China: from Communism to Communism In Name Only?
(The second part of Chapter 3 in my book, I will provide the bibliography at the end of the final part of the chapter. The next part will be on China's energy policies)
3.1.3. Communism (1949 to 1978)
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was unable to subdue the island of Taiwan where the defeated nationalist government re-established itself, and then was blocked by the United States. As with the Century of Humiliation, this is seen as a historic wrong that should be righted – providing a long-term non-negotiable foreign policy objective. A fully communist system (i.e. without capitalist productive relations) was not established until later in the 1950s, when all land became owned by the state or was communally owned by collectives. During this first decade of communist rule there was a rapid growth and recovery from the destruction of the Japanese invasion and the civil war; aided by extensive technical aid from the USSR. A focus on the provision of basic health and educational services, together with nutrition, to rural areas lead to significant reductions in death rates and increases in human development - as O’Grada (2011, p. 195) notes “three major killers - smallpox, plague, and cholera - had been virtually eliminated and large -scale immunization campaigns carried out”. By 1958, death rates had been reduced to 12 per thousand, half the level of India. In parallel, there was a centralized drive to develop basic industries.
In 1951 Tibet was reintegrated into China under the Seventeen Point Agreement, with its internal structure remaining unchanged; a medieval theocracy with the vast majority of land organized into religious and secular manorial estates worked by serfs (Parenti 2003). The region had been a protectorate under the Qing dynasty from 1720 to 1912. The succeeding Republic of China had claimed it as part of China, as the current Taiwanese government still does. The British had invaded Tibet in 1904, and once the Qing dynasty collapsed Tibet became a British protectorate. This was de facto independence as Tibet did not receive de jure recognition by the international community. After the Tibetan uprising of 1959, supported by Taiwan and the CIA (Conboy & Morrison 2002), both sides (the PRC and the Dalai Lama) repudiated the Seventeen Point Agreement and the PRC revoked Tibetan local autonomy. From a CCP point of view, the reintegration of Tibet can be seen as part of the process of regaining sovereignty over Chinese lands from the Western powers; in the same vein as the return of Macao and Hong Kong, and the still unresolved issue of Taiwan. For the vast majority of the Tibetan population the CCP takeover provided extensive increases in basic human rights, health, education, and economic development.
Immediately after the establishment of the PRC, Mao allied the nation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which provided extensive economic, technical and military aid. In 1950, only a year after the establishment of the PRC, the Chinese army was used to repulse the UN troops that had crossed the 38th parallel and had approached the Chinese border at the Yalu River. Although the successful defence of North Korea increased the CCP’s reputation and legitimacy, the cost of the war significantly impacted domestic development policies. After the death of Stalin in 1953 and his denunciation by Khrushchev, the two nations started to diverge on communist doctrinal and geopolitical issues. This culminated in the breaking of relations with the USSR by China in 1962 and border conflicts in the late 1960s. China was also heavily involved in supplying support staff and material to the North Vietnamese during their wars with the French, and then the US (Qiang Zhai 2000) during the 1950s and 1960s; support that was critical to North Vietnam’s final victory. In the 1970s China became more pragmatic with respect to foreign relations and opened up communications with the US from 1972 onwards.
In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to accelerate industrialization “through political will and local initiative” (World Bank 1983, p.10). At first output had leapt during the Great Leap Forward due to the over-intensive use of resources at the behest of Mao (machinery, people and natural resources), but this was unsustainable and produced significant amounts of waste. An example was the melting down of household and farming implements in “backyard furnaces” to produce metal that was generally useless for manufacturing purposes; a process that destroyed capital goods and natural resources such as trees in return for a short-term jump in unusable industrial output. Another was the Four Pests (mosquitoes, rodents, flies, sparrows) campaign, which included the Smash Sparrows campaign that resulted in severe ecological imbalances due to the mass killings of sparrows; the sparrows were seen as pests that ate grain seeds, but they also served to keep insect numbers under control. Their eradication resulted in a ballooning of the locust population that fed off the crops, as well as other insect populations. It was stopped in 1960 and sparrows imported for repopulation. Such imbalances together with the redirection of labor from agriculture to industrial uses, possible disruptive changes in agricultural organization, and some misreporting of reduced yields by Party officials (O’Grada 2009), exacerbated the effects of three years of drought in some areas and floods in others; producing a one quarter decline in grain yields (Patnaik 2011).
