forward. and we can thank the Chinese people for that lesson without losing sight, again, of the excesses, of the tragedies, of the unjustly lost lives, etc. Now, there is no clean way to end this

because we're going to get the next episode is going to be into Deng and the reforms and modern China and history never doesn't give us nice little chapter endings, but perhaps a good way to end this part of the discussion is with the death of Lin Bao and then the death of Mao. And then maybe you could also touch on who the gang of four were, but not say anything much more than that, because I think a good starting place for the next episode is getting into the gang of four and then getting into Deng's reforms. So can you just sort of tell us the Lin Bao incident, Mao's death ended on the emergence of the gang of form? Yeah, I agree that the sort of end game of the cultural revolution and the, you know, the wrapping up things.

in 1976 dovetails perfectly with where we want to start the next session when we start looking at the emergence of the reform program and it's unfolding and its dynamics going forward.

I think we can leave a little bit of this discussion to be the odd ramp, if you will, for that. But, yeah, you know, at the ninth party Congress, Biao, who had been defense minister since 1959, who was himself a marshal of the Red Army and the People's Liberation Army and had played a heroic role in the Korean conflict, you know, he is named as Chairman Mao's close comrade in arms and successor. He was positioned to be the individual who would, who would, you know, lead the party should Chairman Mao, you know, exit the plane.

planet. And that's inscribed in the party constitution in 1969. And yet, by the fall of 1970, Lin Biano is dead. He goes down in a plane crash in Mongolia, in circumstances which were and it pretty much remained a little murky. But what seems to have happened to the best of what I've been able to learn from both things that I've read at conversations with people in China, is that, you know, the spring of 1969 was a point at which, and we didn't, we haven't really talked about the Sino-Soviet split or any of that stuff. There's so much to try to pack into these conversations. But, you know, back in 59, because of the great leap forward and the view that the Soviet leadership

had of China, which as we talked about a little earlier, was never entirely comfortable. You know, they'd been very close in the 50s, but in 59, there's a split between the Soviets and the Chinese. That leads to deepening antagonism through the 60s. And the Cultural Revolution was viewed by the Soviets with a certain amount of horror, perhaps in part, because they recognize that the Bureau. critique could equally well be applied to them, if not more so. By the spring of 69, that relationship deteriorates to the point where there are military clashes on the border between China and

the Soviet Union. So that's a very, very scary moment. This is when there's a lot of construction of, you know, bomb shelters under Beijing and other places. And there was a real fear that there might be war. In that context, it appears, and we're pretty clear on some of this stuff, that Chairman Mao and most of those aligned with him, came to view the Soviet Union, the contradiction between China and the Soviet Union, as a greater problem than the contradiction between China and the United States. The United States, of course, was bogged down in Vietnam, had other problems, domestic problems, you know, significant political unrest here in the United States.

And at that point, really appeared to be a declining imperialist power. And Mao and other leaders seem to have assessed the situation and come to the conclusion that, you know, American imperialism was kind of a spent force, but the Soviet Union was a rising threat. And so what was needed was a reconfiguration of the geopolitical alignments. And that, of course, is what leads to the secret diplomacy, Kissinger going to China in the fall of 71, and then Nixon's amazing visit in February of 72.

But what seems to have been the case is that Lin Biao disagreed with that reassessment. and Lin Biao felt that American imperialism was still the primary contradiction. Of course, his whole analysis long live the victory of people's war is premised on American imperialism as the key negative factor in modern history. And so he seems to have decided

that the chairman was wrong and was going to take China in the wrong, direction. And there's lots of stories about what actually went on. You know, did they try to blow up German Mao as his residence? Whatever went on? It's not clear. But Lin Biao and some members of his family seemed to have attempted to flee to the Soviet Union. They were certainly heading that way. And the plane went down, whether the official version is that it ran out of fuel, There are those who argue that it may have been shot down. It's not clear.

There's no definitive account of what happened with Lin Biao, except that he went down. He died in this plane crash, and that was the end of his position as, you know, his close comrade in arms and successor. But obviously we know that China did go on to have this reconciliation with the United States, not to grasp the United States in a warm embrace, but to open up to recognizing the United States and being recognized by the United States as part of a process given that they had lost not just the political agreement, but the material support that they had been getting from the Soviet Union, they needed, if they were going to continue to build the economy and advance the economy, and we'll talk about that when we look at the transition to the reform period,

they needed the influx of foreign capital, foreign technology, foreign, you know, knowledge and information. And opening to the U.S. begins a process that allows that to get underway. Japan becomes the first source of foreign capital and technology and all that. But that was only possible after the opening to the United States. So there's a complex calculus involved there of geopolitics and economics and development and all that. But that seems to be what goes on with Lin Biao and Chairman Mao

at the beginning of the 70s. You know, the chairman's health is declining already by the time we see those images of him meeting Nixon. He's clearly frail and suffering in many ways. his health continues to deteriorate. Joey Lai is his real close comrade in arms is himself suffering from cancer by this time. You know, there's various back and forths

between the gang of four and Deng Xiaoping who, you know, is purged and then brought back and then purged and brought back, I think, three times. The 70s are a very contentious phase. The gang of four were people who were very close to the chairman. Of course, it includes his wife, Zhang Qing, but also Yo and Yuan and Zhang Chun Chao from Shanghai, and Wang Huoen, who was a worker in the mass movement at the time of the Shanghai economy, who then rises to be a political leader

and winds up as the fourth member of that grouping. And they were, they were, you know, now I think They tend to be viewed as ultra-left. They certainly were very engaged with the critique of bureaucracy and what they called the re-emergence of bourgeois right within the party and all this. But they were one political position. Deng Xiaoping, you know, emerging as sort of the pragmatist, if you will, very famously talking about it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white

as long as it catches mice. all this kind of stuff, being in being given positions by Chairman Mao, with Chairman Mao's support for modernization, for science and technology and things like that. So it's a contentious period where these contradictions around the path of socialist development remain unresolved. The party has been brought back into a closer relationship with the masses, but there are still these contradictory positions, the two-line struggle, if you will, over what is the best path forward? Those contradictions remain unresolved and in some ways can't be resolved so long as Chairman Mao is on the scene. His ability to engage with those debates and those struggles is severely compromised by his neurological degeneration.

Joe N. Lai is ill with cancer in and out of the hospital. Joe dies in January of 1976. Judea, the great military leader, founder of the Red Army, dies in early July. The great Tomshot earthquake that kills several hundred thousand people takes place later in July. And Chairman Malle passes on September 9th in 1976. It's a devastating year for the old.

old leadership of the party and for, you know, many people in China because of the Tangshan earthquake. But that finally, in a sense, opens up the possibility of resolving these contradictions over the best path of socialist development. And I think that's where we should leave it for now because those are the issues that we're going to take off with in the final of our of our four conversations yeah absolutely brilliant ken i'm really looking forward to part four honestly uh you know if i had known that these conversations would be this fruitful i would have just told you it's going to be a ten part series ken we're going to keep you forever but we will uh stick to our word and for now it'll be a four part series but we know that you have some more works that'll be

coming out relatively soon and you'll be back on the show to talk about those as well so don't is not going to be the last year of Ken on guerrilla history. Brett, how can our listeners find your excellent podcast? And I would like to thank you again for being a guest host on the first three episodes of this mini series that we have going on. It's really a great pleasure to have you back on the show. I know there was no gap between, you know, when you were an official host of the show and a guest host.

But it's really, I mean, I really appreciate you coming on and doing these with us. I'll always love guerrilla history. And this right here was the genuinely, I do not exaggerate the best four-hour history lesson I've ever had in my life. And the absolute best analysis of China and these major events of the last century and Chinese history that I've ever encountered. So thank you so much, Ken. I'm thrilling to sit here and listen to you, break all this down. Fascinating stuff. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com.

Yeah. I highly recommend the listeners do that. My co-host, Adnan Hussain, again, was not able to make it to this conversation, but you should definitely follow him on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and follow his other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S, which is focused on the Arab world and Muslim diaspora. It's a great show I've learned a lot from it. Make sure to subscribe to his show and not the one of the same name, hosted by Radio Free Central Asia, which of course,

is a cutout from our friends at the CIA. Don't listen to their show. Listeners, listen to Adnance. If you don't hear his mellifluous tones, you've gone to the wrong place. Ken, how can the listeners find your excellent book? And I don't, I think that we'll just leave it at that. Yeah, well, my, the, the, the, the,

China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future, as published by 1804 books in New York. and it's available on their website, 1804books.com. And we're also working with them on a new volume that we hope to have out by the later part of this year, maybe in time for the 75th anniversary of the PRC, on China and the World, 1949 to 2024. I didn't know whether we wanted to officially tease that project or not, which is why I said we'll leave it there. But if we want to tell the listeners what you're going to be coming back on the show to talk about,

I guess we, this isn't going to place as any. So listeners, that preview, of course. If you've made it to the end of this conversation, you deserve a little preview. So be sure to stay tuned for that release of that book. And, of course, we'll have an episode with Ken as that release becomes more imminent. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-1-995. You can help support guerrilla history 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 follow us on Twitter, keep up with everything that we're putting out individually as well as the show collectively at Gorilla-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore pod. And until next time, listeners, and remember the next episode is going to be on the reform period of China,

so you know you're going to want to stick around for that. Until next time, Solidarity. You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a ranker. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. 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 Aukmacki, unfortunately not joined by my other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. I am fortunately joined by a returning guest host who will be very familiar to listeners of guerrilla history,

Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio, and the Red Menace podcast, as well as former co-host of this podcast. Hello, Brett. It's nice to see you again. Hello. Yeah, very nice to be here, as always. Of course. We are continuing our mini-series today,

but before I remind the listeners of the miniseries and introduce our wonderful guest, I would like to remind listeners that they 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-L-A history. and you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're putting out individually and collectively

at Gorilla underscore Pod that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-I-L-A-U-Score Pod as mentioned earlier this is a continuation of a miniseries and specifically our mini-series on the history of modern China featuring the one and only Ken Hammond. Hello Ken, Ken. It's nice to have you back on the show.

