Upstream - [TEASER] China Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Jason Hickel

Starting point is 00:00:00 A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you, comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. China does not in fact pose any kind of actual military threat to the people of the United States or Europe, and indeed the sole reason for Western fear mongering is because China

Starting point is 00:01:00 is just achieving economic sovereignty, and this is basically undermining the imperial arrangement that Western capital accumulation depends on. is just achieving economic sovereignty. And this is basically undermining the imperial arrangements that Western capital accumulation depends on. And for the West, this is just not on. They're not willing to let this happen. And that's why they went to go to war. It's actually wild to consider that they're willing to flirt with the possibility of global nuclear warfare

Starting point is 00:01:19 in order to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation. That's effectively what we're facing. I think we have to be clear about that. It's a disaster and none of us should accept it. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The world we all grew up in is no longer a reality, although in many ways those in power are still grasping onto it with the desperation of drowning men. Flailing, lashing out, furious, terrified, and in denial of what is staring them in their

Starting point is 00:02:01 faces. Imminent death. The rest of us are watching this process unfold before our very eyes, also terrified but seemingly powerless. It's a weird time to be alive, but when has it ever not been? As we watch, experience, and feel the collapse of the state that we live within, or for those of us not currently living in the belly of the state that we live within, or for those of us not currently living in the belly of the beast, the imperial world that this state rules over, it feels like it's an important time to explore this collapse. Specifically, it's an important time to understand what's happening in the imperial world order.

Starting point is 00:02:41 And in order to do that, we must understand China. In this conversation, we've brought on a regular guest, a guest who you all know and love – Jason Hickel – to talk about China. Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the author of the books, The Divide, A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions, and Less is More, How D-Growth Will Save the World. In this conversation, we first take a brief dive into modern Chinese history,

Starting point is 00:03:20 looking at the pre-revolution period, the 1949 communist revolution itself, the Mao period, the Deng period, and the Xi period. We analyze what the rise of China means in terms of the current world order and the implications for the United States. We tackle some common questions and dispel some common myths about China. Like is China capitalist? Is it imperialist?

Starting point is 00:03:48 We analyze some current events like trade wars and the TikTok ban. And finally, we explain why it's crucial to not fall into the trap of US propaganda when it comes to how we on the Western left analyze China. And now here's Robert in conversation with Jason Hickel. All right, Jason, it's wonderful to have you back on the show. Hey, Robbie.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Thanks. Good to be back with you. Yeah, you are definitely one of our most popular guests and quite a frequent guest, actually, which is really exciting. And our episodes with you are always a lot of fun, extremely informative. Our listeners always have a lot of great responses. So it's really great to have you back on and especially for such an interesting topic. So before we jump in to China, I love it just in case there are any listeners out there who aren't familiar with you, if you could introduce yourself and just talk a little bit about the

Starting point is 00:04:56 work you do. Yeah, sure. So I'm a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. And my research focuses mostly kind of on imperialism and ecology in the capitalist world economy, with kind of a particular focus on how we can achieve post-capitalist transformations, and also how global south countries can achieve sovereign developments kind of delinking from imperialist exploitation, so that we can ensure good lives for everyone within planetary boundaries. And we also have a big research project that's based at ICTO, where I work, with a couple dozen

Starting point is 00:05:35 researchers that are all working on these issues too, so it's quite an exciting team. I've written a couple of books related to these topics that people can check out if they want to. One is called The Divide, a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions. And more recently, Less is More, How Degros Can Save the World. Incredible. And I just want to underscore the research that's coming out of your research team is like phenomenal, and you're doing such incredible and important work. So thank you so much for everything that you do and for sharing a little bit about it.

Starting point is 00:06:07 Today we're here to talk about China. And I'm wondering if we could start with just a brief history of modern China. So we are planning on getting into the history more in the next few months or so with, I'm not sure if you're familiar actually with Kenneth Hammond, but he has a couple books out. We're going to be diving a lot deeper into the history. So for now though, I do think it might be helpful for a brief history, just for anybody who really

Starting point is 00:06:37 doesn't know much or anything at all about Chinese history. It might be helpful to help orient them and give sense to maybe some of the things that we may reference as we move forward. So like, yeah, maybe you could just guide us through the period prior to the revolution briefly, and then talk about the revolution itself, you know, the period of marketization of the economy, and just anything else that you think might be helpful to set the stage as we move forward? Okay, yeah, cool.

