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Speaker 1: Also media.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to the very special lunar New Year's episode of

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Speaker 2: vik kadapp Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today

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Speaker 2: we're talking about China, and more specifically, we are talking

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Speaker 2: about the Chinese state and the persistent question that haunts

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Speaker 2: American national security experts and leftists on social media alike,

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Speaker 2: is China maoist? Now, if you, gentle listener, are not

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Speaker 2: embroiled in a kind of running turf war with American

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Speaker 2: China watchers like I am, you may rightly be asking, wait,

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Speaker 2: what people actually believe this? And the answer, unfortunately is yes,

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Speaker 2: yes they do. And those people get to write in

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Speaker 2: major media outlets. Here's the New York Times how she

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Speaker 2: returned China to one man rule. For decades, China has

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Speaker 2: built guyard rails to prevent another Mao. Here's how Shi

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Speaker 2: Jimping has dismantled them and created his own machinery of power.

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Speaker 2: Here's also the New York Times. This one, I guess

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Speaker 2: technically is from the opinion section, but h Xi Jiping

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Speaker 2: is the second coming of Maosee Dung. Here's the Wall

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Speaker 2: Street Journal. China wants to move ahead, but Shijimping is

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Speaker 2: looking to the past. As China's leader embraces more elements

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Speaker 2: of Maosee Dung's rule, its people are confronting a more

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Speaker 2: uncertain future. Lest you think this is purely an American phenomena,

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Speaker 2: here's Al Jazeera, which was funded by the government of

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Speaker 2: catter is hijimping China's new Maosee Dung, which she casting

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Speaker 2: himself as a twenty first century Mao. China risks arbitrary rule.

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Speaker 2: Here's foreign policy, the Maoist roots of She's economic dilemma.

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Speaker 2: In contrast with Dang, she has embraced a distinctly Maoist

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Speaker 2: socialism that emphasizes personal sacrifice for the collective good, HARKing

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Speaker 2: back to the Cultural Revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies.

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Speaker 2: The British, of course, are also not immune to this

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Speaker 2: Mao derangement syndrome. I guess I would call it Chi

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Speaker 2: Jimping's pilgrimage to Red Meha brings back the Mao factor.

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Speaker 2: So you know this is this is a very very

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Speaker 2: common sentiment. It's been a very common sentiment for most

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Speaker 2: of the last decade. I I haven't even done some

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Speaker 2: of the most common ones, like if you if you

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Speaker 2: expand a little bit out from just Xi Jimping is

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Speaker 2: the new Mao ones, you get a lot of like

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Speaker 2: Xi Jimping is the most powerful leader since Mao, which

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Speaker 2: is kind of true. And I think this is part

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Speaker 2: of why this sort of strategy works, because people do

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Speaker 2: not want to actually differentiate between different kinds of authoritarian systems.

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Speaker 2: There are many, many different kind sentatorships and people people

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Speaker 2: are just loath to actually look at the differences. And

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Speaker 2: you see this. This is not just the sort of

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Speaker 2: American media class thing. You see this in political science

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Speaker 2: literature all the time. Political science literature, especially in the US,

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Speaker 2: has this tendency to divide the entire world into this

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Speaker 2: sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies. And as

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Speaker 2: a product of this, I have had to read some

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Speaker 2: truly truly appalling articles that were published in peer reviewed

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Speaker 2: journals on my my absolute I don't know if favorite

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Speaker 2: is the right term, or the most cursed one that

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Speaker 2: I ever saw was it was an article about like

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Speaker 2: the read the quote unquote resource curse and this argument

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Speaker 2: about whether like having a bunch of oil means that

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Speaker 2: you were inherently going to have an authoritarian government or whatever.