Glad to be back again. We're going to have a good way to wrap up our series today. Absolutely. So to remind the listeners, Ken is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University and is author of the book China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. As Ken mentioned, this is the conclusion

of our mini-series on modern Chinese history. This is part four. So listeners, if you are tuning in now and you haven't heard the rest of the series yet, I highly recommend that you go back and check that out now. we had a preambulatory episode back in September on China's Revolution and the Quest for Socialist Future. That was before we knew we were going to be doing this as a miniseries.

And then we had the first three parts of the series on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, the Chinese Civil War and Revolution. And last time we talked about the cultural revolution and the Great Lead Forward, kind of both parts of that in that conversation. And in this episode, we are going to be talking about the Dung Reform period. So before we get into the actual conversation here, I just want to let everyone know that, yes, this period is rather controversial. There's going to be very strong opinions in both ways. We want to let you know, as we get into this, that we're not going to be telling you that one ideological position is the correct position.

We have faith in you in being able to synthesize information. And this is meant to provide that sort of information to you so that you are well equipped to synthesize all that we're providing for you and then make principled ideological decisions on your own. We're not here to tell you that we're the arbiters of what's right and what's wrong, but simply that we're here to give you that nice information in a way that hopefully is useful to you. So, Ken, picking up where we left off last time, we left off with the death of. Mao and you had just started to introduce who the gang of four were. So perhaps you can touch on what the kind of geopolitical context of Mao's death was because it was a very, a very interesting time in Chinese history. A lot of things were changing right at the time when Mao died. You mentioned that that year was kind of a tragic year for China in many ways. And then can you let us

know about the case of the gang of four, because that was really where we left off last time? Sure. Yeah, well, yeah, you're quite right. 1976 was a tough year for China, for the Chinese people. Not so much in the sense of, you know, economic setbacks or anything like that, but it was a year where three of the leading figures in the revolution, three individuals who had, you know, been in the party since the 1920s, had led revolutionary struggles, had, you know, been responsible for the founding and the development of the Red Army. All passed away. Joanne Lai, who had been the prime minister, and back in the 1950s, had been foreign

minister of the People's Republic, dies in January. Juda, who is the founder of the Red Army, dies in July. And Maudeau, of course, the chairman of the party. the leader of the revolutionary struggle in many ways, dies on September 9th of 1976. In the midst of all that, in late July, there's the Tengshan earthquake, which was a huge, devastating earthquake, killed several hundred thousand people.

Teng Shan is a little distance northeast of Beijing. Tremors were felt all the way in the capital. This was a very, very big event, very devastating. taken by many people as indicative, you know, within sort of Chinese traditional, cultural, cosmological ideas that great changes were underway, that the country was in a sort of involvement of crisis and something had to give. So that sets the stage for a period, a couple of years of struggle, of efforts within the party to sort of learn from the experience of the first three decades of building socialism in China and reassess the situation and decide what, you know,

how to go forward from that point. And critical in that was the struggle against the, what was called the gang of four. The gang of four were four individuals, Zhang Qing, who was Chairman Mao's wife, Yao and Yuan and Zhang Chun Chao, who were a longtime party sort of ideological activist, and Wang Ho Wen, who was one of the workers down in Shanghai back in 1967, who had been become a leader in the Shanghai commune that we talked about last time. And these four had sort of constituted a focal point, a political position in the struggles within the party in the 1970s. They were very focused on issues of the superstructure, the ways in which the dialectic between the base and the superstructure play out, the ways in which old ideas, if you will,

arkening back to some of the things we talked about with the cultural revolution, needed to be revolutionized needed to be overthrown. So they constituted what we might think of as a strong left position within the party. And they were in tension with, in conflict with many times, what is often referred to as the more pragmatist or the more, you know, down-to-earth side of the struggles within the party. Those people who argued that, what was necessary in building socialism was to concentrate on the economic base, concentrate on technological and scientific development, and concentrate on the tasks of building a new economy,

which were complex and challenging and required the party and the people to really work together in ways that would be constructive and building up the economic foundation for a future of greater prosperity. And that grouping was sort of centered around Deng Xiaoping. And Deng Xiaoping, who had been closely associated with Liao-Chi, who of course had assumed the presidency when Mao stepped down after the Lushan plenum back in 1959. Liyosha Chi died in the course of he had a severe illness and died in 1969 in the midst of the sort of turmoil of the cultural revolution. But Deng Xiaoping, who had been sidelined during the CR, is brought back to sort of oversee what we're called the four modernizations in science and technology and things like that. Then he's purged again, brought back again and given positions of responsibility by Chairman Mao.

But then in the spring of 76, after Joe In Lai's death, when there's a popular movement in April at what's called the Ching Ming Festival, the sort of Day of the Dead kind of festival that they have in China, many, many people in Beijing assembled at Tiananmen Square to place rees and banners and things honoring Joe Enlai. that was seen by the gang of four as endorsing, you know, their people who had the opposite political position that they were holding. And at that time, Chairman Mao was already so ill that he was not really kind of managing day-to-day affairs. And so the gang of four characterized the April 5th demonstrations as an anti-party movement. And they associated Deng Xiaoping with that, so he was out once again. So he had this very up and down kind of roller coaster career in the 70s. After the death of Chairman Mao, September 9th, there's a very rapid consolidation of the more pragmatist wing in the party. And there's a consensus emerges that they want to move away from these very militant positions that.

that were held by the, by the gang of four. And so in early October, just about a month after Chairman Mao dies, Chairman Mao's what's called the bodyguard unit of the PLA, they move to arrest the gang of four. And they are held in prison. They're eventually put on trial, and that's all a very public and open event. I remember watching parts of it on CCTV.

And, you know, that leads to, to prison sentences for them, although none of them serves out their full term in prison. They all get released at one point or another as we move deeper into the reform period. But they are removed from positions of influence, and that doesn't, though, immediately resolve the internal questions. There are still distinct positions about how to go forward. There's a feeling within the party, and I think on the part of many, people that the cultural revolution had been, on the one hand, had been successful in awakening

within the party, the recognition of the need for closer integration, the recognition, the sort of re-engagement with the perspective that, you know, the party is the instrument of the masses. The masses are not there to carry out the party's will. The party is there to manifest and fulfill the wishes, the desires, the needs of the people. And a lot of people felt that. But they also felt that the mass political campaigns, the turmoil of the cultural revolution, which Chairman Maher, of course, had characterized as great chaos under heaven, situation, excellent, had done its part, had played itself out. And in many ways had been a very difficult period, a period in which, you know, many errors, many mistakes were also made,

and it was time for a new orientation. But exactly what that new orientation was going to be took a couple of years to hammer out. It's not until the end of 1978 that, you know, a new direction, a consensus about a new direction emerges. And even then, as we'll talk about going forward today. There's not a uniform approach. It's not that everyone totally agrees about every point in the reform program or how to implement reforms. But there comes to be a consensus, a broad enough consensus that significant changes are needed.

And so by the end of 78 and going forward from then, for one thing, Deng Xiaoping reemerges. comes back into public view. Not, he doesn't assume the position of chairman of the party. He doesn't become president of the country. He becomes a vice premier, so a sort of second tier position in the central leadership. But he does become what's called general secretary of the party. Although he doesn't hold that position, you know, permanently.