The result was what has been called the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), but we must be very circumspect about purported death rates during this period given Cold War propaganda and the possible motivations for Deng Xiaoping to downplay the achievements of Mao during his struggle for power at the end of the 1970s. Using the official Chinese numbers the death rate in the severest year of the famine (1960) was equal to the normal death rate in India at the time. Even utilizing these official figures, and assuming the benchmark of the 1958 death rate of 12 per 100,000 (an incredible achievement for a country as poor as China at the time if true), the total number of actual excess deaths in the three years would be around 12 million (Patnaik 2011). As with the 1930s USSR famine, the study of this famine has become enmeshed within ideological discourses that have inflated the number of deaths by tens of millions, with a recent example being that of Dikkoter (2010) which both inflated death rates and assumed an unrealistically low benchmark death rate. In his highly critical review of that work, O’Grada (2011, p. 200) provides a somewhat more balanced interpretation:
None of [the extenuating circumstances] absolves Mao from responsibility … But reckless miscalculation and culpable ignorance are not quite the same as deliberately or knowingly starving millions … Few of the countless deaths in 1959-61 were sanctioned or ordained from the center in the sense that deaths in the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi gas chambers were.
It must be remembered that China had suffered from major famines repeatedly before the communist period, for example the 1906-1907 famine with death rates on the same scale as the 1959-61 famine. The failures of this period led to Mao stepping back from economic decision making, and a limited de-collectivization was carried out that with other agricultural improvements produced a significant recovery in the next few years (1961-1965). This recovery was hampered by the removal of Soviet assistance after the Sino-Soviet split of 1962. In 1966, Mao started the Cultural Revolution “which emphasized egalitarianism and ideology at the expense of economic efficiency” (World Bank 1983, p. 11); aimed at redirecting educational resources to the countryside where the mass of the population lived, increasing grassroots democracy and reducing corruption. Within the cities widespread cultural and social destruction was created as the mass student-led Red Guards were empowered to challenge intellectuals and officials, undermining basic societal institutions and the state bureaucracy. Seeing the threat of the chaos and instability, Mao directed the military to re-establish social order in the cities from 1967 to 1968, including the violent suppression of the Red Guards. In the following years many millions of youth and young adults were sent into the countryside, both aiding the education of the agricultural masses and dissipating the fanaticism that had been bred within the Red Guards. The 1971 death in an air crash in Mongolia of the Vice-Chairman of the CCP Lin Biao, in still highly debated circumstances, has been seen by some as moving Mao away from the extremes of the Cultural Revolution and toward the reinstatement of many purged and disgraced officials. Mao had shown himself to be better at destruction than creation, removing the previous economic and social order but also producing years of lost growth. With the reduction in the intensity of the Cultural Revolution, which would continue under Mao and then the Gang of Four until 1976, economic growth resumed. The purging of many competent officials during this period, and the educational deficits caused by the closure of the universities, provided significant headwinds for longer-term economic development. One of the disgraced officials that were reinstated was Deng Xiaoping, who was rehabilitated in the mid-1970s. Following the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, he established himself as the leader of the CCP late in 1978.