Starting point is 00:07:06 So yeah, I think this is important because in my experience, most people in the West actually have very little knowledge of Chinese history. And to me, this is sad because it's actually this extraordinary story of how oppressed masses of workers and peasants rose up against capitalist imperialism, fought against not only the national reactionary

Starting point is 00:07:26 forces, but also against the US, Britain, and France, like the most powerful states in the world at the time. They managed to win against incredible odds, and they succeeded in establishing a socialist society that is still with us today, which has achieved actually really incredible things. So, it's an amazing story. And so I think that it's useful to kind of start with that. Now, the difficulty of course, is that China's history is thousands of years old. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to skip like most of it. And just we're going to focus on kind of the more recent modern period right around the turn of the 19th century. This is where I think that the story becomes quite relevant. So this is during the Qing dynasty, which was a long period of

Starting point is 00:08:05 political stability, during which China became the major manufacturing powerhouse in the world economy. At this time, China accounted for something like more than 30% of total global manufacturing output, which is huge. You have Britain and Western Europe that were consuming massive quantities of really high quality goods from China at the time, like tea and silk and porcelain, things like that. But China was only accepting payments in silver, right? They refused to accept European goods in exchange for their exports, partly because they considered European goods to be basically inferior in terms of their technology, but also because they wanted to protect their national industries from being undermined

Starting point is 00:08:47 by foreign competition. So it was effectively like, you might say, a kind of protectionist economy. So the Europeans were forced to finance their trade with China using silver, which they plundered from their colonial territories in Latin America. So you get a sense of how the world system is shaping up here. And of course, they were using the labor of enslaved people in Latin America, both indigenous and also African enslaved people, to obtain the silver. So basically, we have a situation where Europe is plundering silver from Latin America virtually for free,

Starting point is 00:09:19 and then using it to buy real goods from China, which they therefore obtained effectively for free. So this was a crazy system that was massively beneficial to Europe. It provided them with an enormous windfall of basically free goods and propped up their material consumption. Now here's what happened. So by around the middle of the 1800s, Europe had lost control of most of its colonies in Latin America. Their silver began to run dry, and they needed some other way of financing their massive imports from China. So they started to sell opium. Now, opium didn't grow in Europe, of course. The Europeans forced their colonial subjects to grow it in India and the Middle East, and then they sold it in China

Starting point is 00:10:05 illegally to finance their purchases of Chinese goods. So in other words, European states and companies basically turned to trafficking drugs, right? The opium was also massively addictive and had a major negative effect on the health of the Chinese population, and actually created a kind of trade deficit actually that sucked silver back out of China and ended up impoverishing the population. So it was a total disaster for China. The Chinese authorities started to crack down on the drug trade as any reasonable state would do that wants to protect this population. And in response, Britain and France invaded China in the 1830s and 1840s with the explicit goal of forcing open the Chinese market. And owing to their superior naval power, they managed to defeat the Chinese military. So this is where

Starting point is 00:10:51 basically imperialism knocks on China's door, right? So these are called the Opium Wars, which is true but also false because they weren't really ultimately about opium as such, they were actually ultimately about gaining control over China's economy, which is exactly what they did. After the Europeans won the war, they basically established China as part of the colonial periphery, alongside India and Southeast Asia and later Africa, etc. They divided the country up into spheres of influence controlled by variously like Britain, France, Germany, and the other imperial powers. And they imposed a series of unequal treaties on China that pushed Chinese tariffs down and therefore let in European manufactured goods, right, which was basically their core

Starting point is 00:11:35 objective. This undermined domestic production, it deindustrialized the Chinese economy, and it turned China into a kind of captive market for European capitalists. So there were several other things that happened during this time, like the British basically established a system of indentured servitude, which is wild actually, this is an important history, I think it's totally neglected. They were basically shipping indentured Chinese workers around the world to work on their colonial plantations, especially after slavery was formally abolished. This is how they took up the slack in the labor force for their labor requirements. And finally, I think it's important to note that the Europeans also, in fact, directly

