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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy now that I'm like a middle aged old man, I don't know. I've been getting really into reading history lately.
Is it Roman history? No?
No, it's actually worse than Roman history. I've been reading a lot of twentieth century history. And the problem, well, one problem is a bit of a diversion. But one problem with reading twentieth century history is that I'm eventually going to have to get around to really learning what World War two is all about, and then I'm going to be a fifty year old man.
Reading You have to fulfill your destiny.
I know.
So I'm going to be a fifty year old man in a few years reading World War two books and watching World War or two documentaries. So, but yes, I've been reading a lot of twentieth century history lately.
You know how you know that you are really old, It's when you start reading twentieth century history books and realize that you were like there and sort of participating in that time period.
Well, it's so funny that you mentioned this because this is increasingly dawning on me when I read history. And again, slight sidetrack, but I've mentioned before a couple of times.
I lived in Malaysia for a year in nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety and I discovered in reading history recently that I don't know if they call it the Malaysian Civil War, but the Ultimate Peace Agreement between the Malaysian government and the Communist Party of Malaysia was signed in nineteen eighty nine that ended that conflict, And so I was there. I had no idea, but reading his.
Grade school Joe was living through history.
I was, and it sort of reminds I think this is an important thing that I've realized reading more history, is that the modern world as we know it is so young. It's basically like the length of a person's life, depending on where you want to start it. Like we're just getting started here.
So the history we're going to be talking about specifically is China. And I was thinking about this because the first time I went to China was in nineteen ninety four, and it was completely different to how it is now, Like there were still rickshaws on the street, Friendship stores existed. Friendship stores still existed in the early two thousands when I was there, and I don't know, do you know what a friendship store is?
I can guess.
So it's like where foreigners were basically allowed to go and like purchase specific goods. They had a lot of like tourist tat and stuff like that. But if you went to a friendship store in Beijing in the early two thousands, it was basically like going to the East Bloc.
It was like a full employment program where you would find a salesperson on the floor and you would say, I want this item, and then they would give you a little like token or receipt and then you would take that to the cashier and pay, and then someone
else would bring the item to you. So yeah, that was in the two thousands, And now when I think about Beijing, like it has changed completely, Like stuff that used to be one story neighborhoods full of bars like san Ley Turn is now like luxury shopping centers totally.
So this is the other thing too, which is that you know, we talk a lot about China right now for obvious reasons, but I kind of feel that like, if we're going to talk about today. There probably is some justification for like how we got here, and I have to admit, you know, my understanding is really very rudimentary and limited. Like in my mind, it's basically like Maud died Doung Hopeng liberalized the economy, that was the economy plugged into global.
Idiot sunflower seeds happened.
Yeah, and then they allowed a business and then they entered the wto in here. And I would say, I know basically four facts about the history of China, and those you know, nineteen seventy eight wto now, so maybe that's just three. And so I actually think it's important to sort of deepen our understanding of how we got to the China that we are so deeply connected to today.
I am in favor of you using the podcast as an excuse to read a bunch of history books.
It's great, it's other.
Manifest your middle aged self. That's fine, we should do it.
Well, it's better because if I have to read books, that means I'm not just scrolling Twitter all the time. So if I have to prepare for episodes anyway, we're going to be speaking with one of the co authors of the new book came out in October The Great Transformation, China's road from revolution to reform. And I would say it complexifies a bit the very rudimentary story of the last I don't know, forty plus years of China. It's more than just three specific dates. It complexifies that story.
It sort of fleshes it out in a big way. The co authors are Odd Arned Westdad and Chen John. The first time on odd Lots that we'll have a guest with the name odd.
Surely the perfect guest.
So it's truly the perfect guest. So we're speaking with professor of history at Yale, Odd Earned west Dad. Professor Westdad, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you for having me on you you almost had to write we had It's truly, it's really a shame that you haven't had me on before, I mean your podcast with me as you first guest.
We had to wait for Joe to enter his history phase.
That's right, but you should have. You should have been the first guest. So why this book, because I imagine if I go on Amazon, there are probably hundreds of books that are some version of how China reformed, How China went from being this backwards economy to dynamic capitalist economy. I know it's been written about in various forms of numerous numerous times. Why did you and your co author still feel at this point that this was an important story or collection of stories to tell.
