The Lunar New Years Special: Is China Maoist?

what people actually believe this? And the answer, unfortunately is yes, yes they do. And those people get to write in major media outlets. Here's the New York Times how she returned China to one man rule. For decades, China has built guyard rails to prevent another Mao. Here's how Shi Jimping has dismantled them and created his own machinery of power. Here's also the New York Times. This one, I guess technically is from the opinion section, but h Xi Jiping

is the second coming of Maosee Dung. Here's the Wall Street Journal. China wants to move ahead, but Shijimping is looking to the past. As China's leader embraces more elements of Maosee Dung's rule, its people are confronting a more uncertain future. Lest you think this is purely an American phenomena, here's Al Jazeera, which was funded by the government of catter is hijimping China's new Maosee Dung, which she casting himself as a twenty first century Mao. China risks arbitrary rule.

Here's foreign policy, the Maoist roots of She's economic dilemma. In contrast with Dang, she has embraced a distinctly Maoist socialism that emphasizes personal sacrifice for the collective good, HARKing back to the Cultural Revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies. The British, of course, are also not immune to this Mao derangement syndrome. I guess I would call it Chi Jimping's pilgrimage to Red Meha brings back the Mao factor. So you know this is this is a very very

common sentiment. It's been a very common sentiment for most of the last decade. I I haven't even done some of the most common ones, like if you if you expand a little bit out from just Xi Jimping is the new Mao ones, you get a lot of like Xi Jimping is the most powerful leader since Mao, which is kind of true. And I think this is part of why this sort of strategy works, because people do not want to actually differentiate between different kinds of authoritarian systems.

There are many, many different kind sentatorships and people people are just loath to actually look at the differences. And you see this. This is not just the sort of American media class thing. You see this in political science literature all the time. Political science literature, especially in the US, has this tendency to divide the entire world into this

sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies. And as a product of this, I have had to read some truly truly appalling articles that were published in peer reviewed journals on my my absolute I don't know if favorite is the right term, or the most cursed one that I ever saw was it was an article about like the read the quote unquote resource curse and this argument about whether like having a bunch of oil means that

you were inherently going to have an authoritarian government or whatever. So they have this chart that's supposed to be tracking like the quote unquote time to a democratic transition of a bunch of non democratic societies by like just how much how much natural resources they have. Now this this chart has in the same category Saudi Arabia, a theocratic monarchy, and also Hoaxayest's Albania, a country whose political line was

that Mao did it, Mao hard enough. And these are just being treated neutraally as the same type of governments because it's not a representative democracy. North Korea is another good example of this. You see people in the US calling North Korea hereditary monarchy like all the time, and it just isn't. Leadership of the party state passes between

members of a family. But that's not actually enough to make something a monarchy unless you're prepared to argue that, like the US is a monarchy because we had two Bushes as president. Now on the grounds that that's extremely funny, I'm not wholly unsympathetic to that argument, but it's not. Calling the US a monarchy because of the two Bushes is not a very serious academic argument. It is just

a joke. And that's I think how we should be treating people like people calling North Korea a monarchy because it's not. A monarchy is not just there's a guy who's in charge and as to another person who's related to them. It's not just that there's someone who you

could call a king. There is a whole political system beneath it, right, there's a whole network of like princes and courts and land titles and inheritances and who and who doesn't have royal blood, and there's there's you know, there's a whole you know, and the economic system of a monarchy as has changed over time. Right, monarchies are very old, you know. We now have like capitalist monarchies like the Saudis. You know, we've had feudal monarchies, we've

had sort of pre feudal monarchies. But you can't simply reduce monarchy to one guy in charge. That is absolutely absurd. But people just do this all the time. Now, North Korea is organized along the lines of a party state, where this is you know, a sort of shortening of one party state. Technically speaking, there are actually other parties in North Korea, and this is true of China as well,

but they don't really do anything. And this is not the episode where I'm going to have to try to and the difference between the United Front and the United Front Works Department, that's another time. But they are functionally one party states. There is one party that actually does the ruling, and then there's a couple of other parties that keep around for appearances, who might do consultative stuff.