Starting point is 00:12:12 colonized several territories within China, including most famously Hong Kong. And I think this is an important piece of history because Westerners today often assumed that Hong Kong is like a separate country that China wants to seize, but in reality it is a Chinese territory that was colonized by Britain in the 19th century and remained colonized until 1997, if you can believe it. I think this is bizarrely forgotten in our historical memory. So this is kind of the background to the Chinese Revolution, right? The society was brutally subjugated by the imperialist powers. The people were totally emiserated. Wages collapsed. Workers and peasants struggled to meet

Starting point is 00:12:51 even basic subsistence requirements. Famines became much more common. The Qing dynasty basically disintegrated and China became kind of a patchwork of warring factions. It was an extremely dire situation. And not surprisingly, all of this triggered massive discontent among the Chinese working class, who came to understand, correctly, that the only solution to this crisis was ultimately to undertake a revolution, remove the imperialists and their their stooges, and regain worker control over the productive forces of the nation. So the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, was founded in 1921, inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution, which had just

Starting point is 00:13:31 taken place a few years earlier. So you can see a direct relationship there. And they formed the People's Liberation Army in 1927. Now, the other major guerrilla force that emerged during this time was the Kuomintang, or the KMT, which was a right-wing nationalist party that was viciously anti-communist. So the Communist Party ends up in the Civil War with the KMT, and this attracts international attention. So the Soviets support the communists in China, and the United States supports the KMT because they're desperate to do everything possible to prevent China from swinging to the left. But the communists, who were led by Mao Zedong, who was a revolutionary from a peasant family, had the benefit of very

Starting point is 00:14:12 strong popular support among China's massive peasantry and working class, and as a result they managed to win the Civil War against the KMT, and in 1949 they established a new government called the People's Republic of China, which is the government that continues to operate in China today. Now just briefly here, the KMT, this is an interesting little side story for the KMT, it was under the command of a guy called Xi'an Kaisheng. The KMT retreats to the island of Taiwan and claims to be the only legitimate government of China. And this is a crucial part of the story because remember, Taiwan was part of China. The defeated KMT basically seizes control of the island, institutes a military dictatorship that ruled there for nearly 40 years, and during that

Starting point is 00:14:56 period brutally repressed socialists and communists and executed tens of thousands of people for the political views. It was basically like a violent fascist regime that had the explicit support of the United States, who saw it as an opportunity to set up a kind of forward base against revolutionary China, right? And I think this is important because a lot of people have this kind of naive view of the US relationship with Taiwan. The story that we're normally told by our media is that the US is supporting this tiny, fledgling democracy that is threatened by its big bad neighbor, but in reality, Taiwan represents clearly a separatist movement that is supported by the US, which wants to use

Starting point is 00:15:37 it to destabilize China. So to grasp the stakes of this, I guess for American listeners, you'd have to imagine after the US Civil War, imagine the Confederates seize, let's say, South Carolina, establish a military dictatorship there with the direct support of Russia, let's say, and then claim to be the only official government in the United States. I mean, obviously, this is a totally absurd scenario and obviously not be tolerated by the US government. That gives you a sense for what's going on with the history of Taiwan in this whole story. Let's get back to the story of mainland China, which is what we're here to talk about.

Starting point is 00:16:10 What happened after the revolution was actually remarkable. Maoist China experienced the most rapid sustained increase in life expectancy of any population in documented global history, which is actually extraordinary to consider. We're talking massive improvements in social indicators. And this occurred because the communists were able to mobilize the productive capacities of the nation, the considerable productive capacities of the nation, to roll out things like public health care, public education, and to implement universal access to important things like nutritious food and other essential goods at affordable prices, which allowed them to massively accelerate human development. Now, of course, everybody knows about

Starting point is 00:16:50 the Great Famine that occurred in the late 1950s. I want to briefly touch on this. This is very clearly a massive disaster. And it happened because the planning system at the time lacked robust democratic mechanisms that would enable people on the ground to kind of feed back on policy implementation. So this was a major error. It was like unintentional effects of the way the planning system was organized. It was an error and the Chinese leadership recognized that fact and they learned very serious lessons in the wake of it. They learned that basically democratic participation is crucial to good planning and they implemented this in the future which is why similar events did not occur.