In spite of the fluctuations in policy between 1949 and 1978, substantial progress had been made toward industrialization, with an industrial share of GDP of 40%; although 85% of the population remained rural. GNP per capita grew at an annual rate of 2-2.5% from 1957-1977, with low levels of inequality and a very high life expectancy for a country with China’s level of GNP per capita (World Bank 1983). During this period, communist China had very significantly outperformed democratic India. While in 1978 China’s per capita GDP was
still 23% lower than India’s, less than one third that of the Philippines and 43% that of Indonesia’s. However, China’s life expectancy had already reached 65.9 years, while India’s (52.8), the Philippines’ (61.8) and Indonesia’s (58.7) were all substantially lower, despite their higher per capita income (UNDP, CIDP & SIC 2019, p. 33),
the Human Development Index (HDI) was much higher in China (0.41) than in India (0.369 in 1980) though, providing a base from which Deng’s reforms could develop from. For example,
as of 1978, social indicators in China were considerably better than those in many other countries whose per capita income was much higher … In 1976, cooperative healthcare covered 85% of the rural population. Similarly, considerable progress was achieved in rural education and literacy in those years. These achievements were impressive, given how low national income was. As a transition phase, these services that met basic needs may well have helped create a human capital base for the surge in development that followed 1978. (UNDP, CIDP & SIC 2019, p. 67)
The sending of elites to the countryside, followed by the Red Guards (as part of re-establishing order in the cities), both reconnected those elites with the rural masses and added to the redistribution of educational resources in significantly increasing rural literacy. As will be discussed below, the experience of the youth sent to the countryside had a profound effect upon a significant number of the current CCP leadership; it is rare for a nation to be led by a group that spent a significant amount of their formative years with the most poor elements of their society.
3.1.4. Communism In Name Only? (1978 to Present Day)
At the start of this period the Chinese GDP per capita was lower than that of sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank 2019a & 2019b), and its economy represented only 2.19% of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms (PPP) (The Guardian 2016). By 2018 Chinese GDP per capita was at the level of Brazil and Mexico in US$ terms and only one third less than Greece and Portugal in PPP terms (World Bank 2019c & 2019d). This had been facilitated by the move away from communist dogma and toward a more pragmatic approach utilizing the incremental introduction of market pricing combined with more localized decision making instigated by Deng:
Only if we emancipate our minds, seek the truth from facts, proceed from reality in everything and integrate theory with practice, can we carry out our socialist modernization programme smoothly … Seeking truth from facts is the basis of the proletarian world outlook as well as the ideological basis of Marxism (Deng 1978)
The richer conurbations such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai currently house over 60 million people who enjoy a standard of living higher than Greece and approaching that of Portugal and Spain; in 2017 the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) for the province of Beijing (pop. 21.5 million) was US$32,379, for Tianjin (pop. 15.6 million) US$29,979, and for Shanghai (pop. 26.3 million) US$31,275 (UNDP, CIDP & SIC 2019). China’s Human Development Index (HDI) in 2021 was 0.768, higher than Brazil (0.754) and far ahead of India (0.633). In 2016, the Chinese economy was 18% of the global economy. These facts remind me of a conversation I had in the late 1990s with a Singaporean colleague when I was complaining about the authoritarian nature of the city-state’s government and its leader. I was quickly silenced when told that only a few decades earlier the city state had been “as poor as Africa” and the freedom of her children from hunger, disease and a lack of education were much more important than liberal notions of democracy. When discussing human rights, it is important to remember the more basic ones and the relative hierarchy of needs; the selective utilization of such rights can be seen as an act of politicization and propaganda. Compared to the experiences of the Mao era, or even of the last two decades of the twentieth century, the current China can be seen as being an incredible achievement. An achievement extremely obvious to any Chinese person over the age of thirty; the human rights of the average Chinese citizen have been massively improved.
