TRIGGERnometry - How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter

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00:00:30.000 When you have a figure of 5% GDP, which we must achieve, that's a quota. You dig a hole, it's GDP.

00:00:40.660 You fill it with concrete, it's GDP. You build a house on top of it, it's GDP. You destroy the

00:00:46.560 house, build a bigger one, still empty, also GDP. But you can sit and you build a train which is

00:00:51.640 empty and you can look at these great skyscrapers which are also empty. Why are they exporting so

00:00:57.700 much, because nobody has the means to buy any of it inside China. We think communism is under

00:01:04.760 production, not enough. No, it's too much of this and too little of that. It remains a classic

00:01:11.460 misallocation of capital, which creates the illusion, the illusion of great achievements.

00:01:18.160 But the moment you start looking at the numbers, it all vanishes rather quickly.

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00:01:41.520 below to have your say on what the government is doing frank d cotter welcome to trigonometry

00:01:46.700 thank you for having me it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show you are one of the world's

00:01:51.620 greatest experts on the history of China, especially over the last 100 plus years or so.

00:01:56.260 Thank you.

00:01:56.780 And the question we wanted to start with is just for you to tell us and our audience,

00:02:00.960 it's a part of the world that's poorly understood here in the West, I feel, by most people,

00:02:05.940 or not understood at all. How does China, which is communist today, become communist over the

00:02:13.820 last 100 plus years? Because when we think of China, we think of it as the Chinese imperial

00:02:20.500 society. That's kind of the historical narrative we have. How does it go from that to what it is

00:02:25.840 today? Yeah, well, that's a long story. And I'm not entirely sure where to start. But one thing

00:02:32.200 you want to bear in mind, when you think about the Bolsheviks and Lenin in 1917, they basically

00:02:39.220 inherit the boundaries of the Romanov Empire, the Tsarist Empire. So the one thing we tend to

00:02:45.360 forget is that the communists in 1949, when they conquer power and the red flag goes up over

00:02:51.620 the Forbidden City, inherits the Qing Empire, which collapsed in 1911. So what I'm trying to

00:03:00.200 say here is that in terms of geopolitics, the China we know today is very much based on the

00:03:07.740 empire that lasted from roughly the middle of the 17th century till 1911 when it collapsed.

00:03:13.620 So to put it in a slightly more brutal manner, it is an empire that has yet to decolonize.

00:03:21.860 So think of Xinjiang Uyghurs, concentration camps, Tibet.

00:03:29.120 Large chunks of that territory belong to the Qing Empire, conquered by the Manchus in 1644.

00:03:36.560 This empire collapses like many empires in 1911.

00:03:39.460 What you then see from 1911 to 1949 is an extraordinarily interesting period called the Republic of China.

00:03:47.240 Can I pause there?

00:03:48.580 Because I'd love for you to tell us briefly why the Qing Empire collapses.

00:03:52.960 The bottom line is that they were overstretched and had to control a huge amount of territory.

00:04:03.640 But I think one other reason is that they managed to conquer so much through violence that the moment there was any sense of weakness, a great many of these peoples they conquered, including Tibetans and Mongols and Uyghurs, rebelled in the 19th century.

00:04:23.620 So this is one of the great stories, Mount Nally, you ask about the 19th century.

00:04:27.820 You know, why did it collapse?

00:04:30.240 Have you heard of the Taiping Rebellion?

00:04:32.640 Briefly.

00:04:33.300 Briefly.

00:04:33.840 Now, you can take any one book written by a Westerner about this thick,

00:04:37.700 and it will tell you some 20 million people died.

00:04:40.360 If you ask, how do we know that?

00:04:42.420 Where does this number come from?

00:04:43.660 There is nothing in the footnotes to tell you how this number has been derived that.

00:04:47.740 If you look at the demography, you'll find something much more interesting,

00:04:51.040 namely that during that conflict, which lasted from roughly the 1850s till the 1860s,

00:04:57.780 about 14, 15 years, and was followed by other civil rules,

00:05:01.800 about 70 million plus individuals were massacred from both sides, the Taiping, who were a rebellion

00:05:09.780 against the Qing dynasty, and the Qing who had to reconquer pretty much half of China.

00:05:16.480 And then if you add on other rebellions of Muslims, of Uyghurs, of a whole series of peoples in the

00:05:24.940 south and the north and the east and the west, you arrive at a death toll of well over 100

00:05:29.760 million people, frequently men, women, children, dogs, pigs, slaughtered without any mercy

00:05:37.320 on both sides. This is an extraordinarily brutal society. So, in other words, the moment that Qing

00:05:45.040 empire starts showing signs of weakness, there are local populations that seize that moment to

00:05:51.340 seek revenge or claim back whatever territory they had before the incorporation into the Qing.

00:05:57.280 the whole thing collapses in 1911. Why is this so interesting? I'll tell you why it's interesting.

00:06:04.860 Because already in the 19th century, you have Westerners who complain about the fact that we

00:06:09.680 tend to think about China as a culture, a civilization, you know, where people like

00:06:17.640 Confucius and other philosophers have instilled some wisdom into large numbers of people in

00:06:24.980 contrast to all the savagery you would see in Europe, for instance. Whereas in reality,

00:06:31.740 whenever there is a war in the 19th century in China, not so much a war, it's just massacres,

00:06:37.700 massacres of innocent people. There's that contrast which some foreigners find very

00:06:41.800 interesting. And I think that contrast still holds through this very day. We tend to think

00:06:46.240 about China in terms of culture, not politics or war or massacres or unpleasant events. We have a

00:06:54.960 romanticized vision of China. And it goes back to Voltaire and other, of course, philosophers in

00:07:01.180 Europe. And why is Chinese history so brutal? I don't think it's more brutal than anywhere else.

00:07:09.600 You have to be a little bit fair. Not on this show. I mean, that's the modern era, right? Not

00:07:19.640 the 19th century, but take Pol Pot, he massacres, what, about 1.60, 2.4 million people. He can't go

00:07:25.780 much further. It's about 20, 25 percent of the population. During the Great Leap Forward under

00:07:31.800 Mao 1958-62, you do have parts of China that few of your listeners will ever have heard of.

00:07:40.300 For instance, Fengyang, which has roughly 8 million people, in which about 2.4 million people

00:07:48.400 are starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.

00:07:50.580 So the proportion is the same,

00:07:52.500 except, of course, that the population in China

00:07:54.040 is so much bigger than Cambodia.

00:07:55.800 So there's a lot more to play with, so to speak.

00:07:58.460 I see.

00:07:58.840 It's extremely densely populated.

00:08:01.800 But otherwise, do I think there's something

00:08:03.800 specifically Chinese about it?

00:08:05.400 No, I don't.

00:08:06.340 I see.

00:08:06.520 So the answer is human beings are brutal.

00:08:08.280 Human beings kill.

00:08:09.940 If you're very lucky, you may have an emperor here or there

00:08:15.580 or a king or a leader who is slightly more, you know, willing to contemplate an alliance with the

00:08:22.620 next door enemy as opposed to massacre. But in general, it is what I call the Mongol method.

00:08:27.520 You arrive and you give the local inhabitants a choice. You surrender and pay respect or we

00:08:33.000 massacre everyone to the very last. I think that's the human way of solving issues until,

00:08:41.180 of course, the advent of the notion of a division of powers, separation of powers, right? It's

00:08:46.340 extremely modern, which is why we call the 19th century the age of revolution, as people started,

00:08:53.180 you know, turning against these autocracies and empires and this and that, when sovereignty is

00:09:00.420 no longer seen to reside in a king or an emperor, a mandate from heaven, in the case of China,

00:09:06.400 but seemed to reside in the people. Of course, then the people massacre each other,

00:09:10.380 trying to define who is part of that people, that population, who is not.

00:09:16.360 But the key point here must be that in the 19th century,

00:09:20.220 as a result of the extraordinary bloody civil wars

00:09:24.800 in which the reconquest by the Qing of large territories is equally bloody,

00:09:30.340 none of the people in charge ever take on board

00:09:34.620 some of these principles that come from Europe,

00:09:37.620 which is division of power, with the separation of powers, which is giving ordinary people a vote,

00:09:43.640 which is basically something we refer to as political reform. None of that exists. They all

00:09:47.820 have their hands drenched in blood, with the result that when there is a revolution that does

00:09:52.820 succeed in 1911 against the Qing, most of the protagonists are not really willing to

00:09:59.100 go along the road of democracy. So this is one of the key, if you wish, key sort of

00:10:11.420 difficulties in the case of the Qing Empire and China today, is that the desire and the will

00:10:21.440 to keep so many people and such a large country, continent, one is tempted to say,

00:10:31.260 the size of Europe, to keep that unified demands a firm hand from above. So the fear of this unity

00:10:41.060 is greater than the fear of what an authoritarian hand from above will do. So that's the issue we

00:10:50.760 have to this very day. So for instance, if you go to the People's Republic of China,

00:10:55.040 if you are a Uyghur and you happen not to be in a concentration camp, which is statistically

00:10:59.640 somewhat odd, in any event, you will live on Beijing time and you will speak Mandarin,

00:11:06.400 by the way. So it's one time zone for a country the size of Europe, right? So it's one time zone,

00:11:14.700 one language, one people. It goes much further than just language. There's the insistence on

00:11:21.320 the part of Beijing that all these people will somehow organically merge into a greater whole,

00:11:28.340 an organic sort of Chinese nationality. So that insistence on unity from above is driven through

00:11:36.440 by the Communist Party after 49 to this very, very day. Now, back to the Republican era, 1911,

00:11:43.940 49th fascinating period, although some of the leaders are keen on that autocratic hand from

00:11:48.960 above, what is so extraordinary is that at every level of society, people from scholars to

00:11:58.780 artists to writers, you name it, to ordinary workers, take the freedoms that they have

00:12:10.220 acquired some freedoms of assembly, of speech, of travel, to go and discover the world. So from

00:12:16.720 1911 to 1949, what you really have is what I refer to as an age of openness in which people

00:12:22.940 can actually read. They can travel. They can go abroad. They can spend 10 years and come back and,

00:12:28.480 you know, open the shop. They can translate, read, publish pretty much anything they wish

00:12:34.920 within limits. Not to say that journalists don't get killed. It does happen. But overall,

00:12:40.340 compared to some of the regimes that will appear in Europe in the 1930s, I'm thinking, obviously,

00:12:47.420 you know, Franco, Mussolini, good old Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, very unpleasant regimes. In comparison,

00:12:55.460 the Republic of China is quite open, adheres to the very highest standards of, for instance,

00:13:00.880 the League of Nations, very keen to be at the vanguard of modernity. Now, that's the overall

00:13:06.780 picture, if you wish. But what happens? Where do these communists come from? This is a fascinating

00:13:12.600 question. You can read anything you wish on the communists. You can read a book by Edgar Snow,

00:13:19.640 who was an American journalist, 1936, went to China, published Red Star over China.