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Speaker 2: So they have this chart that's supposed to be tracking

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Speaker 2: like the quote unquote time to a democratic transition of

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Speaker 2: a bunch of non democratic societies by like just how

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Speaker 2: much how much natural resources they have. Now this this

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Speaker 2: chart has in the same category Saudi Arabia, a theocratic monarchy,

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Speaker 2: and also Hoaxayest's Albania, a country whose political line was

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Speaker 2: that Mao did it, Mao hard enough. And these are

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Speaker 2: just being treated neutraally as the same type of governments

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Speaker 2: because it's not a representative democracy. North Korea is another

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Speaker 2: good example of this. You see people in the US

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Speaker 2: calling North Korea hereditary monarchy like all the time, and

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Speaker 2: it just isn't. Leadership of the party state passes between

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Speaker 2: members of a family. But that's not actually enough to

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Speaker 2: make something a monarchy unless you're prepared to argue that,

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Speaker 2: like the US is a monarchy because we had two

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Speaker 2: Bushes as president. Now on the grounds that that's extremely funny,

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Speaker 2: I'm not wholly unsympathetic to that argument, but it's not.

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Speaker 2: Calling the US a monarchy because of the two Bushes

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Speaker 2: is not a very serious academic argument. It is just

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Speaker 2: a joke. And that's I think how we should be

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Speaker 2: treating people like people calling North Korea a monarchy because

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Speaker 2: it's not. A monarchy is not just there's a guy

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Speaker 2: who's in charge and as to another person who's related

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Speaker 2: to them. It's not just that there's someone who you

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Speaker 2: could call a king. There is a whole political system

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Speaker 2: beneath it, right, there's a whole network of like princes

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Speaker 2: and courts and land titles and inheritances and who and

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Speaker 2: who doesn't have royal blood, and there's there's you know,

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Speaker 2: there's a whole you know, and the economic system of

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Speaker 2: a monarchy as has changed over time. Right, monarchies are

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Speaker 2: very old, you know. We now have like capitalist monarchies

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Speaker 2: like the Saudis. You know, we've had feudal monarchies, we've

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Speaker 2: had sort of pre feudal monarchies. But you can't simply

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Speaker 2: reduce monarchy to one guy in charge. That is absolutely absurd.

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Speaker 2: But people just do this all the time. Now, North

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Speaker 2: Korea is organized along the lines of a party state,

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Speaker 2: where this is you know, a sort of shortening of

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Speaker 2: one party state. Technically speaking, there are actually other parties

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Speaker 2: in North Korea, and this is true of China as well,

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Speaker 2: but they don't really do anything. And this is not

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Speaker 2: the episode where I'm going to have to try to

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Speaker 2: and the difference between the United Front and the United

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Speaker 2: Front Works Department, that's another time. But they are functionally

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Speaker 2: one party states. There is one party that actually does

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Speaker 2: the ruling, and then there's a couple of other parties

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Speaker 2: that keep around for appearances, who might do consultative stuff.

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Speaker 2: But even in terms, even knowing that something is a

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Speaker 2: party state doesn't actually tell you a huge amount about

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Speaker 2: how that system actually functions. And this is where we

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Speaker 2: come to the core elements of today's episode. How does

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Speaker 2: the modern Chinese state operate and how is it different

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Speaker 2: from previous iterations of the Chinese state. So to answer

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Speaker 2: this question, we need to start. We need to start

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Speaker 2: with the origins of the party state itself. And the

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Speaker 2: party state really in the sense that we're dealing with,

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Speaker 2: is born with the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, I

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Speaker 2: guess it technically creates the Soviet Union a little bit,

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Speaker 2: but it's born it's bored of the October Revolution and

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Speaker 2: the Bolshevik taking and consolidation of power. On the other hand,

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Speaker 2: you know, party states are not built in the image

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Speaker 2: of Lenin. They're built in the image of Stalin. And

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Speaker 2: the thing that makes you know, a sort of like

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Speaker 2: what the party stays that come after it, what makes

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Speaker 2: them function is the way that sort of Stalin consolidates power,