You know, Deng Xiaoping doesn't want to position. position himself at that point in the same kind of central leadership role within the institutions of the party and the state that, you know, a figure like Chairman Mao had helped, which doesn't mean that, you know, we'd all recognize that Deng Xiaoping was actually the driving sort of the center, the force that was leading the reform movement. But again, as we've talked about with Chairman him out. Deng Xiaoping isn't the reform movement. He is a critical leader, but these political positions are held broadly within the party and certainly in the government of the PRC and amongst the people of the country, a commitment to a new orientation, a new drive forward in this

process, the ongoing process of trying to build a socialist economy and a new economy and society for China. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. I have two questions for you, one personal and one historical. If you don't want to answer the personal one, we can cut this out. It's just a curiosity of mine. You said that you were alive and present and watching the trials of the gang of four. I'm wondering at that time in your life, did you have any particular sympathies, one way or the other? Or were you just sort of a neutral observer? That's the personal question. And then the political question is before we get into the reform era, if you could say a little bit about Deng Xiaoping's sort of involvement in the his party through these events we've already covered in the previous series before Mao sort of lost coherency and then his life what their relationship was. I know you said it was rocky up and down. But if you could talk a little bit like, you know, what was Deng's involvement, if any, in these incidences like the Long March, like the Cultural Revolution, et cetera. So that would be the historical question. Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, personally, you know, this was a period

of transition, you know, I became concerned with China, interested in China when I was in high school in the mid-1960s. And of course, that was when the cultural revolution was ramping up. It was also when, you know, the United States was deeply engaged in its imperialist war in Vietnam. So that was the moment in which I was becoming politically active and, you know, reading, you know, everything from classical Marxist literature to studies of what was happening in places like Indonesia and Vietnam and China. So my initial sort of political formation was strongly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, by reading Chairman Mao and all that. So, you know, when the change takes place, you know, after Mao's death and then the purging of the game,

of four, and then the enunciation of the reform program, to be perfectly frank, my initial reaction was that this was, in fact, what Chairman Mao had feared and was, you know, China sort of taken the capitalist road. And I think that that perception was widespread among many of us who had been active. I had been in SDS students for a democratic society, you know, and people came out of that after that sort of self-destructed at the end of the end of 1969, end of 69. Many of us were, you know, a little perplexed about going forward and what was happening in China. We'd already been shocked by, you know, Nixon's going to China and all that. So now this just, for a while, this really seemed to me to be, you know, a bad turn, a turn in a bad direction.

And it took a while. You know, I mean, I fortunately, I moved to China in 1982 and lived there for the next five years. And so I was there through the real beginning of the reform era. And, you know, when I arrived in Beijing in the summer of 82, it was still, you know, it was just coming out of the way that society had been for the previous basically 30 plus years. you know there were it was still a sort of blue and gray kind of environment and in terms of people's clothing and things like that in the streets and Beijing is a very gray city historically because a lot of the walls in the Houtong's the streets and the neighborhoods were painted gray so it's an image that's very very strong in my mind from my first years there

but it changed very quickly and and many of those changes were clearly felt to be good by the people that I was getting to know, you know, and as I was studying, learning Chinese, working there, traveling around, not just in Beijing, but I traveled all over the country because the work I was doing involved being a sort of advanced person for American educational delegations, helping to make their domestic arrangements within the country. So I saw a lot of China in the 80s, and And, you know, we can talk about the reforms and their policies and their impacts and all that. But what I saw, my own experience showed me that this was actually improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people and that, you know, my own concerns and my perceptions of it, you know, transformed.

and I came to hold views, you know, which I continue to, of the reform project as a great enterprise, a great endeavor, a great experiment, but one which was fraught with dangers and which had to be managed and carried out in a very cautious and careful way. As history has unfolded, you know, I mean, it's been 42 years. since I first went to China. I've seen that, for me, my perception is that I've seen that take place, that I've seen the party lead this process, and I've seen the people participate in this process in ways, which to me suggests that this has been a worthy endeavor and one which certainly hasn't been 100% miraculously successful in creating a perfect worker state where everybody's joyous 24-7, but is a project that remains, you know, in progress and worthy of the political

and to whatever extent we can do material support of people around the world. And I think largely receives that from lots of folks. So that's kind of my personal view that I was very skeptical and cautious to begin with, but the realities, as I have seen them and studied them over these years, indicates to me, as I discuss, I talk about this, of course, in the book on China's Revolution and The Quest for a Socialist future, that this is, that the reforms have been a good thing and continue to be pursued in basically positive ways. Certainly there continue to be contradictions and challenges, and we can talk about those. but that's my that's my bottom line kind of assessment as far as Dung Chau Pings historical position Dung

Doug is a very interesting figure he was one of the younger of the leaders so he was born in 1904 I believe it was you know so 12 years or so after Chairman Mao and you know six years or so after Joanne Lai

and so he was on the younger side in the in the during the World War I era, he lied about his age and was able to sign up for one of the labor conscription, not conscription, one of the labor volunteer groups that went to France. And he worked for a while in the Reno factory, the auto factory outside of Paris, which was a hotbed of the French Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, along with Joe Enlai, who was there not on the same program, but was also in France at that time, were became members of the French Communist Party, and then we're in 1921, in the group that founded the European sort of branch of the Communist Party of China in tandem with the foundational meetings of the CPC in Shanghai and Hangzhou at that time.

He stayed in France for a while. He spent time in Russia, comes back to China, you know, and is involved in the party's work. urban China. He doesn't take part in the Long March, but he does go to Yan'an and becomes a very important figure. He has, like most of the leading comrades, he plays both a civil and a military role in the party. He doesn't become one of the top leaders right away, but he is very much involved, especially in the Red Army and the liberation struggle.

after liberation he in the 50s the early 50s he's stationed in the southwest he was from Sichuan province to begin with and interestingly he's also he was also from the haka ethnic community that we talked about as being you know really a basic the sort of base of the Taiping rebellion all the way back in the 1840s and 50s he's based in the southwest China for the first few years was divided into what they called military regions. And so he's in the leadership of the Southwest military region. But then as they move to the more stable state formation and all that, he, you know, he's, he's involved in the leadership, but at a very much at a second tier kind of level, you know, on this sort of more,

more pragmatist side. He was a supporter of the Great Leap forward. You know, in retrospect, the Great Leap is often viewed rather with a rather jaundiced eye in China. by the present leadership. But Deng Xiaoping himself, if you read his speeches and his writings in the late 50s, was certainly a supporter of agricultural collectivization and a supporter of the Great Leap. Although he also, you know, takes a very pragmatic approach to resolving those contradictions. We talked about some of the policies and changes that took place after the Lushan Plenum, after the 10,000 cadre conference in 61.

Dung is right in there, you know, focusing on economic policy and all that. And the Cultural Revolution, of course, because of his association, he was very closely associated with the O'Shao Chi. And the O'Shaqi was targeted as one of the leading figures, you know, on the conservative side of the cultural revolution. So, Deng Xiaoping spends a lot of time away from Beijing down south. He's actually comes to be, he resides on a military base outside of Guangzhou and or Canton as it's known in the West. And, you know, that goes on until this sort of up and down period for his career in the 70s. He's always associated, as I say, with this sort of, you know, there's this dichotomy that gets talked about sometimes in the first 30 years of. of the revolutionary government between the Reds and the experts.

And he always leads to the expert side in the sense of viewing the challenges of development as things which required people with particular talent, skills, experiences, expertise. So he occupies, he definitely occupies a very distinctive position about how socialist development should go forward. But there's no question that, you know, he was a deeply devoted comment. communist revolutionary, deeply devoted to the goal of socialist development, the goal of building a new socialist China. But his, you know, the policy orientation, the positions that he occupied were often in contrast to to those that Chairman Mao and his followers strongly endorsed. So,

you know, he's, that that's just characteristic of this sort of struggle between two lines. By the time we get down to the end of the 70s and with his reemergence in November and December of 78, many people in the party have come to share his perspective. Not in a monolithic kind of way. I want to really always emphasize that. And we'll talk about that when we look at some of the debates in the 80s and beyond. The reform orientation is itself a broad field. And there are distinctive positions within it, which We can tease out as we go forward. But, you know, it is a, there is a strong consensus supporting Deng Xiaoping and the ideas which he is raising and propagating from 78 going forward.

Well, to hop in here, I'm going to ask a two-part question as well, although my two parts are going to kind of feed into each other. So, you know, whether it's one expansive question or two related questions is up for debate. The first question is about periodization of the reforms, and this is maybe something that we shouldn't dwell on too long, kind of a minute point, but just something I'm particularly interested in. So as we look at this reform period, I've seen it periodized in a couple of different ways. One of the ways that I've seen it periodized is from 78 up to 84 as a first phase, the lifting of price controls in 85 to Tiananmen in 89 is a second phase from. Tiananmen to the Southern Tour so 89 to 92 is kind of a third phase and then

from 92 the Southern Tour up until joining the World Trade Organization being a separate phase I know that I'm throwing out a lot of dates listeners I apologize but Ken will clear it up for me and then the other way that I saw

characterized or you know broken down is they took a much broader first wave in terms of from 78, basically up to Tiananmen, as tight of there was undulations, but it basically was the same phase. The Tiananmen Square protests in 89 up through joining the WTO in 2001, with, again, undulations as we went, but again, falling within the same phase,

and then from joining the WTO, and if I remember correctly, 2001 onwards. So those aren't like super different, but I'm just kind of interested in what you would say is a more useful way to look at the periodization because it'll definitely help me think about it. And I think it'll probably also help listeners think about how to view these different periods. Because regardless, I think that there is a general consensus that it's more useful to look at the reform period as phases of reform rather than one continuous program that flowed from beginning to end. And then relatedly, you know, regardless of whether you, you go with the really small breakdown in terms of small numbers of years and ending up with a bunch of phases, or the second characterization of a little bit bigger periods of time

and a smaller number of phases, the early days in both would generally be considered to be within one phase. And I guess if we could start talking about some of the reform measures, decollectivization of agriculture, allowing of foreign investment, entrepreneurship. things like that up to the lifting of price controls because in both cases that would be considered the first wave. It's just in one of the characterizations, the lifting of price controls would also be considered to be part of a first wave. Sorry that that's like a very convoluted question, Ken. Hopefully you can make something out of that. Well, that's a, that, you know,

you're, you lay out quite clearly a lot of the discussions and the debates that, that go on with people engaged in this. You know, I think it's okay to think of it in a couple of different ways. You know, we can maintain, you know, as sort of whether you want to turn up the fine tuning or whether you just want to get a broader brush. I think we could, you can, you can, you can think of three, three macro phases, let's call them that.