00:13:24.300 You can go to Wikipedia, you can read any textbook, the story is almost always the same.

00:13:32.500 There is the collapse of the Qing, nasty social forces appear, fascists, imperialists, feudal landlords, and thanks to the Communist Party.

00:13:47.600 Frank, can I just stop you there? Because in an interview I heard you use the term nationalist.

00:13:51.780 Is fascist and nationalist interchangeable in this?

00:13:54.480 Yes, indeed.

00:13:55.160 Yes, indeed.

00:13:56.100 So this is the key point,

00:13:58.300 is that the entire Republican era,

00:14:03.820 from 1921 onwards,

00:14:06.080 when the Communist Party of China

00:14:08.900 is established in Shanghai,

00:14:13.200 it's about 12 people in one room

00:14:15.080 representing about 50 members in the country

00:14:18.320 of what at the time must have been,

00:14:19.840 I think probably about 400 million, 500 million. That's nothing, right?

00:14:26.180 So the entire history of that era has been represented as a fight between the nationalists

00:14:31.940 on the one hand, the people I refer to as the central government, and the communists.

00:14:39.040 But this particular vision, these people then fight. And now the communists, by appealing to

00:14:47.380 modern notions of reform and liberation prevail. They harnessed great social forces because they're

00:14:55.820 more in tune with modernity as opposed to the nationalists who are condemned as fascists.

00:15:01.020 But the point I'm trying to make here is that these communists do not represent anyone.

00:15:05.780 The idea is somehow that the history of the Republic of China, 1920s and 30s and 40s,

00:15:11.960 is determined by a fight between two camps, tends to give an overwhelming importance to a bunch of

00:15:19.380 communists who represent no more than a mere fraction of the overall population, at least

00:15:26.140 until 1940. One example. They are established by agents of the common town, Hank Snavely. I'm Dutch.

00:15:36.020 Shaq Snavely was Dutchman. They know how to organize things. He is sent by Moscow to establish

00:15:44.260 a Chinese Communist Party, which he does in 1921. By 1936, that Communist Party of China

00:15:52.440 has roughly 40,000 members. There's a force of 40,000 people in a country of half a billion.

00:16:00.980 I'll let you calculate how much that is. I'm not all that great with calculations,

00:16:05.340 but it's not a great many, right? So who have we got in Europe? Antonio Salazar, fascist,

00:16:12.960 represses communists. One in every 280 people in Portugal under Salazar is a communist.

00:16:20.280 In Finland, where the Communist Party is banned, taboo, one in 700 people around about the same

00:16:26.480 period is a communist. China is about one in every 12,500 or so. By 1940, according to the

00:16:34.840 Comintern, Comintern stands for Communist International Organization, established in

00:16:40.100 Moscow in 1919 to overthrow what they're referred to as bourgeois governments throughout

00:16:46.200 the world, throughout planet Earth, to promote, of course, the proletarian revolution.

00:16:52.020 So according to the Comintern, in China by 1940, the communists represent one in 1,700

00:16:58.200 people, which I checked is, oddly enough, the same as the number of communists relative to

00:17:06.700 the overall population in the United States of America. In other words, there are as many

00:17:14.220 communists in China as there are in the United States of America, although the United States

00:17:18.260 of America is not generally considered to be at the vanguard of the proletarian revolution.

00:17:22.960 What I'm trying to say is that China is one of the least communist-inclined countries that you could find in the 1920s and 30s.

00:17:33.500 They try time and again, are given massive resources from Moscow.

00:17:39.420 By 1926, you have hundreds of advisers sent by Moscow.

00:17:46.400 you have entire armies set up by Moscow in which the nationalists collaborate with the

00:17:52.680 communists. It's called the United Front. I call it the Trojan horse. So Stalin says,

00:17:57.500 you want help for your revolution. The nationalists want a revolution. They want to unite the country

00:18:02.420 through a military conquest. So you want to do your military conquest, you have to accept

00:18:07.380 communist members as part of your united front, which they do. But by the time then that that

00:18:14.680 United Front collapses in 1927, Stalin has hundreds of advisers in China, entire armies

00:18:23.160 set up with their help. I mean, just imagine there is some army somewhere in, shall we say,

00:18:27.960 Wales, set up by Russia and run by Russians. It would be unimaginable, right? So that is the key

00:18:38.380 point that the communists simply don't find much of a popular resonance.

00:18:46.640 Now, you might ask yourself, why is that? Before we get to the next question, which obviously will

00:18:50.920 be, if they were so weak, how come they managed to conquer power in 1949? The question really is,

00:18:59.120 why in a country that we assume must have been sympathetic towards communism in order to turn

00:19:07.560 communist, that we think there must have been origins to the communist revolution. There must

00:19:12.940 have been social causes for that. But one causes always land reform. The communists embark on a

00:19:20.640 campaign of land reform. They take the land from the rich to give it to the poor. It should work,

00:19:25.080 right? It should work very well. It worked in Russia, didn't it, more or less? But of course,

00:19:30.620 Russia won Alexander, is it the second? You're a Russian, you should know. Alexander the second,

00:19:35.040 I think, emancipate the serfs in 1871, something like that. You do have vastly impoverished

00:19:44.780 serfs who live or work on big aristocratic landed estates. So the disparity is absolutely enormous.

00:19:56.820 And of course, that's what the Bolsheviks think of when they seize power in 1917 and want to have

00:20:03.120 the land we form. But there's no such thing, unfortunately, or fortunately, in the case of

00:20:09.340 the Republic of China. Throughout the Qing, the tax on land is extremely weak. And throughout

00:20:16.520 that vast country, although there is a huge variety in land-owning patterns, there simply

00:20:22.680 are no serfs on the one hand. There is no aristocracy. There are no barons. There are no,

00:20:29.120 you know, wealthy landlords who somehow, you know, oppress a majority of impoverished

00:20:36.960 servants. There's no such thing. People tend to own a small plot of land, and it is true there

00:20:43.540 are those who can't do it and have to work for others as anywhere else on planet Earth. You've

00:20:49.280 got to remember, Italy by 1933 has about one third of the population who lives in absolute

00:20:58.120 poverty. So nobody's denying that there is poverty in China at the time. But there is no land to be

00:21:04.760 taken from a few and given to the many. That's the formula of land reform. I take from the rich,

00:21:10.380 give it to the poor. The poor will follow me. That's the communist approach. There is no land

00:21:14.480 to be taken. Whatever little bit of territory that the communists do manage to conquer and hold

00:21:21.920 onto from 1931 onwards are mere slivers of land along the frontiers of impoverished provinces

00:21:31.320 in inhospitable land, generally high up in the mountains, where the people over whom they

00:21:39.880 preside are already extremely poor, already worked very hard just to get by. And now they must feed

00:21:48.160 these communists and their soldiers and provide man for their army. So you can see what happens

00:21:53.720 within no time. There is no land to be taken. So they will start describing so-called middle

00:22:00.660 peasants as rich peasants. On the normal middle peasants, they will start portraying so-called

00:22:05.500 poor peasants as middle peasants. In fact, very quickly, and you can read it from their own

00:22:10.800 documents, ordinary villagers realize that there really is no point in doing anything at all,

00:22:17.180 because any surplus you produce will be taken by the Communist Party of China. They have an

00:22:23.700 insatiable appetite. They need grain. They need cannon fodder, man. So they squeeze literally

00:22:30.980 every territory they can hold on to. They squeeze it till it's right. This is exactly what Zhang

00:22:34.820 Wu Tao, one of his communist leaders, says in 1934 when he's compelled to leave a territory.

00:22:39.300 He says, we squeezed it like a lemon. So what I'm trying to say here is that in the countryside,

00:22:45.960 but also in the cities there's very little sympathy for the communists by 1936. They have

00:22:53.280 about the same importance as some local band of say bandits or outlaws. So they're not exactly

00:23:02.720 capable of creating a message that resonates with even a fraction of the population.

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00:24:54.100 And yet at the same time, right, you've spoken about this many times, Frank,

00:24:58.160 they were very powerful at creating a mythology. Yes. A myth. Yes. Which is almost religious in

00:25:05.180 its tone, isn't it? Yes, yes. So I think that that message really, it's obviously it starts

00:25:13.860 with the communists from the very beginning. Communists are very good at creating their own

00:25:17.680 myths. But I think it really stems from a book by a journalist from Missouri I mentioned earlier on

00:25:26.120 called Red Star Over China. So 1936, the communists have had a so-called long march in which they

00:25:34.440 have been defeated by troops from the central government. They've been pursued. There were

00:25:39.740 about 80,000 who left in October 1934. About 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 arrived after a year with a huge rate

00:25:48.860 of attrition. They're nobody. They're a voice in the desert. In comes Stalin, and Stalin says you

00:25:56.140 must not fight the central government. You must have a united front with them. You must fight.

00:26:02.460 You must unite and fight the Japanese.

00:26:07.140 Now, that makes sense.

00:26:08.720 Because the Japanese have been taking large chunks of China since at least 1931.

00:26:17.940 You remember The Last Emperor, right?

00:26:20.940 The movie?

00:26:21.480 Yeah, great film.

00:26:22.340 Great film, Manchu.

00:26:24.000 They take the last emperor of the Qing.

00:26:26.360 They install him as head of Manchuria, which they have invaded in 1931.

00:26:29.920 in 1937, they will invade the rest of China. So the great threat to China, what every person in

00:26:37.280 China has foremost on their mind, is, of course, Japan. So when the Chinese communists go on and

00:26:44.420 on about fighting Chiang Kai-shek and the fascists and distributing the land, it has no appeal.