I think there are two reasons. The first one is quite personal in a way. I mean it almost goes back to what you were talking about a minute ago. So I first came to China as and I changed student back in the late nineteen seventies and Changen. Of course, my co Walton lived there during that period, so this
is away so personal process. Well, we lived through parts of the time period that we are talking about in this book, and there is no better incentive, as you just touched upon, to go back to look at history again than trying to understand the period that you lived through. So that's the first reason. And the second reason is, of course that we think we do it better than anyone else. Do it better than anyone else because we have more access to sources and more access to information
about what actually happened during that time period. So as you read the book, you can see how, at least when we do this as well as we can, we are able to get on the inside of many of the things that took place during that time period and show the complexities, I mean, show how complex that period of very early Chinese reform and opening was and in many ways how contingent the process was, and how surprising it is in more than one sense that we ended up where we are today.
So speaking of access, you mentioned this, I think in the very beginning of the book, but you started researching this in twenty ten, and you said that the research process and the access you had kind of changed over the next I guess thirteen or fourteen years or so. Give us a little bit more detail, like, as a researcher of Chinese history, how have things actually evolved for you?
That's right. We started thinking about this and started researching it in the early twenty teens, and of course back then we had much better access to sources, much better access to archives, to talk to people, to travel around and country, to have informal discussions with people who would be in the know than what is the case today. So China has really since twenty sixteen seventeen, there were closed down in terms of access to historical sources of
all kinds. So we were lucky. We started this process quite early on and had some good years in which we actually could collect material. Then we did something really silly. We put it aside for other projects, hoping that we
would get even better access in a few years. That happens sometimes that you make the wrong call on these kinds of things, and instead, of course, it got much was So what we had to do was to go back to some of the material that we had gathered in that early time period before we switch to other projects that we then completed before we returned to this book, and then try to feel that in the best we
could with all the materials we could get now. But the level of access, the level of information is very different today from what you could get pulled off back then.
So I want to get into some of the content of the book obviously, And like I said in the intro, you know, I have this very cartoonish vision of history in my head where Mao dies, Don Chopeg becomes the new leader of the country after a little bit of tension and turmoil, and then China liberalizes.
So one of the sort of eye.
Opening or sort of mind expanding moments in the book, you talk about the cultural revolution, and how even there, you know, we think of that as going I guess from nineteen sixty six to sometime in the nineteen seventy. You argue that the real intensity of it was two years where the sort of the youth of China rose
up against the old cadres within the Communist Party. But even in that time, amid some of this incredible turmoil that the Communist Party was going through under mau, some of the seeds of I guess capitalism were actually planted in that turmoil.
Yeah, that's right. I mean that I think is one of the contributions of this book. I mean, your summarized history of what happened. It is not wrong, okay, It's just that it was really difficult and, as I said, very contingent in terms of the various things that are happening to get from warm to the next of those stages.
And one of the things that we do show in the book is how the cultural revolution, which was undertaken, of course, in order to solidify Maltadome's leadership and attack the old leaders in the Communist Party who he regarded as being too backle to take China into his new Communist paradise. This cultural revolution had effects that were in no way for sea, and part of them was in
many ways the destruction of all China. I mean, they got rid of many of the traditional ways of thinking and loyalties, and much of the patriarchal approaches within families. All of this because of these political campaigns that they undertook, directed almost against any kind of authority except most of ohn authority. And in a strange kind of way, when you get into the nineteen seventies, Mao's still alive, still ruling from Beijing, things start to change in some places
from the ground up. So this is turning to markets almost as a kind of revolutionary acts out of desperation, because people along the coast, in the south, in the areas that have some experience with capitalism and with markets, they are worried that when this campaign ends, things have got to get even worse. And some of these people have been starving, you know, back during the Great Leap
forward in the late fifties and early sixties. So they start rating, they start building up the opportunities that they can take for themselves. In a little way. I mean, this is not a predominant act in China in the early nineteen seventies, but it did see something that is incredibly important for the future, and then comes into full flow after the party takes a step back off the mal died and opens up for these console reforms happening on an until boy Scain.
I apologize in advance for asking a hypothetical, but do you think the economic liberalization of the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties would have been able to happen or would have happened in some form if China hadn't experienced the Cultural Revolution and all the I guess emotional trauma and political chaos that came with it.