The first would be from 70, to 89, although that really spills over into 90 and 91. But, you know, let's just take that first, the 80s, the long 1980s, as the first phase. The second phase from 92, from the Nansuan, from the Southern Tour, I would say all the way down to 2012, okay, so a long phase. And then a third phase that begins in 2013 and brings us up to the present. You know, that's really interesting, Ken, because in both of the characterizations, there was a general consensus that they would split the pre-WTO era off from the post. Well, I'd not post, but in the WTO era.

So it's interesting that you're including all of that within one phase. Well, I think, yeah, when we get to joining the WTO, for me, that's not a turning point. That's part of what's going on in that whole era from 92 to 2012. That's a very important moment. Weirdly enough, I was in Beijing when Charlene Barshowski, the American trade negotiator, was there at one point. And I happened to have a friend who I'd known an American from the 1980s when she was studying in Beijing at the program that I was working with, who at that point was working at the American embassy, so I was hearing a lot about what was going on. And this was in, this would have been in 99.

And, you know, the, the intensity of that, of those negotiations and the, you know, the game playing that the Americans were doing and things like that, you know, there's no question that the decision to join the WTO was a big decision, but it's part of a process that begins, well, is revived and we re-invigorated with Deng Xiaoping in 92. But that really carries on all the way

down through the Hu Jintao era, right? Zhang Zemin and Hu Jintang. I don't see the WTO entry as demarcating different phases. That seems to me to be a central

node in a broad phase that runs from 92 to 2012. That's really interesting, Ken. And I'm sure that we'll get into that specific point when we talk about that phase. But since you're categorizing that first phase from 78 right up until 89 or maybe 92, why don't instead of cutting it off that price control, how I previously articulated the question, why don't you just take us through some of those major reforms that were taking place in that long 1980s, as you were describing it?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, certainly we can we can take that period and break it down into maybe three phases. You know, again, it's just how fine grain you want to get. And you could even, you know, demarcate a few other things within there. But basically, the reforms run along two tracks. And this goes back to the developments that went on in the first 30 years. And we want to be clear right at the beginning of talking about the reforms in a more concrete way, that the decisions that are made and the premise of what's going to happen was that, you know, the first 30 years of building socialism had achieved significant success. The Chinese economy had grown somewhere around 3% a year on the average, you know, for 30 years, which is significant growth.

you know, and people's livelihoods had been significantly improved. Housing, education, health care, you know, transportation, communication, all kinds of things had been improved, had been enhanced. The lives of the Chinese people in 1979, let's say, 30 years after liberation, were dramatically better. Life expectancy had risen, you know, tremendously. infant mortality, which is often taken as a public health indicator, had dropped dramatically the available food supply for people all through the country. Urban and rural, you know, had grown steadily, you know, obviously with disruptions around the time of the Great Leap. But overall, you know, that period is it's not a period of failure, as, you know, bourgeois critics like to argue.

but it was one which had achieved significant economic development. But that development had been matched in its pace by the population growth. You know, the number of people simply grew and grew. And in fact, the successes in things like health care facilitated that. People were living longer. They were healthier. And they were having more, you know, not more. children than before, but the children they were having were surviving at a higher rate.

So population growth goes on. You know, China passes a billion people right at the beginning of the 1980s. So that in itself is a mark of success, but it also means that many of the gains that were made in productivity, in food supply and all this are absorbed. You know, they're consumed by that growing population. So when we look at... China in 1978, 79, we're looking

at a society which had achieved, as I've heard it characterized by a number of people,

a kind of egalitarianism of poverty, right? Because people were not, you know, going hungry,

people were not unhoused. People were not, you know, plagued by disease and malnutrition anymore. That,

those days were long gone. People had adequate food, housing, opportunities, you know, all kinds of things. But the material standard of living was relatively modest, shall we say. And what the party leaders decide, what their feeling is, is that an egalitarianism of poverty is not socialism. Socialism is an egalitarianism of abundance,

right? The idea is that you want to develop the economy, you want to reach a point, where everyone has not just a basic sufficiency, but the ability to access a material life, have a material base for their lives, which allows them to fulfill themselves as individuals and as members of the collectivities of society. And so the goal of setting out on the path of reform is to develop the economy,

to increase, further increase, the material base, the material quality of people's lives. And that moves along a couple of tracks, one of which, very controversial, especially in the West, very contentious, although embraced by the masses of the people in the long run, was the one-child policies, the idea of slowing down population growth, right? easing the pressure on the economy of this rapidly growing population.

And, you know, obviously this was a policy that had its contradictions. Again, it's a human thing. It's a human society. But very, very quickly, it won widespread support and, you know, persisted down until very recently, what, I guess about eight years ago. So that's one track. And we need to understand that without the one-child policies, much of the growth that China has achieved would either not have been possible or would have been straightforwardly eaten up by a much larger population. China could today have a population of $1.8 billion, maybe even $2 billion, rather than the $1.4 billion that it has, which is in a state now of easing, of declining a bit, not elapsing.

but, you know, dropping slightly as we're going forward. And we can talk about that maybe towards the end a little more. But that's one thing that gets put in place. But the other and the more, you know, sort of classically economic dimension, was this concept of using the mechanisms of the market to develop the productive economy. The idea being that as Marx and Engels write about in the manifesto, as Lenin understood back in the new economic policies in the early 20s in the Soviet Union,

that to get an economy going, to get an economy growing, especially one that's directed towards addressing the needs of ordinary consumers, markets can play a positive function. Markets cannot be allowed to become the dominant thing. They can't become the driving force in the economy in the sense of just let's have it be wide open. Let's just let the markets do everything. But market mechanisms can be utilized to drive innovation, creativity, creativity, things like that. And so that's the underlying idea is that we're going to use the methods of the market to develop the productive economy. But we're going to maintain through the instrumentalities of the party and the state,

we're going to maintain oversight, we're going to maintain the socialist core of the economy, and we will use the power of the state and the party and the people to constrain and contain the contradictions, and in some instances, the excesses which we understand will arise in the course of implementing these policies. So this is a very clear-eyed approach to development. It's not an idealist, you know, let's just throw the place open to the market.

It's not an abandonment of the revolution and the role of the party. If anything, it's a strengthening of the role of the party because it puts the responsibility for, you know, not going down the capitalist road right smack on the party itself. right so that's what's that's what what's behind the specific policies that that we can look at and those proceed again along along two tracks that we've seen in place for a long time industrial development and agricultural development in the agricultural sector what we get is is the implementation there there'd been down in Sichuan province dung shawping's home province where he still had a lot of influence there'd been experiments that with what was called the household responsibility system.

And that is, in effect, a decollectivization of agricultural productivity. Although it's not, again, it's not just that abandonment of the socialist infrastructure because there's still, you know, township and county-level collectivities, but productive activity on the land is now structured in a very different way. And essentially what happens is that individual households are now able to enter into contractual relationships with these collective units, townships, counties, to produce a specified set quantity of particular agricultural product. This is primarily, of course, focused on grain. but this is a different mechanism for drawing grain into the central government, right? Grain is still used, you know, it's still marketed internationally as a source of capital,

as a source of money for development. Grain also has to come into the cities and, you know, be available for distribution. But now the mechanisms of doing that are state procurement, right, which is the contract that people enter into, but also parallel to state procurement markets. And so people can, once they have met their contractual quota of procurement for the state at a set state price, they can sell whatever surplus they have in private markets. And that, you know, leads very quickly in the first few years, 81, 82,

to an increase in agricultural production. That, however, plateaus pretty quickly. By 84, 85, you're not seeing those dramatic increases in agricultural production because you reach certain technological limitations. The amount of land, the amount of labor input, the availability of things like fertilizers and things like that. There are constraints, just natural physical constraints on agricultural productivity. But there is this wave, and that's one of the ways in which if we wanted to divide, you know, sort of sub-periods, that would be a marker, that first wave of the expansion of agricultural productivity. It gets up, it stays much higher, it continues to increase, but not in the dramatic leaps that we get in, say, 81 and 82. So that's on track. That's going on in the countryside, and that whole process will continue.