00:26:49.420 Stalin tells them you should fight with the central government, you should fight the Japanese.

00:26:53.820 That takes about a year for that penny to drop, in the case of Mao Zedong. It takes them one year

00:26:59.740 to somehow see that that could be a message, which is powerful. And he then also uses Edgar

00:27:07.580 Snow, who visits them in 1936, uses him as a sort of platform, as a sort of intermediary to present

00:27:16.620 the Communist Party of China as the real sort of underdog who could, because they're democratically

00:27:24.860 inclined, fight the Japanese much better, not to mention other feudal imperialist forces,

00:27:32.180 than the central government of China, represented by Chiang Kai-shek. So that book gets published,

00:27:37.980 translated immediately in I don't know how many languages, puts Mao and the Communist Party of

00:27:43.600 China on the map. It is basically, in a nutshell, a sort of David and Goliath story, you know,

00:27:51.320 the underdog, the communists, are much more in tune with modernity, and they will eventually

00:27:59.720 preside over the liberation of these many, many hundreds of millions of people who are being

00:28:04.880 oppressed by all these forces of fascism and feudalism. So that's the book in 1936. I would

00:28:10.580 say it's the fountainhead of all propaganda. Of course, I guess I was not going to be there

00:28:15.580 forever. They fine-tuned this story. It moves forward. But ultimately, that's the story. That's

00:28:20.740 the story that and so they've got this propaganda that is coming out they've also got i mean mao is

00:28:27.660 fantastic i mean that's his one well he's not there's a clip on the internet which is you

00:28:33.760 saying mao is fantastic well you know norman finkelstein thought the same it's clever man but

00:28:38.900 what you had with mao is that he that was his one real skill was well hold up who was mao tell us

00:28:47.880 about this character? Because most people in the West have no idea. Who was he? How does he come

00:28:53.260 to be who he is? And why is he as gray as Francis? So Mao is not a poor peasant, quote, unquote. I

00:29:01.000 personally don't use the term peasant. There are no peasants in China. As I already pointed out,

00:29:05.520 peasant brings to mind some sort of feudal society. These are villagers. These are farmers.

00:29:11.080 They don't just cultivate the land. Frequently, they run a business next to it or have other

00:29:15.740 occupations during the slack season. But anyway, the point is, he does not come from a poor

00:29:21.240 background. He's sent to school by his family. He, like many others around about the 1890s,

00:29:29.400 start turning against the Qing dynasty, want a revolution in which he, you know,

00:29:35.400 he propone a revolution like so many others, and somehow works in a library in Beijing

00:29:44.900 where he encounters Marxism for the very first time.

00:29:49.480 Now, you've got to remember one thing.

00:29:51.000 When we talk about the great communist minds in China,

00:29:55.940 these are individuals who have been approached

00:29:58.040 by commentaire and agents sent by Moscow,

00:30:01.320 were sent specifically to universities

00:30:03.040 to cultivate some of these great scholars.

00:30:06.340 One name is Li Dazhou, another one is Chen Dushu.

00:30:09.120 It doesn't really matter.

00:30:10.240 Mao Zedong is one of them.

00:30:11.580 He becomes part of that movement.

00:30:13.560 He is very much there in 1921 when the Communist Party is established.

00:30:18.920 I mentioned 12 people, roughly 50 members.

00:30:21.780 He's one of them.

00:30:22.920 And bit by bit, he will emerge as the key sort of leader.

00:30:28.660 Why is that?

00:30:29.860 I think because his real skill is propaganda is a key skill.

00:30:33.880 His other skill is that he is just very much determined at the sheer willpower.

00:30:46.420 You wonder to what extent that is not an explanation of pretty much everything and

00:30:50.760 anything in human life. He's just more determined than anyone else. And he's also more determined

00:30:57.480 than anyone else to make pledges that he will not keep,

00:31:02.860 to make promises that he will break,

00:31:06.080 to go along with alliances

00:31:09.500 which he has no intention of abiding true.

00:31:14.920 He's just a, how should I say it?

00:31:18.520 He is a great student of power.

00:31:23.260 He knows where it is and he knows how to gain it

00:31:26.700 and he knows how to keep it, and he will do it at all costs.

00:31:30.560 For instance, here is somebody who, you know, I mentioned earlier on 1937, 1936,

00:31:36.560 Stalin promotes the idea of a united front with the central government,

00:31:42.340 go fight the Japanese, who are the real aggressors.

00:31:45.880 Quite a few communists think that's a good idea.

00:31:48.000 We should go.

00:31:48.680 Mao says, no, we're not fighting anyone.

00:31:51.800 We let the troops of the central government fight the Japanese,

00:31:56.700 And we hold back. We just wait.

00:32:00.500 And then the moment that the Japanese troops have defeated

00:32:03.120 the troops of the central government,

00:32:05.720 we move into that distressed terrain and we seize it.

00:32:10.420 Very pragmatic, very pragmatic.

00:32:12.760 And that's exactly what he does.

00:32:13.820 So from 1937 onwards, the Communist Party does go up

00:32:17.080 in sort of its control of territory in the north.

00:32:21.780 They're extremely pragmatic and supremely ruthless.

00:32:25.440 will not hesitate one moment to blame anyone else

00:32:31.220 and purge mercilessly to the extent that it hardly matters to him

00:32:38.280 whether innocent lives are massacred.

00:32:40.460 I mean, it's a general communist principle

00:32:43.140 that it's better to get rid of 100 people

00:32:45.800 if there's a chance that one of them might be a spy

00:32:49.400 or an enemy or a potential.

00:32:51.720 He belongs to that school.

00:32:54.620 He belongs to that school.

00:32:56.200 But he also comes across as a true believer as well.

00:32:59.820 He's a true believer in power.

00:33:02.320 Not in communism, because, I mean, we'll talk about it later on,

00:33:05.560 but there are times where he's with, I think, during the Great Leap Forward,

00:33:10.800 where people wanted to have, shall we say, a more pragmatic policy.

00:33:15.000 Yes.

00:33:15.260 And he was very much, no, this is what we're going to be doing.

00:33:18.740 This is the communist way.

00:33:20.080 That's also politics.

00:33:21.860 So you might, I understand what you're saying.

00:33:23.560 It's a really important question, and it is valid for any dictator, communist or otherwise.

00:33:29.020 They wish, I mean, what's the difference?

00:33:31.300 I mentioned separation of powers earlier on.

00:33:33.720 That's one driving principle for democratic societies with checks and balances and, you

00:33:40.340 know, an independent executive and legislative, you name it.

00:33:43.720 On the other hand, you have the Leninist principle of a monopoly over power.

00:33:48.080 So Lenin says, we don't want any of the bourgeois democracy.

00:33:51.880 It is weak.

00:33:52.580 We want an absolute control over power so that we can direct the revolution from above.

00:34:00.440 We're not going to waste time like these democracies, the fake democracies.

00:34:04.480 Our dictatorship is a true democracy.

00:34:06.480 We represent the majority and we will implement that revolution from above.

00:34:11.860 So the question is fundamental in that all of these dictators, they don't just want a monopoly of power for the sake of power.

00:34:20.440 They have a vision.

00:34:21.160 And the communist vision, of course, or for that matter, the fascist vision, is a profoundly

00:34:27.840 democratic vision. They want the best for the majority. And in order to do that, they must

00:34:34.140 unfortunately curb the rights of that majority so that they can carry out that revolution

00:34:38.600 properly from above. The problem is that all of these ideas may well have been important

00:34:47.340 in the beginning. But the moment you start studying power and you start acquiring it,

00:34:54.840 you must also defend it. And once you start defending it, you realize that there are enemies

00:35:01.740 left, right, and center. So every dictator or dictator in the making is fully occupied

00:35:10.020 studying all the people around them. Number two, three, four, five, all the way down to 100

00:35:16.640 Is there a clique there? Are the rumors over there? Is somebody going to stab me in the back?

00:35:22.020 It becomes an all-encompassing, not passion, but need to keep that power at all cost.

00:35:32.040 That is the life of the dictator. If you think Xi Jinping,

00:35:35.900 the man with the nicely slicked hair in Beijing today, if you think that he's reading, you know,

00:35:44.940 Marx and thinking about how he can come up with a more equal society. Well, no. He is studying

00:35:55.000 number two, three, four, five. He's busy with the military. He has a military commission which has

00:36:01.320 seven people on it. Until a while ago, he had purged five of them. It was just him and another

00:36:06.580 one. The other one has not appeared recently. There's nobody left on it. This man is constantly

00:36:11.280 purging. The army, the party, ordinary people hear this, that. It's like an all-consuming

00:36:19.440 business. That's the business of power. So the vision falls by the sideway. But you are right.

00:36:28.080 Of course, he's a communist. Of course, the idea is that you were going to fight imperialism.

00:36:33.100 And, you know, we may poo-poo it. I don't think there was much of a British imperialism in China.

00:36:39.480 The Brits start in 1927 returning all the concessions they had acquired in the 19th century.

00:36:47.340 They start respecting China as an independent nation.

00:36:51.000 But it is true, as I said, that the Japanese are in Manchuria.

00:36:54.220 That's a true imperialist power.

00:36:55.760 They've seized Manchuria.

00:36:56.920 They're keen on seizing more territory.

00:36:58.820 That's a very serious sort of thing.

00:37:00.280 So, of course, they're there to fight imperialism, fight colonialism, fight for the proletariat,

00:37:07.080 fight for the peasants, and our equality for all, etc. That vision is there. But ultimately,

00:37:13.940 when you read their own archives, their own reports, when you follow what they do day in,

00:37:18.020 day out, it is always and invariably about politics. The Cultural Revolution, much later on,

00:37:24.640 is not about culture. It's about politics. The Great Leap Forward is not about leaping forward,

00:37:31.680 economically otherwise. It's about politics. It's always about politics. They themselves,

00:37:36.280 the communists themselves say it very clearly, in particular in the case of China, they're quite

00:37:42.040 pragmatic and they say it very nicely, politics in command. There's constant reminders throughout

00:37:49.760 the entire history of Chinese communism that politics is in command. I remember COVID

00:37:56.240 2020, it must have been April or so, you could see slogans. I was in Hong Kong, spent 20 years

00:38:04.640 You could see slogans that said, politics first, science second.