It wouldn't have happened when it happened, that's for sure. That's not even a hypothetical. I mean, I think if China had continued basic along the Soviet model of development, which is what they took up after the People's REPROBLEBM was put in place in the late nineteen forties, Soviet style everything right, planning, centralization, the wholer. I don't think the kind of reform that we saw in the late seventies and nuineteen eighties would have happened because there wouldn't
have been any fundamental reason to undertake it. I mean, China would probably have chugged along in the same kind of way as the Soviet Union did until some point when that model started breaking down. Now, I'm not saying that the Cultural Revolution was a necessary condition for these changes in pay place, but the period of Cultural Revolution activism did in many ways prepare the ground for the timing of this and when it was to happen alst be because you know, China at the end of the culture
ablution was a deserted thing. You know, when I first arrived there in nineteen seventy nine, this was a dirt poor and terrorized country, you know, a poorer in terms of income to capital and most African countries and things are getting work not that. So that kind of desperation at all levels of Chinese society fitted into these changes.
Something had to be done, and going back to the Soviet model of development as it existed only on when you get into the nineteen eighties does not seem as a viable composition.
What does it mean when you talk about history being contingent? You use that word a couple of times, and I actually don't know if I fully understand what that means. But when you're telling these stories or this story and you're keeping in mind the contingency and history, can you talk a little bit more about this idea.
So you'll see from the book that we go in and out from the sort of micro to the macro level of telling history. And if you look at the night and the coup against the radicals, the softball gang of four within the party took place, which we described in some detail almost you know what happens from hour to hour.
That right, This was the moment in which the left faction after maud Dies was arrested and allowed for a sort of more moderate path to emerge.
That's right. And it was in effect the military coup, and it was undertaken by the military and the security forces against the people who himself had put in charge of the party, including his widow was most prominent of all jiang Qin. Now that night, the following few days, things could have ended up very differently. In Shanghai, the biggest city in China by far, was still under control of the radicals. There were military units that supported the
radical approach to politics. This could have ended up very differently from what it did. And as we described in the in the books, some of the protos, some of the coup makers themselves in those days that followed the coup itself, were completely surprised by how little resistance there had been from the left and how chales there had been on the streets. So that's what I mean with
it being contingent. I mean, this is something that obviously connects to the larger picture that we see today, going back to your sort of three level version of what happened right in China, But it didn't seem that obvious at the time, and it could have gone in very different directions from what we're seeing today.
How important was the fraying of the relationship between China and the Soviet Union in the sort of nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies to spurring or catalyzing that opening up, Because it does feel like the sudden emergence of the Soviet Union as an external enemy. It feels like that led China in some respects to open up to the US and some other countries.
This is a sort of trajectory that I think is really important to get right because what Mao and his group of leaders did in the late nineteen sixties was to turn to the United States as an ally pseudo ally security ally against the Soviet Union because they were so deadly afraid that there would be a war with the Soviets, a war that China certainly would have lost, given the state that the Italians communists themselves had put
China into during the Cultural Revolution. So what Mao did was to turn to the enemy far away in the United States to help backing against an enemy much closer to home, the Soviet Union, which that had this falling out with mainly for our geological reasons. From Mao's perspective, this was always intended to be a strictly security oriented pseudo alliance right it was the right state against the
Soviet Union. Mao, to the end of the States, was puzzled that the United States would support the real Communists meaning him, against the thing communists meaning the Soviet Union. But as long as they were willing to do that, he was certainly willing to reap burnefit. But he never intended that this would have any effect in terms of the increasingly radical communist direction that he was taking for China internally domestically. So that's when what happens in nineteen
seventy six. After Mouse. That becomes so significant because the people who then took over, they thought, aha, we have this relationship with the United States. They are supporting us for their own reasons in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. We can now also make use of this to suit the charge Chinese reform. Right, if it hadn't been for that relationship strictly security orialited that already existed between China and the United States, I doubt that that
would be possible. So it's very important point about the longer term US China relationships to think about that origin and how this actually got started, very different from the way most people think about it, where the security element and the reform element that sort of conflated into one.
It's also just hard in twenty twenty four to imagine that various communist states would not be natural allies. And of course China after the Vietnam War, China also went to war against Vietnam. The fact that they're so concerned about the Soviet invasion, it just sort of this fascinating dimension that I don't think fits neatly into our heads.
You know.