In the late 1980s the CCP was split between those that supported continued political and economic liberalization and those that supported the combination of authoritarian politics and a period of economic retrenchment to deal with inflation and increasing local corruption. Weber (2021) details how close in 1986 and 1988 China came to the implementation of the kind of shock therapy (proposed by the World Bank, Western economists and Eastern European émigré economists, together with a significant number of Chinese economists), that later destroyed the Soviet Union and pushed its successor Russia into a hyper-inflationary depression. In 1988, a group of Chinese economists led by Wu Jinglian were proposing a:
Completely new economic system [requiring] hard-hitting measures to supersede the dual-track system in a relatively short time … [with a privatization strategy that should] reform the legal government structure of state-owned enterprises … [such that] the government will only retain the role of overall management of society and the economy … no longer [being] the direct agent of public ownership, let alone interfere in the internal affairs of enterprises (Wu quoted in Weber 2021, p. 235).
Such words could have been uttered by Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia’s shock therapy. The announcement of “big bang” price reform by the CCP in late 1998 produced a reduction in savings and the hoarding of goods that were affected by price liberalization; producing a rapid increase in inflation from 12% in July 1988 to 23% just a month later. To counter the threat of social instability, price liberalization was rolled back and “the government … reintroduced price controls over important commodities and imposed a strict [economic] retrenchment policy to regain control” (Weber 2021, p. 252). Inflation was overcome within a year of the big bang price reform being aborted, but its imposition and swift removal had created social instability that combined with pressure for political liberalization (Gorbachev had adopted glasnost in 1986) and culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis. With the suppression of the protests came the removal and house imprisonment of Zhao Ziyang who had publicly met and empathized with the protestors who were pushing for liberal democratic political reform.
The centre was strengthened to remove the possibility of the chaos that had afflicted China so many times during its history, a chaos personally experienced by a leadership that had lived through the Japanese invasion, the Chinese civil war and/or the Cultural Revolution (Jiang 1997; Brown 2014; Vogel 2015). Deng himself had been purged from the elite during the Cultural Revolution to reside in the countryside as a manual worker and had seen a son become a paraplegic after either jumping, or being pushed, out of a window while being imprisoned by the Red Guards (Vogel 2011). Xi Jinping, the current head of the CCP, saw his senior Party member father denounced and jailed, one of his two sisters commit suicide after the ransacking of their house by student militias, and was sent to the provinces where he resided in a cave house before being assigned to a work camp to dig ditches (Buckley & Tatlow 2015). The collapse of the USSR can only have reinforced an elite consensus toward a strong central state, and resistance to any signs of domestic revolt, backed by both Chinese history and visceral personal experience. In referring to Xi, MacFarquhar notes “The combination of that domestic trauma, experienced as a young person, and the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union, those two traumas, one domestic and one foreign, have really shaped him … He has seen what happens if you allow too much criticism of the party and the establishment” (quoted in Denyer 2015).
After a few years of retrenchment economic reforms were restarted in the 1990s after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, but political stability was maintained, foreign capital kept at arms-length within the Special Economic Zones, and the economic “commanding heights” kept within state ownership. In contrast to the USSR and its successor states, the period from the late 1980s to the turn of the century was not one of economic collapse, but rather retrenchment followed by rapid economic growth. This was aided by a much shorter history of collectivist communist rule (including the partial de-collectivization of agriculture in the wake of the Great Leap Forward), a previous multi-decadal semi-capitalist period immediately prior to the communist revolution (unlike in pre-revolutionary Russia), extensive markets under the Ming & Qing dynasties, and access to a large market-savvy and capital owning Chinese diaspora – including those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The reinstatement of competitive exams for entrance to the state bureaucracy (removed during the Cultural Revolution) also produced a highly capable technocratic state bureaucracy.