00:38:13.800 COVID is about politics.

00:38:16.740 Now, who is responsible?

00:38:18.640 What are we going to do?

00:38:19.540 It's a political issue.

00:38:20.760 It's not a scientific issue.

00:38:22.460 This goes on and on and on.

00:38:24.020 It's always about politics.

00:38:26.400 And so you've got the Japanese invasion going on.

00:38:31.400 Then the government is fighting back.

00:38:33.000 the communists are holding back. How do they go from that position to being in charge?

00:38:38.200 So, 31, Japan invades Manchuria, and bit by bit, they start seizing territories slightly to the

00:38:46.580 south of the Great Wall of China, just outside of Manchuria. And in 37, in December, they decide

00:38:51.860 to invade all of it. The central government fights back. The communists hold back their troops.

00:38:57.820 They're in a united front now, but instead of fighting, they just hold back. And they start

00:39:02.020 taking bits of territory from which the central government troops had been eliminated. Even then

00:39:08.160 by 1940, they are still a minority. So the key question really is, if, as I claim, the communists

00:39:15.180 really didn't represent a great many people, if the territory they held on to was incredibly

00:39:21.820 impoverished because they couldn't run the proverbial lemonade shop without ruining it,

00:39:28.740 lemonade stand, then how did they get to power roughly 10 years later, 1949?

00:39:37.860 I think if we were to be talking about, say, so we say Germany or Poland, would you ask

00:39:49.180 me, why, Frank, why is it that Poland became communist after 1945?

00:39:56.620 Why is it that East Germany, exactly half of Germany, became communist after 1945?

00:40:06.620 Is there something in that Eastern German culture, you know?

00:40:10.980 Has it to do with Heidegger or these other philosophers?

00:40:14.500 Is there some inclination?

00:40:16.140 Were the land holding patterns in Eastern Germany that somehow led to a social revolution?

00:40:24.080 The answer is, of course, no.

00:40:25.180 No.

00:40:25.700 No. The Red Army arrived and occupied it. In the case of Poland, of course, they arrived first

00:40:32.340 in 1937, a few weeks after the Nazis divided Poland between them. Now in 1945, they're no longer...

00:40:39.240 1939.

00:40:40.280 1939. I apologize. I meant 1939. They divided in 1939, September, a couple of weeks in between,

00:40:48.740 and then in 1945, they have the whole thing to themselves. Wonderful.

00:40:51.360 them. Your point is the communist conquer China. I'm saying that the Soviets sent one million

00:41:00.280 troops into Manchuria in August 1945. And they invade all of Manchuria, which is the entire

00:41:08.020 region to the north of the Great Wall of China, north of Beijing, if you wish, which is not only

00:41:12.900 economically extraordinarily rich and important, but also the strategic gateway to the rest of

00:41:18.720 China. That's how the Manchus invaded China to establish the Qing dynasty in 1644. So once they

00:41:25.600 are there, even after Japan surrenders within literary days, they're on their way to the 38th

00:41:31.840 parallel in Korea, right, to meet the Americans. But they hold on to all of Manchuria for months

00:41:36.400 on and they strip it, strip it as much as they can, but they hand the countryside over to the

00:41:42.000 Communists. The Chinese Communists benefit from the occupation by the Soviets and are able to

00:41:51.740 control the countryside. So that's one crucial element. But then there's also an other power

00:41:58.420 that intervenes in 1944 and more importantly in 1945. And that power is the United States of

00:42:06.980 America. And they make that mistake that so many people make to this very day. They think, oh,

00:42:14.540 the Chinese communists, they're not very important. They don't have that much territory.

00:42:20.340 And most of all, they're not really communist. You know, they're just agrarian reformers.

00:42:25.180 They're much more democratic than the central government of China. And the central government

00:42:28.860 of China, Tiankoshek, must collaborate with them. In other words, they want to impose

00:42:34.660 on the central government of China,

00:42:38.780 Chiang Kai-shek,

00:42:39.840 the same conditions that Stalin wanted to impose

00:42:43.300 during the First and Second United Front.

00:42:45.460 The Americans want a United Front.

00:42:47.120 So you must collaborate.

00:42:48.140 You must have a coalition with the communists.

00:42:51.220 They send a vice president called Harry...

00:42:54.220 What's his name?

00:42:55.580 Henry Wallace, I believe, in 1943.

00:42:59.140 He visits Magadan in 1943,

00:43:03.880 which is, of course, bang in the middle of all those, the gulag, right?

00:43:08.760 This is the gulag.

00:43:10.700 Then goes to Chongqing, where Chiang Kai-shek is with the government of the Republic of China,

00:43:16.860 and says, well, you know, these Soviets do really well economically.

00:43:20.080 You should do the same thing as they do.

00:43:23.740 And then Chiang Kai-shek says, well, no, they're communists,

00:43:27.320 and the communists in our country are also communists.

00:43:31.420 So, Henry Wallace says, no, Stalin told me that these are margarine communists.

00:43:37.480 They're not real communists.

00:43:39.180 He believes this.

00:43:40.560 He believes this.

00:43:41.820 1945, I'll skip a few episodes, but one American after the other is keen on this coalition.

00:43:47.420 In December 1945, George Marshall arrives, the very man who will later come up with a plan to rescue all of Europe against the communist threats.

00:43:57.740 doesn't want to do anything in favor of the Republic of China. On the contrary, he's very

00:44:05.000 keen also on a coalition, says you must come up with a coalition, and says there must be a ceasefire.

00:44:12.240 This ceasefire is broken by the communists. In April 46, the Soviets withdraw their army of one

00:44:18.960 million. By now, the communists are everywhere in the countryside. And the central government is able

00:44:25.160 to push back the communists all the way up to the border with Siberia. Marshall intervenes

00:44:30.800 again, now we're talking May 46th, says, you must stop immediately or we shall cease all

00:44:36.640 deliveries of weapons to you. The communists are on the edge of extinction at that moment.

00:44:45.620 They survive. And a few months later, Marshall also imposes an arms embargo on the communists.

00:44:52.360 So, you have both the Soviet Union, which is backing up the communists, and the United States of America, which is forcing the central government to embrace the communists.

00:45:02.860 In the meantime, even as there is an arms embargo.

00:45:06.740 You said the embargo is on the communists, but you meant on the central government.

00:45:09.580 I meant on the central government.

00:45:11.760 That's right.

00:45:12.080 There is an arms embargo on the central government.

00:45:13.700 That's right.

00:45:14.260 So, just to restate, because it got a bit muddled.

00:45:16.700 Yes.

00:45:16.980 The Soviets are helping the communists, and the Americans are preventing the central government from fighting the communists.

00:45:24.860 And so the communists are actually being helped by both the USSR and by the United States.

00:45:29.620 Very, very precise. Yes, very good.

00:45:34.060 So you're absolutely right. The arms embargo is, of course, on.

00:45:36.860 And you've got to remember that the Republic of China is one of the four great allies up till 1943.

00:45:44.880 three, it recognizes a great power. It ties down a huge number of Japanese troops, even as the

00:45:51.960 Americans are fighting their way through the Pacific. They've lost Pearl Harbor and got to

00:45:57.040 fight all the way to Tokyo. So it's not like the Republic of China is doing nothing in there,

00:46:01.500 quite the opposite. Now, the point is that all along, weapons are delivered to the communists

00:46:09.920 in Manchuria by the shipload and the wagon load. Huge amounts are being provided by the Soviet

00:46:17.900 Union. They train the communists. They equip them. They send officers to Moscow for advanced

00:46:24.080 training. There's a huge backing to the point where in 1947, they come out of it pretty strong.

00:46:31.780 They've transformed themselves, not only thanks to the backing of the Soviet Union, but also

00:46:38.320 because they now implement so-called land reform in Manchuria. So what is land reform in Manchuria?

00:46:45.180 Land reform is, I enter your village and I take what I need. I take the grain and I forcibly

00:46:53.140 enroll the man I need to go and fight that war. And I have barrier troops to make sure that those

00:46:57.960 soldiers move forward, not backwards. Trotsky is one of those used barrier troops in the conquest,

00:47:02.960 reconquest of Siberia. And the point is, they have grain. The communists in Montreal have

00:47:12.160 grain from the countryside, which they can use to trade. They have man in the army. And most of all,

00:47:21.340 they have guns, but not just guns, but a willingness to use the gun that makes, in my mind,

00:47:29.040 makes the crucial distinction between the troops from the central government and the communist

00:47:35.760 troops. It's the willingness to use that gun. It goes back to what I said about Mao and that sheer

00:47:43.140 bloody desire to prevail. What I'm trying to say is that the war that they waged,

00:47:52.220 The civil war that they waged is a war of attrition.

00:47:57.360 They will not hesitate to use barrier troops to make sure that the soldiers move forward.

00:48:02.960 Just for people who don't understand, barrier troops are troops behind your troops who will shoot them if they come back.

00:48:08.780 Yes. So if you move forward, you might survive.

00:48:12.220 If you turn around, you will get shot.

00:48:14.000 They're called Zagradatrade in Russian.

00:48:16.040 That's exactly it. With Trotsky, of course.

00:48:19.220 And Stalin used them in World War II.

00:48:21.180 Yes, of course. So you got barrier troops. You get what are referred to as human waves. You send

00:48:27.740 unarmed people to absorb the bullets of the troops of the central government. The telegrams

00:48:35.040 from Taiyuan in particular, where the commanders say that the soldiers are so demoralized having

00:48:41.640 to shoot endlessly into unarmed civilians who are sent forward towards them in wave after wave.

00:48:49.080 But most of all, also, the willingness to surround cities and starve them into surrender.

00:48:58.660 So this is what happens in Changchun, one of the very large cities in Manchuria,

00:49:05.100 where during an eight-month siege, nobody's allowed to leave,

00:49:10.660 with the result that 160,000 ordinary civilians die of hunger and disease until that city just falls.

00:49:19.080 And they tried to do the same with other cities along the way, to the point where by the end of 1948, any commander of any city is aware of what has happened in Manchuria and may no longer be willing to subject the people in his city to that same fate.