But even in terms, even knowing that something is a party state doesn't actually tell you a huge amount about how that system actually functions. And this is where we come to the core elements of today's episode. How does the modern Chinese state operate and how is it different from previous iterations of the Chinese state. So to answer this question, we need to start. We need to start with the origins of the party state itself. And the party state really in the sense that we're dealing with,

is born with the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, I guess it technically creates the Soviet Union a little bit, but it's born it's bored of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik taking and consolidation of power. On the other hand, you know, party states are not built in the image

of Lenin. They're built in the image of Stalin. And the thing that makes you know, a sort of like what the party stays that come after it, what makes them function is the way that sort of Stalin consolidates power, and Stalin consolidates power by using the rules of the Bolshevik Party to maintain control over members of the state apparatus, even though technically speaking he doesn't he doesn't have like

you know, he keep be doing. He doesn't technically have the formal authority to do as a member of the government, but he has the authority to do as a member of the party. And this is how Stalin consolidates his power,

and soad of walls out trotsky Eta et cetera, et cetera. However, Comma, this is where people make mistakes when that when they're trying to sort of understand what Stalinism was, which is that they make this mistake of looking, you know of kind of projecting back the later Soviet Union onto you know,

onto sort of like nineteen thirty's Stalinism. And the mistake they make is the assumption that Stalinism is purely a bureaucratic doctrine, right, It's purely about seizing control of the bureaucracy and using a bureaucracy to consolidate power, and that is just not true. Part of Stalin's success and you know,

as bleak as that like success is. Part of what Stalin does is mobilize masses of people against parts of the party and in parts of the state bureaucracy that oppose him, that you know, to do things like denunciations to like you know, and to weaken their bureaucratic power. And this means that Stalinism is not a pure politics of state bureaucracy the way that sort of later Soviet

governments are. It's a combination of bureaucratic power and also the direction of mass mobilization, of the mobilization of large numbers of people to go do a thing towards the end of consolidating power. This interplay, the control of bureaucratic power checked by mass popular and mobilizations, is the characteristic element of Stalinism. Both of these tools, both the bureaucratic

apparatus and mass mobilization, are used to maintain Stalin's personal power. Now, Maoism, for all of its claims to be the direct ideological air of Stalinism, Maoism is Stallanism are not the same thing. In sort of like Mao era China, And you know, you can trace this towards from sort of like Mao's insurgency era through the time he's in power to the end of the seventies. During that period, China is if anything, even more prone to mass popular and mobilization as a strategy.

Some of this is ideological. Maoism is to a large extent a kind of internal critique of Stalinism that you know, I mean, like so people in like you could argue about, you know, how good were the intentions of the people who are in charge of the Chinese Communist Party in like the twenties and thirties, right, But they're not They're not stupid, right, These people are smart. These people understand that there are a lot of problems with the Soviet system.

These are people who watched a bunch of their comrades get murdered because the Soviet's fucked up. So these are people who understand the threat of bureaucratization to a revolutionary movements and the formation the potential formation of a new ruling class composed of sort of like management and bureaucratic cadres.

But on the other hand, because it's an internal critique of Stalinism, and not like an external critique of Stalinism, Baoism is utterly unwilling to try to solve these problems by actually giving like workers or peasants, like any kind of autonomy or democratic control over anything, except for like the most trivial minutia of like shop floor bullshit. And the result of this is that, you know, you can't defeat the bureaucracy with democracy, so how do you actually

deal with it? And the result is what's called campaign style mobilization. These are mass mobilizations of extraordinary large numbers of people to do it, you know, to to do a task right. There's a lot of different sort of things they try to do with this. Sometimes they're tried, they're used for economic ends. This is like the Great Leap forward, which is this mass mobilization of people to

increase productive capacity is a fiasco. Now, part of this also was political, right, Partly this is now trying to use mass mobilization against the bureaucracy in a way reminiscent

of stalin but any much much larger scale. And the other you know, part part of what's going on here is that the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is much stronger than the bureaucracy of China, right because you know, the Bolsheviks kind of have a state like bureaucracy sort of intact that they're able to sort of graft themselves onto.

