Rev Left Radio - Modern China pt. 4: The Deng Reform Period to Today w/ Ken Hammond

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

In our final installment of our Modern China series, we conclude with this important, and inevitably controversial discussion of the Deng Reforms and the Reform Period!  Very important that no matter your ideological tendencies, you come into this episode with an open mind, because there will be a lot of useful information for you regardless of how you analyze the Deng Reforms overall - this is meant primarily as a resource to allow you to deepen your personal understanding and analysis of this critical juncture in Chinese and world history.  We definitely want to also thank Ken for spending over 6 hours with us on this mini-series, and we hope that you all get some use from it! Check out episodes 1 - 3 HERE Ken Hammond is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. He has been engaged in radical politics since his involvement in the anti-war movement at Kent State in 1968-70.  Ken is also the author of the book China’s Revolution & the Quest for a Socialist Future.

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. Welcome to guerrilla history. 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 gorilla 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-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. Judal, who is the founder of the Red Army,

dies in July. And Maudezodl, 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. Tongshan 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 Huan, 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, harkening 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, you know, 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. The Ushout she 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, you know, purged again, brought back again, and given positions of responsibility by Chairman Mao. But then in the spring of 76, after Joe N. 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 Tenement Square to place rees and banners and things honoring Joy and Lai.

That was seen by the gang of four as endorsing 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 a 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 pragmatian. wing in the party, and there's a consensus emerges that they want to move away from these very militant positions that were held 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 moved 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 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 orientation was going to be, 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 re-emerges, 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.

He, you know, Deng Xiaoping doesn't want to 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, 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 Mao, Deng Xiaoping isn't the reform movement. He's 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 Communist 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, you know, 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 gang 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, 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 was still a sort of blue and gray kind of environment. And in terms of, you know, people's clothing and things like that and the streets and Beijing is a very gray city historically. because a lot of the walls in the Houtongs, 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 many of those changes were clearly felt to be good by the people that I was getting to 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 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 suggest that this has been a worthy endeavor and one which certainly hasn't been 100 percent, you know, miraculously successful in creating a perfect worker state where everybody's, you know, 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 social's 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 bottom line kind of assessment. As far as Deng Xiaoping's 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 Lye.

And so he was on the younger side 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, 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 were 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 Hongzhou 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 in urban China. He doesn't take part in the long march, but he does go to Yan'an and becomes, you know, a very important figure. He has, like most of the leading comrades, he plays both a civil and a military role in, 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 from the Haka ethnic community that we talked about as being 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's involved in the leadership, but at 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. In retrospect, the Great Leap is often viewed 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 kinds of, 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 El Shao Chi. And the El Shao Chi was targeted as one of the leading figures, you know, on the, 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 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 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 in, often in contrast to those that Chairman Mao and his followers strongly endorsed. So, you know, 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. 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 it 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 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 and 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. And hopefully you can make something out of that. Well, that's a, you know, you're, you lay out quite clearly a lot of the, the, the, the discussions and the debates that, that go on with people engaged in this. You know, I think, I think it's okay to think of it in, in, in, in a couple of different ways, you know, we can, we can maintain, you know, a sort of whether you want to turn up the, the fine, the fine tuning or whether you just want to get a, a, broader brush. I think you can, you can, you can think of three, three macro phases. Let's call them that. The first would be from 78 to 89, although that really spills over into 90 and

91. But, you know, let's, 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 the post, but not post, but in the WTO era. So it's interesting that you're including all of that within one phase. Well, I think, I think, yeah, when we get to joining the WTO, for me, that's not a, that's

not a turning point. That's part of, that's part of what's going on in that whole era from 92 to 2012. You know, that's a very important moment. I, weirdly enough, I was in Beijing. when Charlene Barshefsky, 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 would have been in 99. And, you know, the intensity of 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 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 reinvigorated with, with Deng Xiaoping in 92. Yeah. But that really carries on all the way down through, you know, the, the Hu Jintao.

era, right? Zhang Zemin and Hu Jintao. So, yeah, I don't, 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 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, 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, the, that period is, it's not a period of failure as, 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, in its pace by the population growth, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, 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 not more children than before, but the children they were having were surviving at a higher rate. So population growth goes on. 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. 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 they're, what they're, 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, right? 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 It's a human thing. It's a human society. But very, very quickly, one 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 it 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, of, you know, 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 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, management efficiency, productivity, 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 strange. 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 behind the specific policies that we can look at. And those proceed, again, 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 the implementation. There'd been down in Sichuan province, Deng Xiaoping's home province, where he still had a lot of influence. There'd been experiments 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 an 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, you know, 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. a 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, okay?