00:49:39.140 and that's what happened with Beijing.

00:49:41.260 Beijing sees the troops by Lin Biao surrender

00:49:47.220 what used to be the capital,

00:49:50.640 and there's some hesitation there,

00:49:52.060 and after a while, the city just surrenders.

00:49:54.060 They know what happened in Changchuan.

00:49:55.660 It's an eight-month siege.

00:49:57.000 It's just ruthless, ruthless.

00:49:59.720 No ordinary person is able to pass through the guards,

00:50:04.720 sentinels established in the perimeter

00:50:07.140 by Lin Biao around that city

00:50:09.580 with trenches dug and guards everywhere.

00:50:12.960 They will not hesitate to shoot civilians

00:50:14.560 to try to get through.

00:50:16.560 He's not willing to do it.

00:50:18.680 And other cities will fall one after the other.

00:50:21.780 There are a couple of other great conflagrations,

00:50:25.420 including the Huayhai battle.

00:50:27.360 I believe also 48,

00:50:30.400 with a million troops involved.

00:50:32.760 The ferocious fighting.

00:50:34.460 But as far as I'm concerned,

00:50:36.240 the fall of Changchun, that is the key moment where, bit by bit, the central government just

00:50:43.980 starts collapsing. Troops surrender. You cannot fight an enemy like that. But here's a little

00:50:51.800 anecdote. Red flag goes up, 1949, October. A year later, troops enter into North Korea

00:51:01.520 to fight the United Nations, right?

00:51:05.000 So at one point, I think it's around about 51, 52,

00:51:08.960 one of these U.S. generals is in Taiwan.

00:51:14.080 And he speaks to Chiang Kai-shek,

00:51:15.520 who has had to leave mainland China for Taiwan.

00:51:19.980 So Taiwan becomes a sort of, you know,

00:51:23.280 a sort of island of resistance against the communists,

00:51:27.820 which remains to this very day.

00:51:30.280 But the point really is that Chiang Kai-shek is told,

00:51:34.320 look, these communists are really hard to fight.

00:51:37.800 They will just throw troops at us.

00:51:41.740 And, you know, some of them are not even equipped with normal footwear.

00:51:46.980 They're just being driven forward by carers who, you know,

00:51:52.900 have no respect for human life whatsoever.

00:51:55.480 Some of their weapons are completely antiquated.

00:51:57.440 We still can't fight them.

00:51:59.240 So Chiang Kai-shek looks at him and says,

00:52:01.840 oh, if you can't fight them now,

00:52:04.260 how did you expect me to fight them back in 1948

00:52:07.760 without any help?

00:52:11.280 If you, the United Nations, find it difficult,

00:52:13.560 how do you think I should have done it in 1948?

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00:53:51.960 So, they take control.

00:53:54.900 And then let's fast forward to the Great Leap Forward.

00:53:58.400 Yes.

00:53:58.600 What was it?

00:53:59.760 How did it come about?

00:54:01.200 And why did they think it was a good idea,

00:54:03.540 even though it was patently a disaster?

00:54:05.780 Oh, it was a great idea.

00:54:07.940 That's why they call it great.

00:54:10.620 And it was going forward.

00:54:12.240 If you can't do it at first, you just try again.

00:54:15.420 they have used the term great leap forward a few times by the way even after that disaster which

00:54:21.420 cost um according to their own calculation several tens of millions of people died

00:54:27.400 according to me and five other historians from the people's republic who have used archives it is at

00:54:35.560 least 45 million lives lost from 58 to 62 that's roughly the equivalent of all the people lost

00:54:43.860 during the Second World War, right, worldwide.

00:54:46.880 It's not far away from it.

00:54:48.820 It's not a small number.

00:54:51.340 How?

00:54:52.700 49, red flag goes up.

00:54:54.660 What does the Communist Party do?

00:54:56.540 It does what it does everywhere else.

00:54:58.320 It eliminates all real or imagined enemies

00:55:02.020 in a campaign of terror from 50 to 51.

00:55:05.420 And then very gradually starts turning

00:55:08.440 all private property into state property.

00:55:12.200 You mean taking private property?

00:55:13.860 taking property. Yes, that's how you convert it from private into state. You take it from people

00:55:19.000 and you seize it. No, I do not take it. You give it to me. Or you liberate it. I liberate you and

00:55:25.060 then you will come with the deeds of that corner shop that three generations of your family have

00:55:33.200 been running in Shanghai. You come and present me the deeds with your shop with a big smile and say

00:55:38.720 how pleased you are to contribute to the communist cause. Why do you do that? Because you know that

00:55:45.400 you will become a state employee like everybody else. So your job will depend on me. I'm the

00:55:51.060 state. So you must appear to be really keen. Otherwise, I'm going to say this man's not keen

00:55:57.760 at all. I don't want to give him a job. You go work somewhere in Xinjiang in a camp. So whether

00:56:03.220 these are big industrialists or small shopkeepers, by 55, 56, they surrender everything they have

00:56:10.180 to the state, become state employees. And the same thing happens in the countryside. Of course,

00:56:16.000 1949 onwards, that the parts that have not gone through land reform will go through land reform.

00:56:23.520 So everybody's given a very small plot. Then the common Israelite plot are too small to really be

00:56:29.040 productive. Let's pool everything. And then around about 55, 56, thank you, we will have the land

00:56:34.980 back. It will now be collective land. So by 56, 57, a farmer in China does not have any land,

00:56:45.120 any pools, and it's all been collectivized. All collectivized. But it's not enough.

00:56:51.420 collectivization is good, but it's not enough. So what does Mao want?

00:56:59.760 If you want to understand Mao, communism, you must go back to the other communists,

00:57:07.460 and they all do pretty much the same thing. What does Stalin want? He wants to modernize

00:57:12.760 his country. How does he do it? He takes the grain, the milk, the butter from the countryside.

00:57:19.180 He sells it abroad to earn foreign currency. He uses the foreign currency to buy advanced

00:57:27.940 industries, entire plants. That's how he gets his modernization, right? Now, he wants the grain to

00:57:35.340 go straight from the fields into the state granary. Why? Because he can't trust those damn

00:57:41.800 kulaks, rich peasants and all others. You know, they will withhold the grain. They will feed

00:57:48.260 themselves before the state can. So he wants the grain to go straight into the state granary.

00:57:53.180 Mao wants the same thing. The countryside has been collectivized by 56, 57. The tools belong

00:57:59.860 to the state, but it's not enough. All of it must go straight into the state. Not only that,

00:58:06.280 but he thinks he's got an advantage. China, many people. It may be poor, but it's rich in people.

00:58:13.340 So if he could just transform every man and every woman in the countryside, in that huge country, into a foot soldier who will work day and night to transform that economy, then what can he do?

00:58:30.140 he can get a great move forward and, most importantly, overtake. At the time, they talk

00:58:39.640 about overtaking England, which is still a great industrial power. The talk is about producing more

00:58:45.040 iron, overtaking England, but that's not what he's got in mind. He wants to overtake the Soviet

00:58:51.280 Union. He wants to, Stalin is dead, right? 1953, he's dead, body, 56, dragged out of the mausoleum

00:59:01.300 with de-Stalinization. Khrushchev is the man in charge. Who is Khrushchev? Some little clown

00:59:07.440 from the point of view of Mao. Who brought a quarter of humanity into the communist camp?

00:59:11.900 It's Mao, not Khrushchev. It is Mao who's the man. He wants to be the leader of the socialist camp.

00:59:18.200 So you must overtake not England, but you must overtake the Soviet Union.

00:59:22.900 So by transforming every man, every woman in the countryside into a foot soldier

00:59:26.960 that you can deploy day and night, you can create that great leap forward into communism.

00:59:34.680 You overtake the whole socialist stage.

00:59:37.420 You overtake the Soviet Union, and you become the one who has found the bridge

00:59:44.220 from socialism into communism,

00:59:46.340 the one who has liberated first China

00:59:48.200 and the rest of the world,

00:59:49.240 you become the one,

00:59:51.180 the one pivot around which history revolves.

00:59:54.980 So that's the plan.

00:59:56.160 The reality is somewhat different.

01:00:00.860 The reality is that when you transform

01:00:03.460 every man and woman into a foot soldier,

01:00:05.380 it means literally that you take

01:00:08.820 that every cup, that every tool,

01:00:12.080 You collectivize everything. People sleep in dormitories. Children are sent to kindergartens.

01:00:19.440 Man and woman separated in the fields to work. You take away something that is referred to by

01:00:27.040 economists as an incentive. And you will remember, I said that already for the 1930s, that they arrive

01:00:34.940 in very deprived regions. And quickly, local villages realize that whatever they produce,

01:00:42.080 will be taken by the party. So why do anything at all? It's exactly the same thing with the

01:00:46.880 Great Leap Forward. They have no incentive to work. So what do you do when you cannot get the

01:00:52.480 farmers to work into the field? You whip them. You force them. So bit by bit, you get this sort

01:01:01.900 of cycle of violence in which at first farmers try to resist, then they get beaten, then increasingly

01:01:10.760 brutal forms to force these people to work. And of course, you do this because you must perform.

01:01:20.780 You must fulfill certain quotas. Every village, every county, every province has a quota. And

01:01:26.920 they all compete. They want to outdo each other. You know, I'm the head of one village. I want to

01:01:33.000 outdo your village. I want to show that I'm rather than red. I'm more revolutionary than you are. I

01:01:37.780 can produce more. So on paper, the numbers go up. In reality, nobody's eating. But the grain

01:01:44.100 inspectors take a great amount of grain away. So bit by bit, people start starving to death.

01:01:50.080 But the key point is not that people starve to death. The key point is that their food depends

01:01:56.840 on work points earned in the fields. And when they have no work points, if you are a pregnant woman

01:02:04.060 and you cannot work, if you are sick and you cannot work, if you're too old and you cannot

01:02:09.820 work, if you're considered to be an undesirable element, you will not have enough work points to

01:02:15.540 earn whatever feeble little portion of food you might be given in the canteen. In other words,

01:02:22.300 food is used as a weapon and a great many people are simply cut off from the food chain as a form

01:02:30.280 of punishment. That's the key to understanding the Great Leap Forward, that food is used as a weapon.