I also read your co author's book. He recently wrote a great biography of Joe and Lae, and it occurs to me like reading that book and the new book. Obviously, I think Mao associated ideologically with the left faction and the CCP and the Gang of Four, etc. But he always seemed to keep a couple of I don't know if the word is liberals, but to some extent liberals around So Joe he never got purged, even though it didn't seem like Mao particularly liked him. For much of
his life. Liberals and dun Chopeng got purged multiple times, but never lost his membership of the Communist Party and always seemed to find his way back even during the Mao era. Why was it that, despite his ideological predilections towards the left, that in these important roles he couldn't bring himself to purge some of these perhaps more reformist minded characters.
Because he needed to have things stop. I mean, Mao wasn't just an audiologue, which was the most important aspect of him. I think when you look at his historical role, he was also the leader of a country, and he needed to get certain things to work within the country or within the pup and for that, having seen time and again that his ideological allies were not particularly good at this. They were good at reciting Marx and Lenin,
but they were not particularly good at running things. He needed people like Joe and I. He needed people like Dung Show King to get Kingstom. But as chan Jen Great Joe in biography shows very clearly, there were limits to how far he would go in working with people like Joe. Or he was willing to work with them as long as they served his purposes, and if there was any sense that they actually tried to have a direct political influence above or different from his, they would
get into trouble. So I'm not sure if talken liberals here is the right term. I mean liberals in terms of their thinking about politics. These people served, as long as he was alive, served as gelemen, and they served him at his leisure. So if he got a suspicion with them, as he did so many other people, that they were not serving his radical interests, he would act against them.
You mentioned earlier that your book brings together the macro and the micro, and in terms of the micro, it reminded me a lot of second hand time which is an oral history of the end of the Soviet Union, and there are lots of stories in there about individual experiences and entrepreneurs who suddenly are starting their businesses in the post communist period and things like that. I've been trying to get Joe to read this book a lot time.
It's amazing. But can you talk to us a little bit more about the individual stories that you heard from this particular period in Chinese history.
So there are many stories, and both Jan and I are the kind of historians who are storytellers. We like to tell these stories. We like to focus on individuals and their experiences, and that's of course what sets this period upon. It's such an incredibly dramatic era. I mean, first to count revolution and instants, and then this period of almost unbelievable change, which I remember very well myself.
I mean, from one day to the next, things that have been seen as being true forever were no longer true, right, And things changed so very quickly, and entrepreneurs who had a few weeks earlier had been put in prison for their activities held up as heroes of economic development. Right. That was China during this time period, and it's wonderfully fertile ground for historians who like to tell stories, so
we tell some of these. Maybe some of the most fascinating ones that we came across are the ones of these early entrepreneurs, I mean people who get started even before the political changes in Beijing have taken place, very often coming out of collective enterprises of some sort, people's communes or whatever you have, and finding that they were were pretty good at doing what they were set to do.
We have one example in there, which is one little tract or repair shop that turned out to be incredibly good at repairing tractors in Guangdong Province in the south of China, and then started gradually to get payment in kind kind of bartering system their services against a little bit of steel or a little bit of machinery or some silk and that right which they could and trade or for a while they could actually smuggle it into
Hong Kong and trade it there. By the mid nineteen seventies, these folks have a Hong Kong Bank account right well before anything has happened in Beijing in terms sorry for so if these guys had been caught, they would probably have been shocked, right for smuggling and currency for when the reform really gets started in nineteen seventy eight, they have a leg up, right, and they can do things that no one else can, and now they're heroes. So this is the origins of one of the biggest companies
in China today. So these are the kinds of stories that we'd like to tell. I mean at the political level as well. I mean, one of the most fascinating people that we came across is who are Wokong? The guy who became somewhat unwillingly, most handkicked successful, and who was actually quite a decent leader in many ways, not very imaginative, not of the kind of dynamism that Don had, but still probably someone who was annecessary figure, you know,
in order to facilitate that station. Yeah, that happened in the in the late nineties.
Yeah, I get the impression to reading about him that obviously he was in a difficult position having to uphold MoU's legacy, who's pushed aside eventually more or less by Don Chopang, but also sort of went gradually and didn't put up a huge fight. That probably saved a lot of turmol, you know, speaking of somebody these early companies. I hadn't realized that the China's number one electrical appliance manufacturer.
I don't know if I'm pronounce to you right, but mydea, it looks like that was actually founded in nineteen sixty eight, as you point out in the book. So really, I mean, here's this gigantic, publicly traded company and it was founded right in the heart of the Cultural Revolution.