At this point it appeared to many that China had become “communist in name only”, with the result that the CCP could not fully rely upon ideology for its legitimacy. The CCP became more dependent upon its ability to successfully meet its citizens needs for its legitimacy. The most significant way of providing for its citizens needs was through the economic growth that has facilitated rising living standards. “Top officials in China all know that economic development is now most crucial for maintaining the state’s power. They not only strongly promote market-oriented reforms but also try hard to prevent economic overheating and high inflation” (Zhao 2009, p. 425). Such performance legitimacy is akin to the ancient Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven that had come to the fore with the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 BC). This created a state (and Emperor) legitimacy based upon the state’s ability to competently serve the general good:
One of the key components of the Mandate of Heaven concept is that although a ruler cannot entirely determine his own destiny, he is able to influence Heaven’s will by good and moral conduct … in general, a good emperor needed to act according to moral principles prescribed in the Confucian teachings, maintain the functioning of the government administration and public order, lead the defense of the state in time of foreign attacks, and take responsibilities for the people’s welfare and associated public works, including but not limited to flood control and irrigation projects, road construction, and famine relief during natural disasters. (Ibid., p. 421).
As Zhao notes, the concept allowed for the de-legitimization of the ruler (i.e. the Emperor) based upon performance, a situation that supported rebellion against a ruler seen to be unfit, “the idea of rising to rebel against an unfit ruler had a legitimate position in Chinese political culture” (Ibid., p. 421). As with the Emperors, the CCP has no electorally based legitimacy to fall back upon during difficult times, and therefore must rely upon ideology, nationalism and/or performance for its legitimacy. Through the market reforms of Deng, together with a more open dialogue about the shortcomings of post-1949 Chinese state socialism, “By the mid-1980s, most urban Chinese no longer believed in communism” (Ibid., p. 423). After the forcible subjugation of the pro-democracy movement in 1989, which was significantly triggered by the economic and social disruptions of the prior decade, the CCP “employed all three major forms of performance legitimacy available to stabilize its rule (Zhao 2001): moral performance, economic performance, and the defense of national interest (calls to patriotism and nationalism)” (Ibid., p. 425). The focus of the CCP upon performance-based legitimacy since that period was underlined by the concept of the three representatives put forward by Jiang Zemin in 2001:
Jiang argued that in order to be accepted by the people “The CCP must always represent the development of China’s advanced forces of production, the orientation of China’s advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people” [and] the CCP-controlled [sic] media … argued that the three representatives are “the foundation of the Party, the basis of government legitimacy and the sources of state authority”. (Ibid., p. 426).
China had conditionally obtained US “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) trading status in 1980, renewable on a yearly basis (under the 1974 US Trade Act). Successive US administrations took the view that increasing trade and development would push China toward “economic liberalism, multiparty democracy, and a rejection of hegemonic designs” (Salam 2018), repeatedly resisting Congressional and other domestic pressures to revoke MFN status, even after the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. In 2000, the United States provided China with “Permanent Normal Trade Relations” (after significant political maneuvering within the US), and supported China’s ascension to the WTO in 2001. These latter changes greatly facilitated the movement of Western manufacturing to China, as they provided a promise of future stability in trade relations that corporations could rely upon. This helped accelerate the Chinese economic growth rate in the first decade of the new century, producing a five-fold increase in the size of the economy. The Chinese economy then nearly doubled during the following five- year period. This period of explosive growth has its historical parallel in that of the global emergence of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century; although China’s economy grew at twice the rate that the US had experienced during its industrial takeoff.