Starting point is 00:17:25 And I want to emphasize here that despite this catastrophe, China's social outcomes during the Maoist period were incredibly impressive. We have UN data from 1980, right at the end of the Maoist period, which shows that China's social indicators dramatically outperformed capitalist countries with similar levels of income. So China had lower mortality rates, higher life expectancy, better education, better health outcomes, better electricity access, better nutrition, lower inequality, etc. etc. etc. And in fact, this was famously recognized by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen at the time who wrote in the

Starting point is 00:18:03 1980s, and I quote, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that communism is good for poverty removal. Which is interesting to consider when you realize that Amartya Sen has since been kind of depoliticized and kind of claimed by liberals. I mean, he was clearly in the 1980s very in favor of communist and socialist policy in the global south. And one thing he did in his writing is he illustrated China's success by doing a direct comparison of India. And this is useful because India achieved independence at roughly the same time as the Chinese Revolution happened. In fact, China was actually poorer than India at that time, so in the late 1940s. But communism enabled China to shoot rapidly

Starting point is 00:18:46 ahead in terms of human development, so that by the end of the Maoist period, China's life expectancy was 10 years higher than India's, which is an extraordinary gap. And today, China's life expectancy is one of the highest in the Global South and higher than in the USA. So really impressive achievements on the human development front. I also briefly want to mention what they achieved in terms of gender because I think this is important and also overlooked. So the communist revolution achieved very rapid progress against gender inequality. They very quickly established the right of women to determine their own marriages, and the right of women to divorce, and the right of women to education, land, and economic independence, they legalized abortion in 1953. So this is just a few years after the revolution. By the way,

Starting point is 00:19:31 in many European countries, this did not occur until the 1980s, just to give you a sense for how ahead of the curve they were. They established community cafeterias, they established public childcare facilities, and the idea here was specifically to reduce the burden of domestic labor on women. And they established job guarantees that ensured women had access to paid employment, and they used democratic wage-setting mechanisms to purposely reduce the gender pay gap. These are impressive reforms, and what's interesting is that by the 1980s, again, this is using UN data, we see that China was outperforming the USA and Europe in terms of gender wage equality. And in fact, China's performance on this indicator in the

Starting point is 00:20:12 1980s, get this, was better than what the USA and Europe achieve today, which I think is a remarkable story that deserves our attention. So basically in sum, I mean, when you think about the achievements of the revolution, these are incredible world historical achievements. In fact, even the US was forced to admit this in the 20th century. There were key figures in the US government who wrote that communism was working extremely well in China and provided a kind of model that everyone else in Asia wanted to copy. They realized it was wildly popular in Asia at the time. And we know that the US took extreme measures to crush communist aspirations in China, including with the invasion of Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, the invasion of Korea,

Starting point is 00:20:55 with just spectacular violence, right? Carpet bombing these countries. And China in particular has always been in the sights of the imperialist powers. The US and Western Europeans have fundamentally never forgiven the Chinese people for the revolution. They desperately want to crush it to this day, and they've literally surrounded China with military bases ready to attack at a moment's notice. In fact, before this episode, I was counting US military bases, and I counted almost 200 active military bases on China's borders. I was counting US military bases, and I counted 200, almost 200, active military bases on China's borders. This is active US military bases on China's borders, which is actually wild when you think about it. I mean, there's few nations in the world that would

Starting point is 00:21:35 they would accept that kind of threat to their integrity and sovereignty. So that's, I mean, that's a part of history of China since the Imperial Age and the revolution. But obviously there's much more we can explore. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And just to pick up on that last point, I actually was just reading about the Korean War. And, you know, of course, Chinese soldiers were involved with that at some stage as well. The amount of bombs that were dropped on North Korea, I believe, was the most per capita amount of bombs dropped on any country ever in the history of the world, basically.

Starting point is 00:22:12 And it killed over a million civilians in North Korea. So the idea that China is somehow an aggressor towards the United States, right, which is the narrative that's built in order to justify a lot of the, you know, trade wars and sort of warmongering that's taking place right now is just historically and currently just so inaccurate that it does have violence to reality really. And then a couple other things I wanted to just sort of like pull on and sort of underscore from what you were sharing with that really helpful history. I think just when we look at the development of socialism as sort of a long-term process,

Starting point is 00:22:52 and I'm reading this book right now which looks at sort of all of the different attempts at socialism starting from the 1848 revolutions in Europe all the way up to more into the present and we learn lessons, you know, as a socialist movement through each of these 48 revolutions in Europe all the way up to more into the present. We learn lessons as a socialist movement through each of these experiences. The Chinese revolution was a really fascinating development in socialism in terms of both the theory and the practice of building socialism. One of the things that Mao did, which was really important, was he really put the priority on, as a revolutionary class, onto peasants, which was something that was not quite as clear.