China like doesn't have like a functioning government at all, Like there's no functioning central state in China when the Maoist eventually like knock off the Nationalists, So you know this, this this always means that the level of bureaucracy station is lower in China, but you know, it's still it's it's still that's still like the state building process is still one of the things that Maoists are trying to do. And this is you know, this is sort of what

Mao is tending to check. But this doesn't work. The Culture Revolution ultimately fails, and part of its failure is that, you know, Okay, so in order in order to like stop the dread specter of like democratic election of factory councils and shit, Mao like cobbles together this coalition of soldiers like loyalist Red Guard factions and some of the pre existing bureaucracy. And these people are these are people who end up running the country through the seventies, and

that is just another bureaucracy. And through this whole period, Trya continues to get more and more bureaucratic. Now, this is the most cliche thing that you can possibly say, but unfortunately I do have to say it. The Culture Revolution had a massive impact on subsequent Chinese policy. Every Chinese leader from Dan Jouping on, including Xijianping, and this is something that is not very well covered in the American press, but every single one of these people agrees

that the Culture Revolution was a mistake. And you can see the results of this analysis in how the modern Chinese state mobilizes resources. Now, do you know how you can mobilize resources. It's by buying the products and services contained in these ads.

a bunch of people to go out and do a thing. Now, the modern Chinese date doesn't do this in the same way. The closest thing that they have to sort of like Maoist mobilizations are you know, there is still a thing that's called a campaign stylen mobilization, but it's not the same thing at all as the Maoist system. So let's ask the question, what the fuck is campaign style mobilization? So I'm going to go to the academic literature on this.

A group of professors writing for the journal Public Administration Review, in a very colorfully named article called Campaign Style Enforcement and Regulatory Compliance, describe it thus, following the literature, we define campaign style enforcement as a type of policy implementation involving extraordinary mobilezation of administrative resources under political sponsorship. Now this definition is very interesting because if you look at what is being mobilized here, right, it is not masses

of people. You're not trying to do mass popular mobilizations. You're mobilizing administrative resources. And this is something that becomes very clear the more you look into the sort of literature here, I'm going to quote from a piece called Revised Blue Sky Fabrication in China by Yongdongshen and Anna l Ahlers during the Mao era, this is campaigns down mobilizations aimed at nothing less than mobilizing society as a whole.

While when they occur today, political campaigns are usually foremostly addressed at the state apparatus i e. Especially party and government organizations, at all levels of the political hierarchy, and ultimately at cadres in other words, the implementers of the policy goals at stake. According to Elizabeth Perry has called

this transformation quote from mass campaigns to managed campaigns. Moreover, contemporary campaigns, or better campaign style politics mainly take the form of a disciplinary, supervisory and sanctioning campaigns such as anti crime campaigns or the recently reinforced corruption campaign or b regulatory enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns. So, Okay, that's kind of a lot, but I think I think it's worth actually, you know, taking this in a little

bit of detail. That same article defines up like the characteristics of what campaign style. A campaign style mobilization is so they have a defined goal, they have political sponsorship, there's a high degree of urgency, there's a defined period of time, tightly coordinated operation, the pooling of extraordinary resources,

and public involvement. So that article of the one about blue sky fabrication is studying the twenty sixteen G twenty meeting in Hangzhou where the government sets out to make sure that there is actually like a blue sky for the event. Now, this is a massive undertaking because Chinese air pollution is fucking atrocious. This is something that I might do you another fall episode about this at some point. Chinese air pollution is unbelievably bad. It kills unfathomable numbers

of people every year. It's gotten a little bit better since I was last there. But like when I was last in Beijing, like I didn't fucking I only saw the sky one time in the time I was there, because and that was only because it rained, and so after it rain, the sky was blue for like a few hours in the small just like consumed it again. So in order to make sure that there was like a blue sky for pr purposes for this G twenty meeting,