01:02:37.700 Tens of millions of people are banned from the canteens, starved to death. That's the result

01:02:43.480 of the Great Leap Forward into communism. And how many people approximately starved to death,

01:02:49.280 Frank? Because as well, there was a very curious case of the sparrows, wasn't there?

01:02:54.360 Yes, there was that too. You say, oh, again, great idea. Birds take away the grain, get rid of the birds. So you have people deployed all day long to make noise so that these sparrows and other birds, I presume, I don't think, you know, that the sparrow is going to somehow.

01:03:14.580 Now, so birds cannot land because they're afraid of landing with all the noise that

01:03:21.300 people make, gongs and drums and shouting and loudspeakers, or shall they start dropping

01:03:26.880 dead?

01:03:28.100 So you got yourself rid of all the birds.

01:03:30.260 That's wonderful.

01:03:31.800 Except then, of course, that the birds don't just eat the grain.

01:03:35.940 They also eat insects and things like locusts, which thrive in this very distressed terrain.

01:03:46.320 So they contribute, of course, to the great leap forward, and it's a disaster.

01:03:52.140 So it's just this extraordinary idea that everything can be controlled by using people as foot soldiers in one great army.

01:04:03.540 It can transform nature fundamentally, but all it does is, of course, backfire massively

01:04:09.300 with huge consequences, not just for human beings, but also for nature at large. It's not just the

01:04:15.640 sparrows, the amount of deforestation. It's very hard to find a tree in China that is

01:04:23.140 more than about, what, 70 years old or so? Where are we now? 27 from 59, 60, 61 onwards,

01:04:33.080 it's about 60 years. People cut down trees all the time because they need the fuel, because they

01:04:40.220 destroyed their own homes for fuel, because they have backyard furnaces. You know that episode of

01:04:47.720 the backyard furnaces? China must produce steel if only every household in the countryside could

01:04:55.540 contribute to producing steel once they come back from the fields. Of course, you can't produce steel

01:05:03.300 So they improvise sort of backyard furnaces,

01:05:05.980 and they start using pots, pans, forehandles,

01:05:11.840 anything that's got iron in it.

01:05:13.760 They smelt it to contribute to the quota,

01:05:17.040 the quota of steel that must be delivered by the village.

01:05:20.120 So it's just a massive enterprise of demolition.

01:05:23.780 That's what it is.

01:05:24.900 And are the communists and Mao aware of the damage this is doing?

01:05:28.880 So, there is this myth that somehow everybody's guilty except the man himself, Chairman Mao.

01:05:38.640 It's a little bit like, you know, the king can do no wrong.

01:05:42.940 He didn't know.

01:05:44.660 You know, it's his intermediaries who are guilty.

01:05:49.380 Of course, Mao knows exactly what's going on.

01:05:51.880 He is in charge on a daily basis of a huge machine that tries to find information on and about everyone and everything.

01:06:05.540 So he sends his own teams into the countryside to find out what's going on.

01:06:10.460 He knows precisely what's going on, but it's much easier first to deny it.

01:06:15.220 Then, when other party members bring it up, in the summer of 1959, being utterly paranoid, as all dictators are,

01:06:24.740 when you spend your life studying power and who may or may not have it, you become paranoid.

01:06:31.240 That is paranoid.

01:06:32.520 So when a number of party members bring up the famine, in a very sort of indirect way, very polite,

01:06:40.680 they tiptoe around the great man. He sees it as a threat. And as yet another purge,

01:06:47.100 pushing the great leap forward even further in 59, 60. So by the time we're in 61,

01:06:52.840 we're talking tens of millions. And he knows exactly what's going on. Then he turns around

01:06:57.700 and says, oh, exactly what Stalin said. Stalin said that the further you go with the revolution,

01:07:08.420 them, the more counter-revolutionaries there will be. There are counter-revolutionaries in

01:07:13.100 the countryside who have sabotaged everything. That's why the Great Leap Forward failed.

01:07:18.820 So you must purge the countryside of all its counter-revolutionary elements. That's what he

01:07:26.220 does. From 62 to 66, what is 66? It's a cultural revolution. So you have purged the countryside

01:07:33.800 of counter-revolutionary elements. Now in 66, you must have a cultural revolution to purge the

01:07:38.060 cities of anything and everyone who thinks in a manner that is not considered to be communist

01:07:47.620 or proletarian enough. Ask me about the Cultural Revolution. So, but before we get to the Cultural

01:07:55.440 Revolution, it's just extraordinary if you're a leader of a country that you see that tens of

01:08:01.780 millions of your subjects are starving. Yes, it is. And your conclusion is that the reason

01:08:09.480 they're starving is they're not cooperating enough with your policy. So we have to starve

01:08:14.540 them harder, basically. Yes, not only that, but there's a wonderful saying. I mean, when you read

01:08:20.580 the archives, it's just fantastic because you can see how these top leaders write to each other and

01:08:26.480 explain what problems they have. The leader of Sichuan, which is the country the size of France,

01:08:33.620 he gets the results of an investigation into the deaths in the countryside of Sichuan,

01:08:42.820 and the result is roughly 9 to 10 to 11 to 12 million people starved under his leadership.

01:08:50.500 and he tells the chairman, you know,

01:08:54.740 we've lost a great many people, but that's a good thing

01:08:58.340 because the ones who survived, they're the core.

01:09:02.780 They're the core.

01:09:04.780 But the people we lost are the slackers,

01:09:07.220 counter-revolutionaries, riffraff.

01:09:10.960 That's the idea.

01:09:12.580 Don't forget, communism is not a soft ideology, right?

01:09:17.940 No.

01:09:18.300 I mean, Stalin, steel, Molotov, hammer, Lenin, box, you know, the bourgeois crying, sentimentality, humanism.

01:09:32.560 What a pathetic value that is.

01:09:35.300 Empathy, you know.

01:09:36.300 Why?

01:09:37.320 You must be a man of steel.

01:09:38.800 You must carry on with this revolution.

01:09:40.980 In other words, you will never get there.

01:09:42.560 If you're going to stop and cry at every man you lose in the field, you're not going to win the war.

01:09:47.520 And these are pretty hardened men.

01:09:49.240 They've gone through a civil war that lasted about 20 years.

01:09:52.460 But the military man, they're not literate.

01:09:56.880 They're not reds.

01:09:58.680 They have spent 20 years fighting in the field.

01:10:02.560 And they're going to continue to fight after 49 for that great goal.

01:10:06.840 So, yes, of course, what is 45 million plus?

01:10:12.080 I say it's a minimum of 45 million people.

01:10:14.200 I could be 50.

01:10:15.000 A number of Chinese historians have come up with 15 million.

01:10:18.840 I don't think you can come up with an exact figure.

01:10:20.860 It's impossible.

01:10:21.940 Just a rough approximation.

01:10:23.920 But what is that in a population about 800 million at the time?

01:10:28.480 It's nothing.

01:10:29.500 Mao says, Mao says, Mao says, when he goes to meet Khrushchev, I believe it's in 57,

01:10:38.120 the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he said, you know,

01:10:43.680 if we have a nuclear war, an atomic war, and half the population on planet Earth will die,

01:10:49.760 but the other half will become communist very quickly, and then we will prevail. Now, you might

01:10:54.920 think he's just being flippant, which is true. Absolutely, he loves being flippant. He likes to

01:11:00.900 trigger people. But he's also been quite serious. He's got the broad, long vision. People will

01:11:08.900 reproduce eventually. What matters is that we get from this stage to that stage. We must fight

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01:11:58.520 It's so interesting. I remember we had the historian Dominic Sandbrook from the rest

01:12:02.960 of history on the show. And one of the things that was the real takeaway, he talked about the

01:12:07.860 the greatest killers in human history were always idealists, people who had this great vision that

01:12:15.580 they were trying to implement, and they were prepared to do whatever it took. That's what

01:12:19.820 you're describing. Yes, yes, yes and no. I mean, I think it's the other way around.

01:12:29.700 Scholars, people like me, idealists, you know, you spend that time with ideas. Is Mao an idealist?

01:12:36.760 Cultural revolution. Why? What? When? 66, until he dies, roughly. What is it all about?

01:12:46.500 There are those who think that the Great Leap Forward is a disaster. Doesn't matter how many,

01:12:52.780 whether you think it's 20 million or whether it's 40 million or more, it's a disaster.

01:12:57.840 So Mao fears that somebody's going to do to him what Khrushchev did to Stalin,

01:13:05.120 denouncing, possibly even before he dies. There could be demaoification. He doesn't like it.

01:13:13.160 He's paranoid. He sees all sorts of cliques around him, people who will destroy his legacy.

01:13:22.000 He comes up with the Cultural Revolution, which in a nutshell is really asking, in stage number

01:13:27.740 one, 66 to 68, ordinary people, for the very first time in any communist regime,

01:13:33.520 to denounce party members, and people are keen to do it. Then he brings in the army from 68 to 71,

01:13:43.260 so he lets the people purge the party. Then he uses the army to purge the people.

01:13:48.320 And then towards 71, with the death of Lin Biao, the very man who besieged Changchun and created

01:13:54.940 160,000 deaths in that siege that lasted eight months, when Lin Biao was more or less killed,

01:14:02.040 really, in 71, head of the army, then the army is purged. So Mao's pretty much purging everyone

01:14:08.820 and every institution so that he can sleep peacefully. So in 1974, I think somebody

01:14:28.300 comes up and says, ah, you know, there could be a threat from such and such. And Mao says, no.

01:14:37.040 No, I've dealt with all the issues. There is no threat anymore. He can not so much retire,

01:14:45.180 but he can rest. No, there is no Khrushchev out there. Now, with millions of people purged during

01:14:53.820 the Cultural Revolution. Number two, Liu Shaoqi tortured to death in a dungeon. Many party members

01:15:00.380 either tortured to death or sent to the countryside. Hundreds of millions of ordinary

01:15:08.100 people, their lives destroyed. The Cultural Revolution is about loyalty. You must prove

01:15:12.820 your loyalty to the chairman. So if you're just an ordinary individual, you must be able to

01:15:18.040 Know his work by heart. Pay respect to him. Show your loyalty by denouncing others who are others.