Starting point is 00:23:30 And then also just his incredible ability to conduct guerrilla warfare was really astounding and a huge achievement in terms of learning how to fight against, like you mentioned, the right-wing nationalist, vicious Kuomintang, which had actually massacred many of the communists and was just a really evil force and could have taken the country in a horrible direction. So it's really quite a remarkable history. And thank you so much for sharing so much. I know you're not a historian of China, but you obviously have a lot of depth in your knowledge of the history there. So thank you so much for sharing that. And you had touched a little bit on the development of China economically, and you had mentioned in our correspondences that one thing that you think

Starting point is 00:24:26 would be an interesting point to touch on is that this idea and we've talked about this in previous episodes with you is sort of the drain right from the south to the north from the periphery to the core. So on that note I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about China's position in the capitalist world economy, bringing it a little bit more into the present and building on and maybe providing any kind of specific examples to bring this idea further down to eye level, this idea of unequal exchange and how China still does suffer a drain to the core. Yeah, yeah. So actually actually this brings me to answer a question that you asked earlier, which I didn't actually get to touch on, which is about the liberalization period in China, which is kind of the precursor to understanding its current position in the world economy.

Starting point is 00:25:15 So basically during the Maoist period, China was effectively locked out of the world economy, right? Now, the way that we normally hear about this from Western propaganda is that this is because Mao wanted to pursue autarky and basically closed China off. But this is actually a false narrative. In fact, Mao wanted to trade with the rest of the world, but the US prevented it by sanctioning China and effectively imposing a kind of blockade similar to what they're currently doing in Cuba. And the US objective was basically to what they're currently doing in Cuba, right? And the US objective was basically to crush the Chinese economy, which failed, but it did massively limit China's developments because they couldn't buy the capital goods that are necessary for advanced

Starting point is 00:25:54 manufacturing. But this changed in the 1980s. So this is after the death of Mao, when Deng Xiaoping rises to the leadership of the Communist Party. And Deng's view is basically that China needs access to foreign capital if it wants to accelerate its development of the productive forces. So Deng decides to strike a bargain with the devil. He agrees to implement structural adjustment programs in China in direct alignment with the World Bank and the IMF. Now China had a reasonable level of bargaining power because it was a fairly large economy, etc. It was able to avoid the more extreme shock therapy that completely crushed most of the other countries in the global south that suffered structural adjustments.

Starting point is 00:26:36 And China retained public control over finance and industrial policy, which is crucial. But still, the reforms quite severe. So they privatized state companies, they dismantled many of the price controls that China had been using, and they dismantled the public provisioning systems that were established during the socialist era, etc. Now, this had several important effects. One is, of course, that China did in fact gain access to foreign capital, so that's that. But all of the privatization and the abolition of the price controls led to huge inflation, and it was a massive shock to the working classes who were suddenly basically unable to afford rent and food.

Starting point is 00:27:15 And in fact, this ended up triggering huge protests against the capitalist reforms, which culminated in demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989. And this is an interesting part of the story because most Westerners assume that the Tiananmen Square in 1989. And this is an interesting part of the story, because most Westerners assume that the Tiananmen Square protests were against communism, but in fact exactly the opposite is true. They were protesting against the US-backed capitalist reforms. They thought the reforms were going too far and they wanted to retain the socialist policies of the Maoist era. In the end, the state suppressed the protests and proceeded with reforms as per the IMF and World Bank agreements. And the US basically saw this as a

Starting point is 00:27:51 massive victory. So it's important to remember that the West was facing a crisis of capital accumulation in the late 1970s, and they desperately wanted to liberalize China. They saw this as a way basically to gain access to a massive pool of cheap labor and restore their profitability. That's exactly what happened. As soon as China was forcibly open, then American companies were able to relocate industrial production over to China, where they could produce the same goods they were producing before, but with much lower labor costs, which enabled them to massively increase their rate of profit, and this effectively resolved the crisis of Western capital accumulation at the time.

Starting point is 00:28:30 This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Jason Hickel. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Podcast Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast.

Upstream - [TEASER] China Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction w/ Jason Hickel

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