Although I will add one thing, just on agriculture very quickly to tease listeners that in the relatively near future we're going to have an entire episode on the issue of decollectivization of agriculture with Jeun Shu, who is a returning guest of the show as well. We're going to have him talk about his book from commune to capitalism. But one of the things he points out in this book is that a lot of the productivity gains within agriculture in this period was a result of increasing usage of inputs like land and labor rather than the specific policies themselves. You know, like it was input driven rather than organization driven, if that makes sense. So it's worth keeping that in mind just as an addendum to what you were saying, not that that invalidates what you were saying in any way. Oh, no. I mean, it's exactly right, that it is input-driven. The difference being that it, you know, I don't think you can separate out the role that the policies play in facilitating that new input structure. Of course. Yeah. There's a dialectical relationship. The inputs have to come from somewhere. The question is whether productivity is productivity because of organizations.

or whether the policy is including input into how it is going to increase output as a, as a, you know, productivity in that term. Sure. So I just wanted to help the listeners perhaps get that little taste of, you know, where that productivity in large part was coming from. And then again, just listeners stay tuned because we're going to have an entire episode devoted to agricultural reform in this period. And, again, the semi-near future. I'm talking with you in which one right now anyway. So, yeah. Yeah.

Sorry, Ken, feel free to carry on. That's fine. That's fine. On the industrial side, this things get, you know, things are perhaps a little more complex. The goal is to develop, you know, the productive economy, right? So that involves foreign direct investment, what's called FDI, foreign direct investment, opening up China to capital inputs from the outside. And in order to incentivize that, of course, you know, I mean, China has its attractions.

It has an educated, competent labor force, which is available at relatively low costs, certainly on a global comparative basis. They also, they pursue this in a couple of ways. One, of course, is the creation of the special economic zones, the SEZs. These were areas beginning down south at Shenzhen and Jujat, but then proliferating along the coast and eventually spreading to other areas in the country. These were areas where foreign corporations could invest, build productive capacity,

build factories, basically, and have special, you know, not be subject to the domestic sort of revenue structures within the country. They could repatriate a proportion of profits, a significant proportion of profits, but not everything. And these had to be structured. These investments needed to be structured as joint ventures. That is to say, there needed to be a Chinese partner in many of these enterprises. But, The, you know, the attractiveness of China, the attractiveness of China on two sides. One, on the, what I mentioned is the idea of this educated, sophisticated labor force that was available at globally, relatively very low prices to begin with.

But also, you know, the possibility of marketing, you know, a proportion of things that were produced. A lot of stuff, the idea was they were going to be produced for export. it. But there was also going to be the opportunity for marketing within the country. And that gets back to the old fantasy of Western Capital. And, you know, the line that comes from the early 19th century, if every Chinaman would extend the length of his sleeve of his gown by an inch, the mills of Lancashire would spin forever. You know, this vision, Carl Crow in the late 19th, early 20th century,

he wrote a book called 400 million customers. And this, you know, this, this, this vision of China as a vast new arena for the pursuit of profit was just irresistibly attractive to Western Capital. And so Western Capital starts to flow into the country. And through the 80s, there are a number of really tough structural questions about how reform can be implement it. We're going to have this new investment coming in. We're going to have these new productive facilities. We're going to have new commodities coming into the domestic markets. How do we manage that? How do we manage this growth? There's a wonderful book by a scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst called How China Escapeed Shock Therapy. And that's a really,

really critical question because we look at what happens with the Soviet Union once the collapse of the Soviet Union takes place and Western Capital just flows in and in conjunction with, you know, the fire sale of social assets that leads to the emergence of the oligarchs in the Soviet Union, you know, this is a problem that, you know, it doesn't get addressed for a while. You know, the initial phase of post-communist life in Russia is one in which, you know, capital faces very little in terms of management and constraint, and that has some very negative consequences. We don't need to go too deep into that. I think most people are familiar with that phase of things. But in China, the goal is to manage this process in a more incremental way.

and Isabella Weber's book looks at these debates within the party over how to go forward. There were distinctive positions. There were some who advocated for, you know, sort of all-out marketization, just let the markets do everything. There were others who, you know, really wanted to take a more cautious step-by-step approach in a variety of ways. There were debates, for example, one of the big decisions that gets made, although it has to be moderated and modified down the road, was to use the automobile industry as a driver for industrial development. This was based on the experience of the United States where back in the 1920s, you know, coalition of government and industry leaders, capital leaders,

you know, decided to basically dismantle what had been a massive public transportation infrastructure, especially in the eastern part of the country, and instead direct public funds to building roadways, highways and all this, so that the automobile industry could grow so that, you know, people would have an easy way to drive their cars, you know, all the way across the country. Think of the romantic images of, you know, Route 66 and all that. That's the result of conscious developmental policies on the part of American capital and the American state, you know, which is an instrument of administration of capital. The same kind of decision is made in China in the mid-80s to invest a lot, to allow a lot of investment in the development of, you know, the automobile industry.

And all the infrastructure that would go with that, building highways, developing, you know, a domestic, I mean, think of gas stations and restaurants and all this kind of stuff. And if you travel in China today, if you drive around in China today, you see that that follows through, that that is produced in a bunch of. But, of course, we know now that that leads to negative consequences because automobiles produce a lot of pollution. Now they're trying to address that, you know, by the whole development of electric vehicles. And, you know, these things generate their own contradictions. It's a dialectical process. And as historical materialists, we understand, and they understood that these processes would yield contradictions, which weren't necessarily anticipated or understood. right at the beginning.

And, you know, this again is that that phrase that that I think I've mentioned before about crossing the river by feel of the rocks, that the reform program isn't a pre-figured, guaranteed, just roll out the blueprints kind of thing. It's trying to build a socialist economy using these market mechanisms. And it's a, you know, definitely a complex process going forward. But those debates take place. and one of the crucial things, which Henry's already referred to, is the question of price reform, right? To what extent are we going to let prices be set by the market, by market forces?

You know, should there be price ceilings? Should there be price bases? What should be the range of market, you know, variation? How far can prices change? How rapidly can prices change? which sectors can be deregulated first and which should be held until later. And there are, you know, very, very dynamic debates about this. They bring in consultants from Eastern Europe where some of the socialist economies there had been struggling with similar questions. They bring in economists and industry specialists from the West.

And, of course, they're all advocates of you, just let it rip. But fortunately, for the most part, cooler heads, prevailed, and the process went forward in a somewhat incremental way. Until we get down to 1987 or so, when forces largely centered around the figures of Zhao Ziyang and Huyaobang sort of throw their support more to a more rapid price deregulation. And there's a 87, there's an attempt at that that only lasts. about six weeks and gets rolled back because it causes inflation and runs on commodities and

things. But after what they think of as some appropriate fine-tuning, they try it again in 1988 on a very large scale. And that triggers real serious economic problems, especially in the urban sectors that lead very quickly into the contradictions and the unrest. that breaks out in April of 1989. And I suppose that perhaps this is a time where we want to go ahead and move and talk about that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. It's a perfect segue because, you know,

obviously here in the West, if you know anything about China, it's almost always that image of the man standing in front of the tanks and Tiananmen Square and how the West made lots of hay out of this. And they still do to, you know, to label China as this authoritarian tyrannical regime. I mean, to say nothing of the hypocrisy of that for Western governments.

But that's a side point. And all the listeners will intuitively understand that. But I'm interested in the event itself. This is 89 is the year that I was born. So it's kind of interesting. And it's also the end of this sort of first phase that you've laid out for us in this three-phase approach. You said it could technically kind of go towards 91 and 92, but 89 is an interesting stopping point for phase one. So with all that in mind, can you tell us about the first?

the event and importantly how these conditions that you're talking about, these underlying conditions and this new economic issues arising from the deregulation of certain things, how that might play in to this event and the government's response. Yeah, you know, the only way to really make sense of what happens in 89 is to understand the contradictions that emerged in the course of the 80s. And, you know, and again, the leadership, I believe, and, you know, all the indications, things I've read suggest and people that I've talked with there, you know, talk about, the leadership understood that using markets was a dangerous thing and that it was going to lead to the emergence of contradictions. Contradictions like corruption, you know, that

opening things up to market forces, it creates opportunities for people in positions of power in the party or in the state to abuse their positions, their powers. You know, instead of seeing them as a public trust, instead of understanding their objective as serving the people, some people were going to take advantage of that to enrich themselves. They were going to manipulate the situation to their own advantage. And that was understood, but the idea was that, you know, you'd have to take measures to try to keep that under control. But that becomes a problem.

You didn't have a lot of corruption, you know, in the first 30 years. It was just a completely different kind of system, of structure. But now you have those opportunities, and some people did begin to abuse that power. So contradictions of corruption begin to emerge in the 80s, and people see that. There are also, you know, differential levels of improvement, of development. Some sectors advanced more quickly than others. Some people were feeling left behind. In particular, a lot of people that we might think of as the professionals,

and especially young people who were at the beginning or not even yet at the beginning of their careers, they were still students, thinking about what the future held for them. People who were basically in what we would think of as kind of public sector jobs, not public sector productive jobs like factories, but public sector jobs like education or medicine or the legal professions, journalism, other kinds of things like that, their livelihoods were not being improved as rapidly, kind of ironically in some ways, as those of farmers in the countryside or a lot of industrial workers.