01:15:27.860 Well, if you're going to denounce somebody who's already been denounced, there's not much good.

01:15:31.660 So you should denounce maybe a friend, a colleague, a family member.

01:15:40.060 You should denounce someone close to you. Then you really prove your loyalty to the chairman.

01:15:45.520 But that's the culture of Putin.

01:15:47.740 And why? Why, why, why?

01:15:49.400 So that the chairman can sleep.

01:15:52.440 To protect his power and his legacy.

01:15:54.680 Yes.

01:15:55.780 Okay, Frank, well, you seem pretty down on communism in the same time, I must say.

01:15:59.140 Oh, that's not true.

01:16:01.660 And people look at China today, which remains formally communist, the People's Republic of China.

01:16:07.680 What do you mean by formally?

01:16:09.360 Well, this is the point I'm driving at.

01:16:11.840 Good.

01:16:12.620 The regime effectively under Xi Jinping is the successor regime

01:16:17.240 to the successor regime to the successor regime of Mao Zedong.

01:16:20.820 Yes.

01:16:21.740 And yet, look how wonderful China is, people will say.

01:16:23.900 Yes, it's wonderful.

01:16:25.580 So I'll make a point.

01:16:26.740 When I went to China, I went into a shop...

01:16:28.640 Let me guess, the food was great.

01:16:30.000 Actually, no, it wasn't.

01:16:31.360 It was better at my local.

01:16:32.300 But anyway, let's not focus on that.

01:16:34.840 I didn't have sweet and sour pork, Frank.

01:16:36.420 Not a civilised country.

01:16:37.960 Anyway, well, I went into...

01:16:39.920 I literally just offended 1.4 billion people with a bit of banter.

01:16:43.620 You said it.

01:16:44.480 But when I walked into a shopping centre,

01:16:47.660 I mean, it didn't look like communism.

01:16:49.780 There was Louis Vuitton, there was Gucci.

01:16:52.020 And these shops were the size of supermarkets.

01:16:55.180 Yes, yes, isn't it wonderful?

01:16:56.960 And who built all of Moscow?

01:16:58.400 You remember I mentioned Stalin earlier on, 29 to 33.

01:17:02.780 Massive famine, right?

01:17:04.160 Not least in the Ukraine, by the way.

01:17:05.960 so that he could buy entire plants, industry abroad, and modernize his country.

01:17:13.180 Moscow is transformed. Skyscrapers everywhere.

01:17:17.400 He wants to rival Manhattan, New York.

01:17:19.500 Who builds all these skyscrapers?

01:17:22.100 An American, called by the name of Khan, K-A-H-N.

01:17:26.120 He's the head of a firm of architects who build hundreds of hotels and factories and skyscrapers,

01:17:35.220 transform the skyline of Moscow.

01:17:39.360 Oh, same with China, of course.

01:17:42.440 They want the same thing.

01:17:44.140 They want these huge buildings.

01:17:45.580 They want, you know, proof of, tangible proof of success.

01:17:50.020 And they've been working at it for quite some time.

01:17:52.800 Now, take, for instance, should we talk about the bullet trains?

01:17:57.100 I just loved it.

01:17:57.880 I love those high-speed trains.

01:18:00.700 I love them.

01:18:02.520 They're always empty, the ones I take.

01:18:04.840 in China. It was always empty. So we're being told time again, look at how successful China is.

01:18:11.900 Now, where are you going to find this kind of train here in England? Never mind the United

01:18:15.800 States of America. Maybe you can find them in France. But, you know, in France, they have unions,

01:18:21.980 workers' protests, things close down. Horrible. In China, like under Mussolini, by the way,

01:18:28.180 the trains arrive on time, is in debt to the tune of 900 billion US dollars, which is a large

01:18:36.020 amount, right? It will never make money. So the counter-argument is going to be, oh, well,

01:18:41.100 that's great. It's a public good. To which I would counter that it is not a public good

01:18:50.220 in that the public, the vast majority of ordinary people, cannot afford to take these high-speed

01:18:56.660 trains. They take the parallel system, they do ordinary trains, which are very slow and cumbersome.

01:19:02.880 So who pays for these bullet trains? It is those very people who take the ordinary trains. Ordinary

01:19:08.180 people have the deposits in state banks. 99.5% of all assets of banks in China belong to state

01:19:16.740 banks. In fact, this may be a good point to invoke a very simple principle, which is communist,

01:19:25.520 namely that, as Marx said it,

01:19:27.620 the means of production must belong to the proletariat,

01:19:31.460 which is the state, right?

01:19:32.420 There must be state control of the means of production.

01:19:34.840 That's the case in China today.

01:19:36.460 So not one farmer owns a plot of land.

01:19:39.260 Not one single person owns a plot of land in China.

01:19:42.100 The bank assets belong to the state.

01:19:44.820 Most of the primary materials belong to the state.

01:19:48.460 Energy is controlled by the state.

01:19:50.160 Big industry is controlled directly or indirectly by the state.

01:19:53.120 You can be a billionaire today, tomorrow your assets belong to the state.

01:19:57.700 We will find you somewhere, you know, you fell out of a window or off a wall or you just disappear.

01:20:03.380 People are made to disappear for years on end and then reappear as faithful servants of the Communist Party of China.

01:20:10.580 In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the People's Republic of China has not abandoned its absolute control over the commanding heights over the economy,

01:20:19.880 which means it can carry out huge projects like these trains,

01:20:23.780 these bullet trains, which make very little money.

01:20:26.460 Some bits are very good, you know,

01:20:28.480 between cities which are quite close to each other,

01:20:31.620 but these trains run all the way through this huge continent,

01:20:35.580 this huge country the size of a continent, many of them empty.

01:20:39.240 They simply don't make money and never will.

01:20:41.720 They are funded by the savings of ordinary people.

01:20:45.040 Ordinary people do not consume.

01:20:46.720 What you're looking at, in fact, are the benefits of a system in which wealth produced by anyone at every level flows towards the state, but not towards the people.

01:21:00.140 In other words, it is a system in which ordinary people, the household proportion of GDP is the lowest or one of the lowest of any modern economy in world history.

01:21:15.100 The Chinese have a saying for that.

01:21:16.760 The temple is rich, but the monks are poor.

01:21:19.640 So when we talk about how China must, you know,

01:21:23.200 come up with a more balanced economic model

01:21:26.760 and must promote consumption,

01:21:29.740 that's a political problem.

01:21:32.940 It will not happen.

01:21:34.280 Because if the state were to decide

01:21:38.100 that people should consume more,

01:21:41.320 it must give them a greater share of GDP.

01:21:44.180 by giving them a greater share of GDP, the state can do less. It can no longer build these bullet

01:21:50.680 trains. It cannot build up its army. It cannot prepare for an invasion of Taiwan. It cannot

01:21:58.660 dispose of all these assets that it needs to confront the imperialist camp, etc., etc., etc.

01:22:06.460 So now you can see what the problem is. What you see when you go to China is the temple,

01:22:11.720 and a temple frequently built without much rhyme or reason.

01:22:17.960 I'll give you another example, ghost cities, ghost cities.

01:22:21.540 A great many of them are one reason, they can't count.

01:22:25.720 It's a communist country.

01:22:27.460 Communist countries are unable to count

01:22:29.280 because nothing is open or transparent,

01:22:32.520 which means that people lie at every single level.

01:22:36.260 It's a bit like Gogol, you know, the Murpiyadushi,

01:22:40.240 The Dead Souls by Gogol, I think,

01:22:42.300 is a chap who goes around collecting dead bodies.

01:22:44.420 And by having these dead bodies

01:22:46.860 and pretending they're still alive,

01:22:48.040 we can still collect rentals.

01:22:50.360 Yes, the tale by Nikolai Gogol.

01:22:53.320 Everyone does that in the People's Republic of China.

01:22:56.700 A village will pretend to have 100 people

01:22:58.720 when it only has 80 to collect benefits for 100 people.

01:23:01.680 And you pocket the 20% that don't exist.

01:23:06.800 So they don't know how many people they have.

01:23:09.100 We've got this massive scheme about cities building for the future

01:23:12.420 for a population that's simply not there.

01:23:14.140 But the key point really is that the economy is not just debt-driven,

01:23:21.480 but it's also driven by quotas.

01:23:24.180 In that sense, it is a Stalinist economy.

01:23:27.340 Stalin would give quotas.

01:23:28.920 You must produce this, you must do that.

01:23:31.120 When you have a figure of 5% GDP, which we must achieve, that's a quota.

01:23:38.060 You will and must achieve 5% GDP.

01:23:41.160 Whether you are the mayor of Wuhan City

01:23:43.260 or whether you're in a province or a village,

01:23:45.720 you must show that you have achieved 5% GDP.

01:23:48.440 How do you do it?

01:23:49.420 How do you get 5% GDP?

01:23:51.540 When people don't have enough money to buy anything.

01:23:54.060 When you're in debt to your knack,

01:23:58.020 we're no longer talking 280%.

01:23:59.600 We're talking about 300, 320% of debt.

01:24:02.520 Huge.

01:24:03.840 What do you do?

01:24:04.480 You can do anything.

01:24:06.200 You dig a hole.

01:24:07.420 It's GDP. You fill it with concrete, it's GDP. You build a house on top of it, it's GDP. You destroy

01:24:13.800 the house, build a bigger one, still empty, also GDP. So again, a Stalinist measure is that you

01:24:20.280 measure not only is GDP a quota, a command from above, not something you just measure that occurs

01:24:27.680 naturally in the market economy. But you also measure what comes out regardless of what goes

01:24:34.760 in. The output, not input. And also the output, regardless of whether or not anyone buys it.

01:24:42.220 That's the key point. So we've been talking about overcapacity, right? Oh, China produces all these

01:24:48.040 solar panels and electrical vehicles, but there are way too many overcapacity. Europeans have

01:24:55.200 been complaining about overcapacity, as if this is new. And it goes back at least to the ancient

01:25:00.680 crisis in 96, 97, when there were, um, when about, I think a fifth of GDP was overproduction.