During the 1980s and 1990s the Chinese development policy “adopted the practice of efficiency first and equity second” (UNDP, CIDP & SIC 2019, p. 76), the
focus was to loosen the system so as to provide each individual in society with development opportunities and unleash individual capacity. The dominant position at this stage was to encourage individuals to fully use their initiative in the market so that “some people get rich first”, a dramatic reversal of the previous egalitarian ethos. (Ibid., p. 78)
Since that period, there has been an increasing focus on rebalancing growth, increasing equity and reducing corruption. The “commanding heights” of the economy, such as the financial and energy sectors have been kept within state control. In addition, even in private companies. management must work with representatives of the Party-state who reside within each corporation. The movement of the ex-Soviet Bloc countries toward the liberal model of capitalist democracy in the 1990s supported the idea that the inclusion of China within the neoLIO would lead it down the same inevitable liberalizing path. Western hubristic assumptions of the “End of History” (Fukuyama 1992) and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy, provided support to such a benign view of China’s rise, “The West … chose to look at China through political rose-colored glasses over the decades, despite the dramatic wake-up call that was Tiananmen” (Rudd 2019, p. 39-40). China’s own focus on economic development “pushed the country away from its earlier revolutionist attitude towards international society, and towards a more status quo position” (Buzan 2010, p. 13) with respect to the neoLIO; a position exemplified by the diplomatic strategy of “keeping a low profile and hiding brightness”. As Buzan noted, “over the past 30 years [1980 to 2010], China has done a pretty good job of pursuing peaceful rise” (Buzan 2010, p. 15). There were some scholars and policy makers who questioned such a benign view. For example, Brzezinski (1997, p. 54) questioned “how large a Chinese sphere of influence, and where, should America be prepared to accept as part of a policy of successfully coopting China into world affairs? What areas now outside of China’s political radius might have to be conceded to the realm of the reemerging Celestial Empire”. With the US focus on the “Global War on Terror” post 9/11, China could continue to gain strength while enjoying the security and stability provided by the neoLIO; a situation that continued through the first decade of the 21st century. Internally, the CCP continued to liberalize the economy but within a framework of Party-state dominance.
In 2007, China became the third, and then in 2010 the second, largest economy in US$ terms; overtaking Germany and then Japan (IMF 2019a). IMF projections indicate that China may overtake the United States in the late 2020s if it continues to grow at the same rate (Ibid.); there is already a precedent for this on a PPP basis since 2013 (IMF 2019b). China’s rapid economic growth has not turned the country into a liberal capitalist democracy, instead, the CCP remains the dominant political force and large swathes of the economy remain state-owned or subject to state direction (So & Chu 2016; Starrs 2017). Xi underlined the non-negotiable nature of this arrangement in a speech in 2015:
We must consolidate and develop the public sector with firm commitment, and devote equal commitment to encouraging, supporting, and guiding the development of the non-public sector, ensuring that ownership of all forms can reinforce each other and develop together. At the same time, we must be extremely clear that our nation’s basic economic system is a pillar of the Chinese socialist system and the basis of the socialist market economy, and therefore the dominant role of public ownership and the leading role of the state sector must not change. (Xi 2015).
Under Xi, an extensive anti-corruption drive was carried out that supported the legitimacy of the Party. When combined with actions to reduce the monopolistic and oligopolistic positions of leading Chinese corporations and to rein in and reduce the power of the most vocal corporate leader (Jack Ma of Alibaba), and policies to rebalance incomes between the cities and countryside, the Party-state has increased the focus toward more sustainable and equitable growth. In addition, it has made clear that the Party-state will continue to be the predominant economic, social and political institution.
In the 2010s, Chinese foreign policy took on a less subservient stance, with Xi Jinping’s new strategic direction of “Striving for Achievement” (SFA) indicating, “that China will take initiatives to shape its external environment in a favourable direction” (Yan 2014, p. 166); as noted in chapter 2. Buzan typifies China as a “reformist revisionist” state that “accepts some of the institutions of international society for a mixture of calculated and instrumental reasons. But it resists, and wants to reform, others, and possibly also wants to change its status” (Buzan 2010, p. 18). It will want to “’shape’ the international system to a higher degree”, expect “to be treated on an equal footing” and “will never compromise on China’s sovereignty and core interests” (Sorenson 2015, p. 65). Buzan (2018) notes that China aligns with the classical Westphalian Global International Society (GIS) institutions of sovereignty, non-intervention, territoriality, balance of power and great power management, together with the newer ones of nationalism, human equality and development together with a conditional acceptance of markets. “From the CCP’s perspective, it is the liberal West that is aggressively revisionist, seeking to impose liberal values [of market dominance, democracy and selective human rights] on the rest of the world” (Ibid., p. 462). This statement helps place China’s position with respect to the neoLIO, with it being seen as supportive of many of its aspects while wanting to revise its relative position within that order and resisting what it sees as a Western revisionism that especially violates concepts of state sovereignty. Given its historical interactions with the West, especially during the Century of Humiliation, such a focus is understandable.