because China wanted to sort of show off. There was a massive, massive deployment of resources, and this becomes one of the sort of campaigns mobilizations. And these mobilizations, you know, they may not be sort of mauise style mass mobilizations of like getting people to go do the thing, but they are massively intrusive. They include things like shuttering factories, moving millions of people, restricting like who can drive them what days, like, restricting whether or not you can like

use like cooking stuff in your house. But Comma, we need to look at how these things actually happen. So the way that these campaigns start basically is for for the large scale ones, you have mobilization that flows basically down the lines of the state. Right, they start from the federal governments and they go to local governments and

regional governments and implementation you know, for sort of scientific stuff. Right, So if you if you look for you know, going back to the sort of example of the G twenty for you know, in order to do the scientific core coordination for it, you get a very very broad, sort of broadreaching like coalition or coordination between scientists at universities as well as at research institutes and government agencies and you're pulling them all together in order to produce like

I don't know, you're like air quality measures, right, And these efforts also can very rapidly fold in the governments of other provinces. So what does it actually mean in terms of how these mobilizations work. What it means is that mobilization is a way of moving around different state and sometimes just kind of pseudo nonstate actors like universities and research institutes. It's a way of moving those resources around in such a way that you can accomplish a thing. Now.

One of the kind of defining characteristics of a lot of these campaigns, and not all of them, like the anti corruption campaigns obviously are sort of different, but a lot of these campaigns rely on scientific and technical mobilization, both in the sense of what resources they're moving, right, moving you moving scientists around, but also in terms of

public justification. And this is also something that's very different, Like there is ideological justification going on, but like in like a Maoist sort of like like a high culture revolution like period or even greatly forward period, you're mostly using sort of ideological like direct ideological motivation to get people to go do a thing. Here. It's very technical,

it's very scientific, it's very technocratic. And one of the products of this, one of the products of sort of how technocratic everything is, is that And this is something Shen and Ahlers are very clear about. There is like there's no public comment here, right Like the way these campaign mobilizations work is the state tells you what you are doing, and you are not telling them back like anything. Like you are not negotiating with them, you are not

in a dialogue, you are not submitting comments. They are just telling you what to do. And this goes from like regular people all the way up to like corporations, right like even large corporations. A lot of times with these like campaign style things don't get a like negotiate a deal or whatever the fuck, It just it just sort of happens. Now, you may have noticed in the original one of the original descriptions, I was talking about one of the things they have as part of the

definition is public mobiles mobilization of like the public. But we need to be clear about what that means so that it doesn't get confused with like maoism. So when we say there's mobilization of the public, it's stuff likely so during the G twenty campaign, they were like they would the CCP would like have old people volunteer to like walk around their neighborhoods and like snatch on anyone who was like using their cooking stove. So like that's

the kind of mobilization we're talking like. These are not like these are not like Red Guard tribunals, like dragging people out of their houses. This is like a seventy year old's person incredibly nosy seventy year old going like, ha, this person using their cooking stove. You know how you can get a cooking stove that you can actually use? Uh,

maybe these products and services. I don't know if we're sponsors by cooking stoves, but you know we could be there could there could be a cooking stove product and service out there waiting for you and we're back. Now we should also look more at some of the methods of how this stuff happens. Right. So one of the things that's happening as part of this campaign is part of the part of the plan to reduce pollution, is they need Chinese government wants to move a bunch of

people out of out of the city. Right now, a Maui style thing would just tell the people to fucking leave. The way that the way that the modern Chinese government does this is to send people like basically free travel vouchers. Shennon Ayler's report, the value of these vouchers is more than one point five billion dollars, So like that's dollars, right, that's that's like, you know, this is this is these

are very expensive campaigns. But but you know, this is the way that the Chinese state moves in a lot of these cases, right when they're trying to move, when they need to move a bunch of people, they deploy vouchers. So some of these campaigns are using even more like technocratic means to get things done. So looking back at the article of campaign style enforcement and regulatory compliance, we find examples of what is technically campaign style mobilization. Okay quote.