Yeah, those are I mean, those were perhaps some of the most surprising examples. I mean they're not many of I mean, we should be careful with not exaggerate. Okay, this is not an attempt that to rehabilitating the control revolution, but it was possible, under extraordinary circumstances and by extraordinary people, to few things that probably early on could not be on. I mean, they didn't do it big because the Communist
Party wanted them to do it. They did it because the Communist Party lost control and couldn't go on with the kind of centralized planning that they had done before. Not everywhere and at all times anyway. So media is a good example of that, and I'm sure there were hundreds, if not thousands, of these startups cultural revolution era startups that didn't succeed, or these people were caught and ended up in prison camps or whatever. Right, so we shouldn't
overstate the countryvoid importance of these attempts at entrepreneurships. Many of them ended up not going anywhere, but there was this opportunity among those that survived to have that fundamental advantage over others when then countrywide national reform came about in the late nineteen seventies. And that actually connects to a point about who are go Phone because at that point, normally in Chinese politics, someone who fell from grace the way who all Go Phone did would have met with
quite a terrible fate. Who allowed himself to be replaced at the top because he simply taught it was better for China that it went in the direction that it did peacefully, and then spent the rest of his life cultivating grapes in his residence in Beijing. He became one of China's foremost experts of native grape varieties, a subject
of which he published at least two articles. Of course, andro pseudonym, So you know, this kind of thing earlier on in China would have be don't think given the cut throat aspects of Chinese politics.
I didn't realize that China had native grape varieties, so that's interesting, okay, But just on this point, what was the downside for individu rules in accepting market liberalization, Because nowadays we talk a lot about the social compact in China, the idea that okay, maybe people don't have as many democratic rights as in other parts of the world, but the promise from the CCP is that we're all going
to get rich. And it feels like in the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties there was some loss of a social safety net that came about as a result of the promise that like, Okay, you're not going to get as much welfare social welfare, but you're going to get a chance to become really, really wealthy.
And that was, of course part of this great transformation that we're talking about, is what happened when much of that social welfirm net disappeared. It was a very brutal process. I mean, we have a tendency I think in this country and knows what to think about Chinese reform as the good reform in terms of results, and Russian reform is the bad reform. Right where things went wrong after the collapse of the solid Union. But these two are in many ways much more similar, we discovered than what
they generally have been taken to be. The desperation that you find among a lot of Chinese when these social welfare systems went away, mainly in the late eighties and nineties, in the early two thousand was very profound. It was a market revolution, but as all market revolutions, it has
its winners and its users. And what was remarkable about the transformation in China was that when one went through that first period of relative hardship, then of course the general economy started to pick up, giving more people a chance to enter into the middle class. But these two
time periods are not the same. There was a period of real hardship to begin with, and then quite a bit later this opportunity for many people still not everyone still draw up about four hundred to five hundred million poor people in China, a lot of people, but for
many to take that step into division justice. And that's in a way the story of Channel's reformed that they were able to make that jump, while in Russia, most of the efforts that setting up I'm of the economy that's actually worked domestically failed.
So one thing that people say a lot is that the Chinese Communist Party for a long time up until the day, is obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union and figuring out how to avoid a similar collapse at some point, and part of me wonders, like, the two countries seem so different and the circumstances seem so different that it's like hard for me to like say, like, oh, if you do this, then you do get that outcome,
and like who knows. But there is some school of thought that part of the problem with Soviet reforms starting under Gorbachov was the sort of political liberalization that maybe economic liberalization is okay markets, but you still need that strong central party, and that maybe Orbitschov's mistake was doing both at once, or maybe doing the political liberalization at all,
et cetera. You talk also in your conclusion about some of the missed opportunities of more political liberalization along with the market liberalization that China has seen over the last several decades. When you think about the fall of the Soviet Union and what contributed to that collapse, how much of it is it the market reforms versus the structure
of the Soviet Union versus the political liberalization. And is there an argument to be made that the reason that the CCP and the country is as stable as it is today is because they didn't also pursue the political liberalization.