01:25:10.060 So at the time, not solar panel, but maybe bicycles and washing machines and what have

01:25:15.300 you not. But in fact, it's intrinsic to communism. We think communism is underproduction, not

01:25:22.020 enough. No, it's too much of this and too little of that. So at the height of the Great

01:25:27.440 forward, as people are literally starving or being starved to death, there are mountains of

01:25:34.960 uncollected grain, you know, along dusty roads in the countryside. The goods accumulating. They

01:25:43.880 might have a mountain of shoes size 42, but not enough size 38. I'm just making it up now, but

01:25:50.380 it's a mismatched economy. Why? Because nothing is transparent and it's still the same to this

01:25:56.480 very day. The state decides that it must invest huge amounts in high-speed trains, solar panels,

01:26:04.460 electrical vehicles. It will identify what it thinks matters most, regardless of what people

01:26:10.400 are able or willing to produce, never mind consume. So it remains a classic misallocation

01:26:18.740 of capital, which creates the illusion, the illusion of great achievements. But the moment

01:26:24.580 you start looking at the numbers. It all vanishes rather quickly. So you're saying the Westerners

01:26:30.320 who look at China's numbers and some of the things they see when they visit and are impressed

01:26:35.560 are the Walter Durantes of our time, effectively. Exactly. Except that this regime has had,

01:26:41.400 so Walter Durante is the one who visits Moscow in the 1930s and thinks it's just wonderful.

01:26:48.420 There's no famine. Nothing ever happened. I think his exact line was something, I think it's his

01:26:53.300 line, I've never eaten as well as I ate in Moscow. He says this during the holiday morning.

01:26:57.920 Which is probably true. Yeah, I'm sure it would have been true. Yes, and of course this is true

01:27:02.120 for visitors to China. From 1949 onwards, they eat very well at the height of the famine in Beijing.

01:27:08.160 Now, you might say there is no famine. People eat well in China. That may or may not be true.

01:27:15.200 One very simple fact is that a greater proportion of children in the countryside in India can

01:27:23.100 have fought to buy spectacles and go to school than in China. There you go, okay? That's not

01:27:29.880 nothing, right? Children going to school in the country, so it's not nothing. So anyway, the point

01:27:34.120 really is, this is a regime that has had many decades to very gradually build up its ability,

01:27:46.220 ability in terms of, you know, the architecture of it, but also ability in terms of economic cloud.

01:27:52.760 build up its ability to project an image of great stability and success.

01:28:00.160 It's very simple.

01:28:01.480 You've been to China.

01:28:02.280 Have you ever seen a shanty town in China?

01:28:06.160 No.

01:28:06.580 No.

01:28:07.220 Have I seen people sleep outside in Hong Kong?

01:28:11.580 Yes.

01:28:11.880 Have I seen homeless people in the richest capitals of the world?

01:28:17.760 Yes, absolutely.

01:28:18.660 Have I ever seen anyone homeless in the People's Republic?

01:28:21.480 No.

01:28:22.240 Why?

01:28:22.580 Because they get deported back to the countryside.

01:28:26.400 It's a complete and utter control of that image that matters a great deal.

01:28:31.080 A lot of us go to China, visit a couple of cities.

01:28:37.100 The moment you leave a city, that huge, beautiful highway turns into a two-way road.

01:28:44.140 Once it hits the countryside, it's a dirt track, and it all vanishes rather quickly, very, very quickly.

01:28:50.660 That is the point, is that so much wealth is extracted

01:28:56.800 to project an image of great wealth in the cities

01:29:00.780 and whatever links these cities.

01:29:03.540 But you can sit and you build a train, which is empty,

01:29:05.860 and you can look at these great skyscrapers,

01:29:08.300 which are also empty.

01:29:11.160 And you've got to think really about who pays for all of it

01:29:15.700 and how sustainable is it?

01:29:18.120 And most of all, where is that, where is it going?

01:29:21.020 Where is it going?

01:29:22.720 Where is it going?

01:29:23.440 This debt gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

01:29:25.060 There was a period when the debt seemed to be huge,

01:29:29.560 but there was the illusion that somehow growth could be greater than the debt itself,

01:29:34.540 so you can outgrow the debt.

01:29:36.120 But that never was the case.

01:29:37.720 The debt has been accumulating very, very steadily.

01:29:40.780 I mean, 2008, the financial crisis, the USA pulled a lot of money into the economy.

01:29:50.260 But the PRC pulled as a proportion far more into it, far more so.

01:29:56.480 A great deal of that is just basic, straightforward misallocation of capital.

01:30:03.860 It looks good, but underneath, it's not doing all that well.

01:30:10.400 We read newspapers about how China today has a trade surplus of a trillion, is that right?

01:30:18.980 Is that 1.1 trillion years old?

01:30:20.840 I mean, the numbers are just phenomenal.

01:30:24.400 So we're supposed to applaud.

01:30:25.840 I mean, isn't that just amazing?

01:30:27.680 But it's not.

01:30:29.400 It had several engines of growth.

01:30:31.320 One was infrastructure.

01:30:34.900 But they had built so much infrastructure.

01:30:37.320 infrastructure. There's a point, of course, in the 80s, one of the decades of neglect, you do need roads. You do need trains. You do need ports. You can invest into that. But they've been investing and investing and investing just to meet that quota. You know, that you must achieve. It was a lot more than 5%, right? That 5% is the reason the low one was much higher before. You must reach that GDP. There's no infrastructure to be built. There's far too much of it already.

01:31:08.100 So that's gone.

01:31:09.340 Then there's real estate.

01:31:10.940 That's another clever trick.

01:31:12.960 You know, I build something, so I fulfill the quota.

01:31:16.160 Then I sell it to other people.

01:31:17.660 The whole thing is like a Ponzi scheme.

01:31:21.200 And you have ordinary people trying to get a foothold and invest into this.

01:31:25.980 But that's all gone pear-shaped too.

01:31:27.840 Real estate's all gone downhill.

01:31:30.480 So what have you got left?

01:31:32.220 Exports.

01:31:32.880 You must export at all costs.

01:31:34.380 Why are they exporting so much?

01:31:37.300 Because nobody has the means to buy any of it inside China.

01:31:41.780 So what you have is an economy controlled by the state in which a factory, regardless of whether this is a private or a state factory, makes no difference.

01:31:52.720 It's all about who's going to pay tax on that stuff locally.

01:31:56.280 So your local government will give you subsidies.

01:31:58.820 We'll give you, you know, don't worry about the land belongs to the state.

01:32:03.360 We provide it for free.

01:32:04.760 We provide tax subsidies.

01:32:06.460 We will sell you energy below cost of production.

01:32:09.740 You just go ahead and churn this stuff out as much as you can.

01:32:13.860 But other local governments are doing the same.

01:32:16.160 We have the same issue that appeared in the 80s, the 90s, all along.

01:32:23.360 Instead of having, say, 100 great bicycle factories, and I'm talking about the 1980s,

01:32:29.320 every little county must have its sewing machine factory, its bicycle factory,

01:32:35.980 And it's a refrigerator factory.

01:32:39.520 A mountain of this stuff doesn't get sold.

01:32:42.380 What do I do?

01:32:43.440 I cut corners.

01:32:44.560 What do you do?

01:32:45.400 You cut corners.

01:32:46.800 We're in a competition.

01:32:48.800 We try to bring down the cost of production.

01:32:52.340 I start selling below cost of production.

01:32:55.360 You start selling below cost of production.

01:32:58.700 And here comes the WTO.

01:33:02.840 This is fantastic, 2001.

01:33:04.460 I can now export all that rubbish I've been producing and nobody wants. I can just put it

01:33:09.300 on a boat and it goes all the way to California where some sucker will buy it. And nobody can

01:33:15.440 compete. If you're in Bangladesh, you cannot compete in the production of garments, Bangladesh,

01:33:22.600 because you don't have the same kind of subsidies. Nobody can compete. It's what

01:33:27.920 Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, called the road to serve them. There are those who say we must compete

01:33:34.960 better with China. There is no competing. The moment you start competing, you're on that road

01:33:40.940 to serve them. You're going to have to curtail. First of all, you must ban all unions, right?

01:33:49.480 You must nationalize all industry. You must make sure freedom of speech is gone. You must provide

01:33:56.720 massive tax subsidies, you must have a labor force that has zero rights. That's the key point,

01:34:02.040 really. And ultimately, your point is they must be poor. They must be poor. In order to subsidize

01:34:07.780 this. Because they are the ones who are paying. They do the work and then you don't pay them.

01:34:12.900 That's the key point. Frank, I mean, this is what a pleasure it's been. A bit depressing,

01:34:18.100 but nevertheless, a pleasure. It's just absolutely fascinating. That's classic trigonometry. Yeah.

01:34:24.160 Final question is always the same, Frank.

01:34:26.000 What's the one thing we're not talking about

01:34:27.500 that we really should be?

01:34:30.100 I thought about that and I thought,

01:34:32.140 oh, should it be the notion of peaceful evolution in China,

01:34:35.360 which is with us, with them all the way till now,

01:34:39.020 should we talk about overcapacity?

01:34:40.900 But all of this has been around for a long time.

01:34:43.240 I think the one thing I would say, Winston Churchill,

01:34:46.140 study history, study history.

01:34:48.340 All the secrets of state draft are in history.

01:34:50.600 And we study history.

01:34:51.920 We were all fascinated by our own history, but study the history of China.

01:34:56.520 There's so much in there.

01:34:58.440 There's so much of it.

01:34:59.540 So much of it is like a soap opera.

01:35:02.480 The overcapacity goes back decades.

01:35:05.020 Peaceful evolution as a concept goes back decades.

01:35:07.980 A lot of stuff goes back decades.

01:35:10.700 There's very little, there's really new, quote unquote, history, study history.

01:35:15.080 And indeed, you have written a number of very successful and excellent books on the subject,

01:35:19.900 including about the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution.

01:35:22.540 And you've also written one about dictators

01:35:24.120 and you have others coming up too.

01:35:26.380 Yes, thank you.

01:35:27.800 Somebody's got to do it.

01:35:29.040 Absolutely.

01:35:30.180 Thank you so much.

01:35:31.300 It's been a pleasure having you on

01:35:32.700 and thank you for watching.

01:35:34.200 We won't have time for Substack Questions for this one,

01:35:36.580 but we'll see you soon with another episode.

01:35:49.900 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - September 05, 2026

How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter

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