For instance, the central government either waived the loan interest for corporate spending on basically these like desulfurization things to make industrial like exhaust not have sulfur in it, or cover these expenses using central environmental cential environmental funds. In addition, an innovative green electricity policy offered that point Zhoo two three sent price premium per kilowatt hour to power plants

that installed one of these systems. So this is like exactly the opposite of how a booist campaign would do this, right, Like they are these factory people are getting like price subsidies, and like they're waiving the interest on loans. Now, we've been focusing on campaign stylen mobilization because those are the most sort of extraordinary kinds of mobilization. But most policy isn't even implemented by campaign. It's implemented by normal bureaucratic processes.

And this is even less booist than the sort of campaign stylen mobilizations. Now, most people, a lot of people who describe China as Baoist are describing their oppressive apparatus, But here they have things exactly backwards. Right, Contrary to the government of the socialist period, which was sort of governed by mass mobilization, the modern Chinese government is almost pathologically adverse to anything that even smells like mass popular mobilization.

And this isn't to say that China doesn't have protests like it does. There are protests in China, but Comma, like a lot of these you know, there there are protests like there are like ecological like nimbi protests. There are like real estate there's a lot of real estate protests,

and some of those, some of these are allowed. There there are protests that one of the very common forms of protests against not getting paid by your boss, but even attempting like and most of these protests aren't like so just aren't really anti government, right, Like they're not sort of like they're not calling for the downfall of the regime or whatever. They're like pissed off about a

corrupt local government. But even attempting to documents. All of the protests that happened in China in a given year canon has landed people in prison. So you know, the

state is not super happy about this. And if we look at what happened to mass protests in twenty twenty two, they were brutally suppressed and you know, the sort of anti like the even even things that weren't even really that big but we're kind of antecedent service that attempted to use sort of maoist politics were also unbelievably quickly like stamped out. Right. There was the oppression of the student workers movement in late twenty tens on the student

sort of worker like Maoist movements. The Chinese state does some sort of like limited mobilization online, you know, in terms of sort of like they have this like pr strategy thing overseas of like wolf warrior diplomacy or whatever. It's unbelievably cringe. But even then, these are not even close to the kinds of mobilization the state and the party could like nationalists mobilizations they could unleash if they

wanted to. And this is because instead of working through mass popular mobilization, the state isn't maoist, and because it's not maoist, it works through their bureaucracy. Policy implementation works by going from the top and then if they go down to local government's local government respond it goes back up to the top again, it comes back down and the policy gets it implemented. Right like you know, when when there are mask like you know, mass campaign style things,

they're not they're not mass mobilizing people. They're mobilizing research institutes. They're mobilizing like government bureaus. They're they're they're they're shifting bureaucrats and technocrats around. Now I think I think there's a lot of reasons for why the Chinese governments is sort of like pathologically adverse to anything that even sort of smelled like kind of smells like male style politics. Right.

One of them is that, you know, these are we talked about this before, but like these are people who a lot of these people lived through parts of the Cultural Revolution, like they saw really fiascos emerge out of this stuff. But you know, the other thing that they're that these people are afraid of is that so you know, when I say these people were around for the Culture Revolution, like these people saw the Chinese working class take the

city of Shanghai nineteen sixty seven. Right, this is all and this is part of the reason why Tiana then rattles them so much, because they you know, they nearly

watch the working class take another Chinese city. And these people, these are people who have a you know, and I think understand this on a more visceral level than most other political leaders understand that if they if they don't correctly manage situations and like stamp up populamobilization like they could, you know, there there are worlds where they fucking wake up. They dragged out of their houses and the Chinese working class hangs them from lamp posts. Right, that's a real threat.

And this is part of why you know, they're using something that's something that's called neoliberalism, right, the disenchantment of politics. They this is, this is why the state, even when it's doing repression, operates through sort of technocratic and bureaucratic means. Now, journalists resort to calling this maoism because they're lazy hacks who are also racist. But you know, now we can see pretty clearly by actually looking at how the state

functions that this is not maoism. Maoism is built on mass popular mobilization. The modern CCP is built on stamping out mass popular mobilization. This has been nickeld happen here, Yeah, happy lean your New Year's everyone.