No, not really, I don't think that is the key. I think the key reason why the CCP succeeded was more that they were willing to experiment, I mean, under a situation of political dictatorship. As you pointed out, they were willing to experiment in ways that the Soviet leadership was And maybe I mean, and this is pure speculation, but maybe that goes back to what we talked about earlier on that the Soviet Union kept chugging along, you know,
with some growth a very very long time. There wasn't that kind of desperation that you found in China after everything that the Communist Party had tried had failed. So these people were really running out of the time both to transformed China but also to protect the execution right. They had to do something, and then they introduced gradual reform and all that gradual economic reform without ever thinking that
they would give up political control. So this is one of the things that we show in the book, and I think this is the reason why the Chinese communist potted today is so obsessed with learning the negative lessons from the Soviet Union, is that much of this was of course not just about creating a China that was rich and strong. It was being able to recreate the
communist party that was in control of mostics. Right. So that story or how that the dictatorship was reinforced at the back of reform already in the mid nineteen eighties, is a very central part of our book. I mean, we do see a period of openness from the late seventies to the mid nineteen eighties, when there would have been a really possibility that China would have moved in a more democratic, but more pluralistic, more open direction than
what happened what happened later on. But by nineteen eighty four of their aboats that period is ended. Done is laying down the law, saying the direction that China will go in is one of increased deepening, market reform and communist party control. There will be no pluralism of any sort, there will be no freedom of speech. All of that is and this is of course very important in terms
of understanding China today. I mean, this is what created the kind of situation that we see now, even though I now, of course, I was in China in the spring and one of my businessman friends was joking that maybe, you know, reform and opening should be seen as a gigantic Yet you know, let in its new economic policy back in the nineteen twenties where people were allowed to generate wealth for a while, just for the party to
come back in and confiscate everything. So don't say that I'm sharing that view, but given what she and King has been up recently, you can spok of longer standing.
Since we're up firmly in the nineteen eighties. Now, talk to us about Coca cola and its presence in the Chinese market, because I kind of think this is like a nice little microcosm of the changes that happened to the Chinese economy around that time.
So the Coca Cola example is really interesting because it's a typical example in a way of how it was possible for a moved the national company to come into China, to start working in China because of the attractiveness the symbolism of the product that it delivered, but also was able to work with local people and local businesses within China. And what's also fascinating here is the connection between Coca Cola and its political significance in terms of the American.
Because Coco is like a symbol of American capitalism, right.
Yes, and the Chinese leadership wanted to embrace that symbolism without necessarily having to embrace the full package. So they were trying to figure out how they could work with this particular American company and indeed other American companies as well, in order to be seen as helping bringing Coca Cola to China, but on conditions that would be acceptable to them.
And this is the story that is repeated over and over again in China when it comes to foreign companies, the connections to local partners, how the government oversees this in seat of political terms, but also how it can turn out to be immensely emotionally successful under those circumstances.
You joked about your businessman friend in China saying, maybe that whole reform period was like Lenin's net period, and you had the dominance of the party and then wealth was created, and then now the party re emerges in strength and Caesar's control of that wealth, so to speak. I'm curious your take here in twenty twenty four. Do you find that to have been an inevitable arc? I mean, I probably doesn't sound like you believe much is inevitable,
given your focus on contingencies of history. But was this something that like due to this specific leaders who emerged in China, most prominently Shijinping, but also to some extent with the more nationalist edge of hu Jintao, Like, was this something that is like it was the result of these specific individuals that has bent the curve of history so to speak, or do you think there was sort of like structural forces and play that brought back the sort of like very high level of state control.
I think it was both. I mean, in the She and Pink case, I think he was picked by the party as the what the Chinese could call the core leader back in the early twenty teens in response to what was seen as a bunch of real problems from a Chinese Communist Party perspective over liberalization, decentralization, corruption, strength of private companies that meddled in a lot of things
that the Communists didn't want them to meddle In. They wanted to get a strong leader win who could deal with those issues in a way that his predecessors, youngstermen Hu Jintao, had not been able to do it. So they wanted a strong leader. It's just that I think even for many Communist leaders of that generation, they got more than they bargained for. So that's where the personality
as state comes in. They got a leader who really wanted to return digal So issues to the maoist or even the sort of pre Mao period in terms of the CCP's history, and emphasizes the party's position over what even many party leaders back twenty fifteen years ago. Coote
would be good for China. And it's a classic example, right of responding to real world problems not unknown in this country, right by going very far in one direction, hoping that that would resolve the problem that is there, and then getting stuck in a way in WICKI kind of leader that you have in this case in Tea and pain. So, I think that's the story the way we can tell it now. I hope at some point to be able to tell that story based on archives
and primary documents. As an historian, we can't do that yet, but I think at some point we will be able to do that, and then it will be fascinating to test that hypothesis about how this happened.