Certainly in industry, there was some pain being inflicted in terms of reform of enterprise operation. But wages were rising and productivity was improving, you know, and all that. But there were differential effects of this. And some people, especially educated young people in the cities, apparently felt a certain level of anxiety and frustration that they were not being taken into account, or at least that they didn't have what they felt was a sufficient seat at the table, you know. they many people viewed Huya Bang in particular who had been leader of the young Communist League and had a lot of I don't know he had a lot of profile among young people

he dies on April 15th in 1989 right in the middle of a meeting of the leadership he had been he had been moved out of his top leadership position in 1988 because it was felt that the reforms that he was advocating were a little too fast, a little too unregulated, a little too reckless, basically. But he didn't lose this position in the leadership. He stepped down from his top position, but he was still a part of the Political Bureau, and it's in a meeting of the Political Bureau. He has a heart attack, you know, and dies.

That leads to some demonstrations by students. Again, sort of echoing back to 1976, and the April 5th, the Ching Ming demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. And, you know, there's perhaps some miscalculations on the part of the leadership. The leadership, again, is a complex mix of people. We don't want to think of it as this authoritarian monolith. You know, it's a political complex. And some elements in the leadership right away characterize even these protests, these marches,

as anti-party, right? The students, many of the students thought of themselves initially as just patriotic, but, you know, contradictions begin to emerge. Then, you know, this occupation of Tiananmen Square gets underway, and people are camping out and hanging out down in the square. And, you know, the state takes a very hands-off policy. They let people camp out in the square. You know, imagine if people, you know, tried to pull that by occupying, you know, that park right across from the White House in Washington.

They're swept out of there, you know, by the cops overnight, right? Not in Beijing. You know, these young people had something to say. There were different responses to what they were saying, but that was tolerated. But then at the end of April, beginning of May, Gorbachev makes a visit to Beijing. He's coming around. This had been a big deal. The Chinese were very proud of what they had accomplished in the reform era.

And here's, you know, Gorbachev, this sort of reformist leader in the Soviet Union, they wanted to show off their accomplishments. And this visit had been planned for a long time. Instead, Gorbachev arrives. They bring him in from the airport. They can't even take him in the front steps of the Great Hall of the people. They've got to sneak him in a side door. It's very, very embarrassing.

It's a real humiliation for the leadership, the Chinese leadership, with Gorbachev's visit. And to make matters worse, of course, the Western media have flocked to Beijing to cover Gorbachev's visit, which they thought was going to be this sort of triumphalist occasion. But now, you know, they're just delighted that it's an embarrassment for the leadership of the PRC. And they start, you know, calling the demonstrators, the protesters, they start emphasizing the idea that what they want is to overthrow the Communist Party, to overthrow the government of the People's Republic and to have a, you know, a color revolution. They didn't call them that quite yet. But to have this kind of regime change take place, which was not at all what people were saying at first. but then within the student movement, within this protest movement, new elements begin to emerge

and take over the leadership. People like Chilin and Wang Dan and Wur Kaishi, right? And I got to know Wara Kaishi because later on he was at Harvard when I was in grad school there. And this was not a fellow who had a profound grasp of politics and certainly knew nothing about democracy. Just a little side anecdote, he was, when he came to Harvard, he was assigned a tutor to help him, you know, work on his public sort of presentations because they thought he was going to be some great asset, you know, for the government program in Harvard. But he kept not showing up for his classes. And finally, his sort of overall handler confronted him and said, why aren't, what are you doing? You're supposed to be going to these tutorials so you can talk about, you know, your democracy movement.

And he says, in Chinese, he says, Minjua, which means democracy. It's such a hassle. You know, he just didn't have any understanding of what, you know, what real workers' democracy would be like, right? So these, this idea that the, that the demonstrators were calling for democracy and for, you know, overthrowing the government and all this,

that becomes what's going on, but that's a manipulated outcome, you know, these particular elements that came to be predominant, not necessarily among the actual people in the square even, but in the media, in what was being said. And, you know, there they are holding up their signs in English, right? They're building this, this bogus, you know, so-called Statue of Liberty thing, you know, evoking, you know, Western imperialist corps, right? So, you know, these contradictions deepened. The leadership, the party,

invited these leaders to come to the Great Hall, come into the Great Hall, and meet, you know, Deng Xiaoping, Li Pong, other leaders of the party, meet with the leaders. Warrakeesh shows up, wearing pajamas, right? He'd been in the hospital. and he, you know, that's okay, but he just comes over wearing his pajamas. I mean, the whole thing kind of spins out of control in this, in this bizarre theater.

And, you know, efforts to communicate, efforts to find a negotiating position just founder, because these more intransigent leaders, Chiling at one point says publicly that they want a bloody confrontation because that's the only way to provoke the kind of revolution that's going to sweep away, you know, the communist leadership. So, you know, the idea that somehow, you know, these were, these were innocent students who were just sort of protesting and then the evil communists, you know, come in and crush them. That's just such a concocted narrative, right? What happens, of course, we get to June. The city has been paralyzed. This is the capital of the country. It's been paralyzed for over a month. And they decide, the leaders decide that that can't go on, that they have to clear the streets. And they bring in elements of the People's Liberation Army. They come into the city, particularly from the west side, but also from the east side, along Chang'anje, the main east-west street. And by this time, there are elements that want to, you know, pursue this, this.

overthrow of the system that come out and fight. They stop some of the vehicles. They kill soldiers. They steal weapons and start killing more soldiers. In the course of the night, you know, the people that I know, and I was there, I wasn't there June 4th, but I was there by the beginning of July. And people I talked to who'd been involved in the protest, people I talked to who worked at the Naval Hospital, which was the closest one to where the main fighting took place because it was right across the street from the school that I was at back in the 80s told me that their best estimate was that in the course of all that somewhere between 6 and 800 people had been killed and that of that almost 300 had been military

personnel so this was a very very violent confrontation so it was not just you know soldiers rolling in and and massacring students that's not at all what happened this was a a violent uprising in the end that, you know, contested for the overthrow of the system. No one was killed in Tiananmen Square, you know, that whole mythology has been largely debunked by a number of sources. And really, if you go back and you read the immediate press coverage at the time by reporters who were there, they say the same thing. That's what they saw. but that gets you know mythologized and and as as brett said you know that image of the dude with the shopping bags and the tank that's that's just everybody's icon uh but in fact of course he doesn't he doesn't even get arrested right he stands there he stops the tank he does his little dance thing and then he goes on his way you don't see that that's never that's never shown you know we just get this idea of you know the tank and the heroic you know individual standing up to power. But that's not even an accurate representation of what's shown in the

video from which that still is taken. So, you know, I don't think anyone feels great about what happened June 4th in Beijing. You know, the party leadership did what they came to believe had to be done to clear the streets, to get the city functioning again, to get the government able to function again. That produces, of course, widespread international condemnation. The same bourgeois media that had been fanning the flames, had been legally anticipating, overthrowing the government. Now, of course, become a chorus of condemnation. And it was very difficult in those times to try to speak out in any way that tried to take a more calm and rational approach to understanding what it happened. There's just this chorus of condemnation.

You know, people, study programs, economic activity, there's a great downpair. I was there, as I say, in July of 89, because I was still working, even while I was in grad school, I was still working with this organization that ran programs. And there were, there were a dozen or so students who still, heroically, I think, went to Beijing that summer to study. and and, you know, you know, let's keep those exchanges, those things, those connections open. That was our, that was our view. But a lot of, you know, there was a lot of condemnation, a lot of boycotts and turning away.

Travel, you know, travel groups, tourism, that just went down the toilet for a while. But even this sort of wave of bogus hand-wringing and moral condemnation, you know, that fades because the overwhelming material realities of the modern world, the attractions of China, once again, the attractions of China for capital were irresistible. So, yeah, late 89, 90, 91 even, China's trying to recover from this. China's trying to reposition itself. But again, there's debates within the party leadership about, well, what do we do now? You know, we had these contradictions that emerged in the 80s.

We had this, you know, this unrest that turned into a, you know, a counter-revolutionary uprising. You know, how, you know, what are we going to do? Some people were like, we got to shut this down. We got to stop these reforms. We got to, you know, go back to a much more, you know, structured planned economy, you know, not just the core, but the whole thing, wipe this stuff out. Others, you know, took the position of, oh, the problem is we didn't go far enough. We didn't open it up enough to the free market, about enough.

And Deng Xiaoping then, once again, emerges as the voice of what we can think of as kind of the mainstream reform position. And that leads to his southern tour in 1992, where he, you know, kind of paraphrases Mao back when he said, communes are good. Now Deng Xiaoping, down in Shenzhen, says, reform is good. You know, we're going to get reformed back on track. We're going to move forward. We're going to deepen it, broaden it, strengthen it, you know, and move forward. So that's the turning point between that first phase.

I think that first phase has to include 89 and its aftermath as part of that whole, you know, sort of long 1980s. But 92 is clearly the change to that second, for me, long phase that's going to run for the next 20 years. well Ken that feeds right into my question and you already started to answer it and I know that we only have about 15 minutes or so left with you so I'll try to keep this brief because we still have two phases to talk about but as you were starting to answer the Southern Tour in 92 really was the changing point and then that second phase then goes on for about 20 years so just to be brief can you tell us a little bit about how the Southern Tour email emerges from that post-Tienaman atmosphere and how that then transforms into the second phase, which then carries out for 20 years. What are some of the high points? Just briefly, otherwise, we won't have a chance to hit the third phase. Sure, sure.