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 first wave, and that's one of the ways in which if we wanted to divide 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 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 Jun 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. we're 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 solely 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 uh so i just wanted to help the listeners perhaps get that little taste of uh 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 uh agricultural reform and period in the, again, the semi-near future. I'm talking with Shun 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 for 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, 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, 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 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, you know, there are a number of really tough structural questions about how reform can be implemented. 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, 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, a 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 abundance. 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 prefigured, 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 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 these, 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. 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 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 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 all the indications, things I've read suggest, and people that I've talked with there 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, as 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 were 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 money. 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 and 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.

They, many people, viewed Huya Bang in particular, who had been leader of the, 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 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 Qing Ming demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. And, you know, there's perhaps some 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 same. 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, you know, 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 Wurakashi, right? And I got to know Wurakishi, right? And I got to know Wurakishi, 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 at 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, time, which means democracy. It's such a hassle, you know. He just didn't have any understanding of what, you know, what a, you know, what, what, what, what real workers democracy would be like, right? So these, this idea that, that the, that the, the, the, the, the demonstrators were calling for, 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 in in 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 the leadership the party invited these leaders to come to the great hall come into the great hall and meet you know Heng Xiaoping, Li Pung, other leaders of the party, meet with the leaders. Wara Khashis shows up wearing pajamas, right? He'd been in the hospital and, 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 bizarre theater.

And, you know, efforts to communicate, efforts to find a negotiating position, just fact. 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 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 concoct. 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'anjia, the main east-west street. And by this time, there are elements that want to pursue 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 protests, 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 massacring students. That's not at all what happened. This was 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 mythologized. And as Brett said, you know, that image of the dude with the shopping bags and the tank, that's just everybody's icon. But in fact, of course, 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, you know, 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 downturn. 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, you know, let's keep those exchanges, those things, those connections open. 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, even this, this sort of wave of bogus hand-wringing and moral condemnation, you know, that, 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 is trying to be. covered 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, a 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, not 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 his southern tour

in 1992 where he 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 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, to that second, for me, long phase that's got 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 emerges from that post-Tieneman 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 we can extend a little bit uh as i say i got a little wiggle room so um yeah you know the the the southern tour which so interestingly they they the term they use for that the chinese term they use for it the nansuan uh is a term that refers back to the ching dynasty when both the kongshi 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 it's, you know, sort of commercial capitalist economy had rebounded from the turmoil

of the mid-17th century. So the non-shun, 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 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, pursuing lines of reform that were just too excessive. John 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 Doug Chauping's southern tour is the, it's the public event that communicates that commitment, that reinvigoration 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 I don't see the WTO membership as a as a as a as a as a as a as a as a step along this long path because this is the phase this is the period of course where where China's economy really takes off you have you know 10 11 12 even 13 percent annual growth rates through this long period over you know 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, you know, who are going to follow after him, to bide 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 social distribution. For now, we're using market mechanisms. You know, frankly, you know, those are mechanisms for the extraction of surplus. 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 private capital and foreign capital, but a lot 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, you know, be more attractive, have better, you know, conditions for the, for the access to foreign technology and capital. And the economy grows and grows and grows. People's livelihoods improve. The availability of housing, you know, the per capita square feet

available for people just grows and grows and grows. Educational opportunities. The number of people able to go to college. You know, 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 percent, 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 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, And what they mean, of course, is the power of capital, right? So they continued 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 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 these 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 Ringgit had collapsed as market speculators, money market speculators, had messed around foreign exchange. You know, China had the muscle to tough it out through the 97 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. 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 hooko. 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 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 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 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, you know, 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, 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 a long, 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, right? 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 is 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 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-profit. 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, what, 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, you know, 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 kind of 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, 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. 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 in that. 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. 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 given the constraints that we have to work with, yeah, you know, China's positioned at an interesting moment. And I think that it's actually a very interesting moment because we have 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 starting to turn down. And of course, there's, you know, in certain circles, there's just panic about this, 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, right? 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 there. 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 1804books.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.

Yeah, 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 him. 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-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A- underscore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.