So just on the revolution from below point, one of the things that you emphasize the book is a lot of the stuff that happens in this time period is a result of people feeling that they are heading somewhere, that there's like a grander Chinese vision that can be achieved,
and so that motivates people to actually do something. I'm curious, just going up to the present day, do you get a sense that people feel that that there's like a direction that China is heading in that it's clear to people like what they are trying to do at a moment.
Absolutely not. I think it's very very clear that a lot of people in China do not understand where the country is heading and what the reasons are. And you know, you don't spend much time in Beijing before you realize that these days, I think it was very different in the time period that we are talking about, which was generally a time or uplift, at least in economic and
social terms. And it's right to say, I mean as many historians said that there was an element of a bargament that at least for some Chinese, not everyone, but for some Chinese, very particularly in business, that one accepted the dictatorship for what it was and then went on getting rich and establishing somebodies great middling fortunes that you find so many in China today. And that is good.
I mean, that was positive. It was much much better than the dark past that we described at the beginning of the book. It was just that China wasn't able to take what in our view is a necessary step to improve its political system, its overall attempt at trying to become a more open, more pluralistic country in the period when the going was good, when there was a
general sense that China was making advances domestically and internationally. Now, I think even if people from within the Chinese Companist Party of the Hemping would try to move in a direction of increased liberalisation, which I think they will have to do at some point because people are just very unhappy with the color system that is there at the moment, it would be much more difficult because the going is not that good and it probably is never going to
be that good again, and it was a remarkable period of economic transformation ten percent per year growth rates. It would have been possible to carry out necessarily reform, but these people didn't want to do it because they had become so preoccupied with holding on power themselves. And I think historically that that might turn out to be the biggest mistake. That's cover is for us later.
On, arn Western, Thank you so much, truly the perfect guest. Really appreciate you coming.
On nominative determinism. Truly had to come on this.
Indeedeed we talked about contingency. This is not contingent. This is right. This is the one.
This is the one scientific fact of history that was inevitable regardless of it.
Was great chatting with you.
Yeah, thank you so much. Congrats on the book and encourage people to check it out. And I appreciate it. Thank you, Tracy. I'm totally down in my dottage to just turn this into a history podcast where we read books and then talk to historians.
I feel like podcasts becoming history podcast is also an Indepololgi right.
Well, you run out of things to talk about, so you gotta start mining the past.
You know what actually in all your recent reading, you might know the answer to this question which I forgot to ask arn about. But why was the Soviet Union and China in like the nineteen fifties obsessed with steel production?
Do you know why? I actually don't know the answer. My guess would be is just like the most sort of objective thing of what you need to modernize in a twentieth century economy, you need steel for probably literally everything that gets built. It'd been a good question. Another thing that I wish I had asked is how paranoid,
how justified? Was because you asked that great question about the importance of the tension between China and the Soviet Union in Mao's turning at least to some extent to the US, which then expanded greatly over the following decades. But I never get the impression that there really was any actual prospect of war. Like there's one point in the book where like the leaders all scrambled away from Beijing because they were fear of a nuclear attack from
the Soviet Union. But it's not clear that there was any real anything happening there.
I guess hindsight is twenty twenty when it comes to a lot of this stuff, including the Cold War, is kind of similar. I guess, like nothing happened in the end in terms of like a nuclear tech came close with Cuba as minds, that is true, but like it didn't happen. Yes, But one thing that I got from this book is again the importance of an external enemy when it comes to radical economic transformation. And I think we've seen so many examples of that throughout his at
this point. So China, China's market liberalization as a result of its fear of the Soviet Union is a great one. I guess the return of industrial policy in the US as a result of its fear of China's economic dominance is another one. Japan in the nineteen eighties would be a good one too. It feels like in order for anything to get done at scale and in an efficient time period, you have to have like some sort of threat that's hanging over you.
This is why we need the Paul Krugman, like, we need to convince everyone that the threat is the alien. Yes, yes, and then you catalyze development without actually and then there's no aliens in the end. But yeah, I though there was fascinating. I know, it's such a cliche and I hate to admit it, but it does seem like understanding the modern world, you can learn something by reading the past.
I resist incredibly surprising.
I resisted that reality for a long time in my life, and now I've succumbed. We have to know how we got here.
Okay, now that you've discovered history, shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Audlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Odd arn Westdad. He's OA Westdad, and definitely check out his new book, The Great Transformation. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Kerman Arman, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, and Keil Brooks at Keilbrooks. Thank you to our producer Moses Ondem. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash od Loots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter, and you can chat about all of these
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