And we can extend a little bit, as I say, I got a little wiggle room. So, yeah, you know, the Southern Tour, which so interestingly, the term they use for that, the Chinese term they used for it, the Nansuan, is a term that refers back to the Qing dynasty when both the Kangxi and the Chenlong emperors did what they called inspection tours to go down to southern China to look at how things were going. And this was a phase, the late 17th, 18th centuries, where China was once again booming, where its sort of commercial capitalist economy had rebounded from the turmoil of the mid-17th century. So the Nanshun, the southern tour, had this sort of evocation of a moment of transition where things were going to get, you know,

things were going to be better, things were going to improve, and that the leadership was checking it out to make sure that we were on track. They were on track. So, you know, that's the result, as I say, of these debates within the party after 89 about how to go forward, changes in leadership. Jiao Ziyang is out as prime minister. You know, he was seen as, again, for sure, lines of reform that were just too excessive. Zhang Zemin is brought in. He's a sort of consummate technocrat. And after the course of debates, because it's a, you know, it's a democratic centralist

party, they reach the conclusion that we're going to reinvigorate reform along certain lines. And so the Don't, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the public event that communicates that commitment, that re-invigoration of reform. But this second long phase needs to be understood in a very particular context or a very particular way. And this is why I don't see the WTO membership as a rupture point, but as a as a step along this long path. Because this is the phase. This is the period, of course, where China's economy really takes off. You have 10, 11, 12, even 13% annual growth rates through this long period, well over a decade.

Capital is flowing in. Technology is coming in. China is increasingly drawing on the global capitalist system to develop its economy. And that economy is developing very, very rapidly. that takes place China needs to accommodate itself to that global capitalist system and Deng Xiaoping, maybe the last of his important messages, was he urges other leaders, Zhang Zemin, Hu Jintao, others

who are going to follow after him to buy their time and build their capabilities, right? And what that meant was we're going to, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to pursue this course of development. We're going to build our economy. We're going to maintain our socialist core up to the point where we can reach a point where we can begin to implement socialist distribution. For now, we're using that, you know, market mechanisms. You know, frankly, you know, those are mechanisms for the extraction of surplus. We're Workers are working in the factories. They're working in various kinds of productive activities,

construction workers, all this. They're being paid wages. And those wages are not the same as socialist distribution. They're not getting, you know, some sort of absolutely equitable distribution of the value that they're producing. There's a process of accumulation going on, some of which is in private hands, profitability to, you know, private capital and foreign capital. But a lot of of which is accumulation of social wealth in the hands of the state, right? So the socialist state. So we recognize that. And we recognize that to build the economy, we have to go through this. And we need foreign capital. And we need foreign technology. And we need foreign expertise. So we're going to, we're going to not shove socialism in the face of the global

system. We're going to take a low profile, bide our time, build our capabilities. Joining the WTO is a perfect example of that, because it brings China into this global capitalist nexus in ways that allow it to be more attractive, have better conditions for the access to foreign technology and capital. And the economy grows and grows and grows. People's livelihoods, approved, the availability of housing, you know, the per capita square feet available for people just grows and grows and growth. Educational opportunities, the number of people able to go to college. Now in China, almost half of people graduating from high school can go to university. When I was there in the early 80s, that was maybe 10, 12%, you know. So that's a remarkable expansion

of educational opportunity. Improvements in health care, all these kinds of things are going on. but China is is keeping its head down. China is going along with global capital. And what this does, one of the things it does is it, it kind of feeds the wishful thinking, the illusions of Western capital, of Western imperialism, of basically the United States. 1989 didn't work out for them. They had hoped that the communist government would fall and something much more sympathetic to global capital would replace it and capital would have kind of free reign to restructure China

in the same way that they were busily going about trying to restructure Eastern Europe to Soviet Union, places like that. But instead China, you know, survived 1989 and reinvigorated the reform period. but Western imperialism still hoped, still dream that, as you often heard them say, economic liberalization inevitably leads to political liberalization. And when they say liberalization, what they mean, of course, is the power of capital, right? So they continue to nurture that fantasy.

Joining the WTO, that seemed like, ah, okay, they're playing along. You know, they're, yes, they're coming to join us. But what China was really doing was taking advantage of the global capitalist system to develop itself, to develop its economy. It was doing exactly what they said. And if you read what they talked about, you know, in the domestic press and everything, which, of course, is often dismissed as just propaganda in the West, they're always very clear that the goal is to build a socialist future. The goal is to build a level of material prosperity that would allow for socialist distribution to create, to move finally towards that egalitarianism of abundance

that was the overall, the overarching objective of reform, to build the economy to that point. Okay. So that goes on. And there's bumps along the way. There's the 97 financial crisis around Asia. China weather's that. remarkably well. They had accumulated tremendous foreign exchange reserves, dollar reserves,

which they were able to pump in, for example, to Hong Kong to keep the Hong Kong dollar from falling in the way that, you know, the Thai bot or the Indonesian ringet had collapsed as market, you know, speculators, money market speculators had messed around foreign exchange. You know, China had the muscle to tough it out through the 97 credit. crisis. But when we get down to 2008, things get interesting because that's the point at which, you know, we have this global financial crisis, you know, these ridiculous derivatives and bogus mortgage packages in the United States lead to a massive financial meltdown, 2007, 2008, which then infects the rest of the global capitalist system and causes

tremendous hardship. People lose their homes, people lose their savings. We see it as the worst capitalist crisis, probably since the global depression back in the 1930s. It affects China, not in the financial sector, because China has always kept its financial sector walled off from global speculators, but in the productive sector, because consumer demand in the West, especially in the United States, largely evaporates, but evaporates. And corporations like Walmart, you know, that are huge exporters out of China into the United States, they're not buying stuff. Other, you know, other companies as well, they're just, they're not, you know, consumer demand is not there. 20 million people, maybe even a little more,

are laid off by factories in China. 20 million people lose their jobs. But it's at that point that we can see how the socialist school in China, how the socialist system in China, makes it so different from the capitalist West. Because those 20 million people, yes, they lose their jobs, but you know what? They have household registrations. They have what's called a hookah,

and they can go home to the villages from which they had come, where they are guaranteed housing, they're guaranteed health care, they're guaranteed education for their children, and they have access to other economic, resources. They're not living the life of luxury. They're not, you know, going back and just, you know, even living the material quality of life probably that they had in their, you know, where they were working. But they're not cast out on the streets. They're not living in, in refrigerator boxes,

you know, on the sidewalk. They're not putting up tent cities because they have nowhere to go and no one to help them, you know. The socialist core is there and they're taken care of. And I'm observers in the West see this, and they hear how China talks about what it's doing, you know, that socialism is taking care of people. And I think this begins to undermine the sort of rosy view of the future that Western Capital had, that China was going to somehow at some point go through what by now they call the color revolution and become a subordinate component of the global capitalist system. That leads in the West in 2011 to Obama and Hillary Clinton announcing the pivot to Asia

and calling for a new American Pacific century. They're now seeing China not as a potential future component of the capitalist system, but somehow as some sort of rogue country that isn't getting with the program. And it's in that context that this second phase, this long phase of building the economy, accommodating China to Western capitalism, biting time, keeping a low profile, but building capability, building the economy, creating vast improvements in the material quality of life and conditions in China, accumulating social wealth in the hands of the government. now they reach a point where they can move to the next phase which now they start to talk about as the primary phase of socialism and that is marked by the election of Xi Jinping right Xi Jinping and Li Kucheng at that point are elected in 2012 as the new leaders

they take office in 2013 and that begins sort of the third macro phase which we are in today right And now it's, what, 13 or 11 years down the road, we're still in that phase. And that's a phase where China no longer has to totally accommodate itself to Western capitalism, to the global capitalist system. China by this time has achieved a level of material abundance, not, you know, not the end of goal, but they're starting to achieve what they call a moderately prosperous. society, right, where, you know, by 2019, they complete the project of lifting 800 million people

out of poverty. They eliminate the final pockets of absolute poverty by United Nations standards, right? And of course, they continue it. It's not like, oh, we did that, we're done with that. They're continuing to redistribute social wealth that has been accumulated by the process of of, you know, surplus extraction. There's no question that that's how this is done. But they have social wealth that can be redistributed into poverty eradication, into programs to deal with environmental issues. They understood, and they got a clearer and clearer understanding that along with corruption

and inequality, that environmental contradictions were also going to emerge from the use of markets. But now they're redirecting socially accumulated wealth to address those things, to invest in alternative energy, to invest in research and development for addressing climate change, global warming, things like that. China is probably the leading country, certainly the leading developed country in terms of its activities, in terms of its contributions to trying to address global warming, whether it's alternative energy production, solar panels, electric vehicles, we could go through a whole panoply of ways in which China is playing that role. Finally, the last point I want to make on this theme is that when we get to the pandemic, we get to COVID-19. Once again, we see how China's socialist system handles this in a way that's completely different from the West where it's seen as a profit opportunity. In China, the party, the state the people mobilize to contain the virus, to contain the pandemic.