Initiatives such as BRI that serve to expand China’s sphere of influence while supporting political and economic diversity (and restricts the interventionism of the Washington Consensus institutions), and the “Made in China 2025”, together with a “Chinese dream” that envisions a China at odds with basic tenets of Western neoliberalism, can be seen as direct challenges to America’s global leadership and the neoLIO as it currently stands. At a deeper level, the universalism of Western modernity is being challenged as the only true version of modernity. Instead, multiple possible versions of modernity are seen as possible, with the Chinese model as one of them (Jacques 2012). This creates significant ideological differences between China and the West, especially in such areas as the balance between individual (and property) rights and the collective, and the need for Western-style democracy.
China has also taken a more active stance against the US within the UN Security Council after encountering what it saw as the misuse of a UN-mandate by NATO to overthrow the Libyan state in 2011. In addition, China’s military capabilities have expanded. Although Chinese defence expenditures have remained at around 2% of GDP, they have paralleled the exponential growth of the economy. In US$ terms, the Chinese defence budget overtook that of Japan in 2001, became the second-largest globally in 2002, and in 2018 was equal to over one third of the US defence budget while being nearly four times larger than the third-placed country (SIPRI 2019); calculated on a PPP basis China’s defence spending would be approximately half that of the US.
The combination of the above factors has led to a reassessment of China by the United States, starting with the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” in 2011. US policymakers have changed their positioning vis-à-vis China significantly as indicated by national security documents, together with many academic books and articles, identifying China as a strategic revisionist competitor (US DoD 2018) and assessing the viability of oil blockades and military conflict (Allison 2017, Collins 2018, Gompert et. al. 2016). The current trade war that includes demands for fundamental changes to the ways in which the Chinese economy operates can be seen as a continuation of this escalating trend. As Buzan noted in 2010 “The danger is that as China rises it will become less dependent on the United States, and more opposed to its leadership, and the United States will feel more threatened by its increasing power and revisionism” (Buzan 2010, p. 22). A fundamental issue is that the Chinese population is about four times that of the US, and therefore if it is able to escape the “middle income trap” and its GDP per capita becomes closer to that of the US it will naturally become the dominant world power. From a realist viewpoint it would be advantageous for the US to keep China within that middle-income trap, a possibility undermined by the continual upgrading planned for the Chinese economy through such initiatives as Made in China 2025. Moak (2020) states the US view bluntly, “China was a ‘good guy’ when it was producing labor-intensive or low-technology products such as garments. It only became the ‘greatest threat’ when it was able to produce high-technology goods that were competitive with those produced in the US.”
"The result was the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) that resulted in the death of approximately 20-30 million from starvation”. ??
Though such an horrific die off would bolster the argument, it did not in fact occur. Nobody starved to death during 1959-61, and nobody wasn't hungry.
Mao had fed million-man armies on the march, under fire, for decades. He was the world's greatest logistician. Despite Mao's best efforts, there were excess deaths, just as there were with Covid, but they occurred to people in their 60s, at a time when life expectancy was 58. (Covid deaths were 99% 80 year olds).
The details are here: https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/maos-great-leap
After the shock doctrine's managed demolition of the economy in western countries, the majority will eagerly give up their civil rights etc in return for Security...
Expect "too much freedom is not a good thing" slogans to abound...
The Child minding centres already incalcate such, and habituate the kids to total surveillance society...
Johnny, Sally, no one is allowed to be alone (a sign of anti-social behaviour)), or to be unhappy (a sign of deviance) - "everyone must join in"...
(Research published over a ago revealed that levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, in pre-schoolers attending minding centres was above normal...(A price of Security !)...