Again, of course, the West condemns this. Oh, look, it's authoritarianism. Lockdown. Lockdown. Lockdown. That's all we heard in the West. But the realities in China, again, certainly in a human society with contradictions, with mistakes, with problems along the way. There's no, you know, we're not, we're not trying to say everything went perfectly. But they did a lot of. of things right, and they kept their death count down. They saved lives. They made human life, saving human lives, the priority, not generating profits for insurance companies, hospital corporations, pharmaceuticals, you know, super profits for all those sectors in the West, while the United States has lost, you know, what, 1.1 million people now. In China, until they relaxed,

the policies a year and a half ago, not quite, you know, 14, 15 months ago, they had fewer than 5,000 deaths. And even, you know, there's a wave of mortality that emerges after the relaxation of the policies. They're still under 60,000, right? So a fraction, a small fraction of deaths in the West in a population four times bigger than that of the United States. So, you know, the United States can rant all at once about what a great health care system it has and how China is such a terrible authoritarian place. But the reality is that China saved the lives of perhaps three or four million people while the United States just cast human life down the toilet so long as profits were being made for corporations. And that contrast, that demarcates the way in which China remains on the path of socialist development. Are they there? Have they achieved full socialism? No. No. There's still workers in factories who are not receiving the full wealth, the full value of the labor that they are expending, you know, of the wealth that they are producing. We understand that's what market mechanisms mean. And, you know, we want to get past that. They want to get past that. The goal is socialism. And then eventually, and this is going to take a long time, communism, from

each according to their ability to each according to their needs. That's the goal. That's the dream. Xi Jinping talks about staying true to the original mission of the revolution. That's what he's talking about. They're on that path. Will they succeed? I certainly hope so. And I believe so. But I also know history. There's no done deals. So we watch it. We support it. We encourage it. We oppose imperialist efforts to derail China's development, to contain China, maybe to destroy China, you know, we oppose those, but we do so, you know, recognizing that we support China in what I like to call, we extend critical support. There are things, there are contradictions that we don't approve of.

There are things that, you know, different of us and we'll have different opinions about. but overall we think that the path of socialist development is worth support and that's that's kind of where we're right an absolute masterclass um the rhetoric veered into inspiring at times and i genuinely agree with with everything you said and i've never heard as good of a breakdown of that period um as you just gave a way to end this episode and i know you you've certainly touched on it and we could we could end right there because you you had a wonderful sort of closing statement but looking to the future. One thing that I see a lot, especially in the West, and this is no surprise to anybody who's been listening to this conversation or knows anything about this topic, there's constant predictions of China's collapse. One of the figures that have risen up lately, I've read every one of his books because I'm a masochist, is Peter Zahan, and he is convinced that the demographic crisis in China is such that China is going to collapse. And any day now, I'm checking my watch. Any day now, it's going down. So I'm interested in your thoughts on the near-term future of China, how Xi Jinping sees himself and his leadership of the Communist Party in light of everything we've learned about Dang and Mao and the party itself. And then this idea of socialism by 2050 and what the near-term and medium-term goals are for the Communist Party of China on their path towards socialism and, as you said, eventually, over the long-term communism. yeah yeah boy i mean we could do a whole not another hour on that but um given the the constraints that that we have to work with um yeah you know china's positioned at an interesting moment uh and and and i think that that it's actually a very interesting moment because

we have this this demographic situation where china's population has started to become smaller, not at any kind of rapid pace, but it's not growing. And that sort of arc of development of growth of the population is going to, it's starting to turn down. And of course, there's, you know, in certain circles, there's just panic about this, including, including some in China. You know, oh my God, what's going to happen? So few workers to support an older population. Well, at the same time, Xi Jinping and others in China have just in the last few weeks started talking, using a phrase of new productive forces, right?

You're going to, if you're following Chinese media at all, you've got to be hearing this more and more. I just printed out a translation of some talk about this that's come out in the last couple of days. I'm really fascinated with this. And basically, I think going forward for China to achieve their goals, what they're going to do, this is, again, a situation in which it's the socialist nature of the system that's going to be critical. Because technological innovation, what we sometimes call automation or, you know, cybernetics,

you hear various terms for it, basically the enhancement of the fixed capital component of production, right, the accumulated capital, you know, in technology. First, it was in machinery, now it's in, you know, high-tech systems and things like that, as opposed to the, you know, the living proportion of capital, the labor. input, human labor input, active human labor input, you know, the organic dimension, I suppose you might call it, is declining. In the West, that produces a crisis in the economy because, you know, you need fewer workers. So more and more people get laid off from their jobs. But then they're not earning an income. So how can they buy the products that are coming out of the factories, right?

you know for a capitalist economy that's a very very difficult contradiction to to address because you don't want to pay people who aren't working because if they're not working you're not extracting value from their labor right so we're not going to pay them right uh so but on the other hand if people aren't being paid if people don't have jobs how are they going to be consumers so it's a that's a fundamental structural problem for a capitalist economy that's why we have to have socialism because in socialism you have this social accumulation of wealth, right? And then social distribution of wealth. And this idea of new productive forces,

I think what they're talking about and where they're going with this is the idea that as the economy becomes, the economy becomes more productive, as essentially we can call it capital, becomes more productive, the need for labor is going to be less and less. So having fewer workers, younger workers, doesn't have to be a problem, right?

In fact, with growing efficiency of productivity, with growing technological inputs in productivity, fewer people can continue to produce greater value. And with a socialist system, that value can be distributed to everybody, right? to everybody. It can still be based upon your input. You know, socialism is from each according to their ability to each according to their work. It can still be based upon that. But the quantity of work necessary to produce X amount of value, you know, is going to be less. So the distribution can still be, you know, one of abundance. So I think going forward that that's the direction that China needs to be working to achieve.

And this discussion, this rhetoric of new productive forces, I think is articulating that. It's just beginning to emerge. And we've got to keep an eye on it. But I think that when we look at what China is doing in terms of its research and development, its investment structures, its emphasis on building an ecological civilization, which again focuses on reducing resource consumption. making production more efficient in those ways as well, I think that they're on to a number of good paths, a number of good tracks. You know, the U.S., of course, is doing everything it possibly can

to derail that, you know, sanctions and embargoes and technological boycotts, and of course, trying to force China to divert investment from enhancing productivity into military things, a new arms race, which they're, you know, they're certainly not buying. Their expenditures on military things are still a tiny fraction of those of the United States. But, you know, I do think that going forward, those are the directions in which I think China is going to be developing, you know, over the next few decades. Having said that, I, of course, also have to trot out the classic caveat that I am a historian. You know, I work on the past. And one thing that we learn is that predicting the future is really always a challenge.

We don't learn from the past in the sense of we can turn it around and just project it into the future. But I do think that we can see trends and patterns and we can see goals and objectives that the Chinese have articulated for themselves and movement in those directions, which suggests to me that a more sophisticated, a more productive economy going forward is already being utilized to address social needs through the accumulation of social wealth. And that that process can be, should be, and hopefully will be advanced by the party,

by the state, by the people as we move deeper into the 21st century. Yeah, a great note to end on. Just had to throw out that when Brett was referencing the coming collapse of China, the first thing that came into my mind, of course, was Gordon Chang, who has been revising his predictions for when that collapse would happen pretty much every other year for the last, what, 15 years at this point. But, you know, who knows? Eventually he might be right in a couple hundred years or so. You never know. That's about at the rate that we would expect Gordon Chang to be right on anything else.

But Ken, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on for this mini-series. I know that I mentioned in the previous episode that, you know, if we knew it was going to be this one, we would have just told you, Ken, it's going to be a 10-part mini-series that you're joining us for. But we will stick to saying that this is a four-part miniseries for now. We'll bring you back when your new books are coming out. And it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you about modern Chinese history over this past five to six hours of conversation that we've had. in these four episodes. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. I truly appreciate you coming and spending so much time with us and laying things out as clearly and comprehensively as you did.

So again, our guest was Ken Hammond. This was part four of our series on modern Chinese history. Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University, author of China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. Ken, can you let the listeners know where they can find your book? Sure. The book is published by 1804 Books in New York, and it's available at their website at 1804 Books.com. And we're also working with them, as Henry just alluded to, on a new book called China and the World, 1949 to 2024, looking at China's international relations and the ways in which those have been both rather consistent in some ways, but also have varied.

in different historical moments. We're hoping to have that out in time for the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic this October. But, you know, stay tuned and we'll let you know. And definitely keep us in the loop, Ken. And when that's ready, we'll bring you back on. Brett, how can the listeners find your excellent podcast? And again, thanks for guest hosting this series. It's been a great pleasure having you here for all four parts of it.

It's been an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Ken. And I would love to come back and co-host for that next episode you do about his new book because I really love talking to him and love learning from it. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio.com.

Thank you, Henry. Of course. My usual co-host Adnan Hussein has been unable to join us for this series as a result of some health things, but he's getting over them. You definitely should follow him on Twitter at Adnan-A-H-U-S-A-N,

subscribe to his other podcast, the Mudgellis, which is focused on the Arab world and Muslim diaspora issues. That's M-A-J-L-I-S, wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at H-U-C-K-1-9-9-5. You can help support the show. Allow us to continue making episodes like this at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with everything that we're putting out individually and collectively at Gorilla underscore POT. again, Gorilla is spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.