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Speaker 2: and Stalin consolidates power by using the rules of the

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Speaker 2: Bolshevik Party to maintain control over members of the state apparatus,

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Speaker 2: even though technically speaking he doesn't he doesn't have like

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Speaker 2: you know, he keep be doing. He doesn't technically have

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Speaker 2: the formal authority to do as a member of the government,

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Speaker 2: but he has the authority to do as a member

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Speaker 2: of the party. And this is how Stalin consolidates his power,

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Speaker 2: and soad of walls out trotsky Eta et cetera, et cetera. However, Comma,

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Speaker 2: this is where people make mistakes when that when they're

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Speaker 2: trying to sort of understand what Stalinism was, which is

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Speaker 2: that they make this mistake of looking, you know of

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Speaker 2: kind of projecting back the later Soviet Union onto you know,

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Speaker 2: onto sort of like nineteen thirty's Stalinism. And the mistake

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Speaker 2: they make is the assumption that Stalinism is purely a

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Speaker 2: bureaucratic doctrine, right, It's purely about seizing control of the

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Speaker 2: bureaucracy and using a bureaucracy to consolidate power, and that

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Speaker 2: is just not true. Part of Stalin's success and you know,

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Speaker 2: as bleak as that like success is. Part of what

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Speaker 2: Stalin does is mobilize masses of people against parts of

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Speaker 2: the party and in parts of the state bureaucracy that

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Speaker 2: oppose him, that you know, to do things like denunciations

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Speaker 2: to like you know, and to weaken their bureaucratic power.

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Speaker 2: And this means that Stalinism is not a pure politics

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Speaker 2: of state bureaucracy the way that sort of later Soviet

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Speaker 2: governments are. It's a combination of bureaucratic power and also

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Speaker 2: the direction of mass mobilization, of the mobilization of large

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Speaker 2: numbers of people to go do a thing towards the

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Speaker 2: end of consolidating power. This interplay, the control of bureaucratic

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Speaker 2: power checked by mass popular and mobilizations, is the characteristic

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Speaker 2: element of Stalinism. Both of these tools, both the bureaucratic

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Speaker 2: apparatus and mass mobilization, are used to maintain Stalin's personal power. Now, Maoism,

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Speaker 2: for all of its claims to be the direct ideological

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Speaker 2: air of Stalinism, Maoism is Stallanism are not the same thing.

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Speaker 2: In sort of like Mao era China, And you know,

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Speaker 2: you can trace this towards from sort of like Mao's

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Speaker 2: insurgency era through the time he's in power to the

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Speaker 2: end of the seventies. During that period, China is if anything,

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Speaker 2: even more prone to mass popular and mobilization as a strategy.

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Speaker 2: Some of this is ideological. Maoism is to a large

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Speaker 2: extent a kind of internal critique of Stalinism that you know,

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Speaker 2: I mean, like so people in like you could argue about,

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Speaker 2: you know, how good were the intentions of the people

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Speaker 2: who are in charge of the Chinese Communist Party in

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Speaker 2: like the twenties and thirties, right, But they're not They're

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Speaker 2: not stupid, right, These people are smart. These people understand

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Speaker 2: that there are a lot of problems with the Soviet system.

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Speaker 2: These are people who watched a bunch of their comrades

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Speaker 2: get murdered because the Soviet's fucked up. So these are

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Speaker 2: people who understand the threat of bureaucratization to a revolutionary

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Speaker 2: movements and the formation the potential formation of a new

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Speaker 2: ruling class composed of sort of like management and bureaucratic cadres.

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Speaker 2: But on the other hand, because it's an internal critique

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Speaker 2: of Stalinism, and not like an external critique of Stalinism,

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Speaker 2: Baoism is utterly unwilling to try to solve these problems

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Speaker 2: by actually giving like workers or peasants, like any kind

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Speaker 2: of autonomy or democratic control over anything, except for like

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Speaker 2: the most trivial minutia of like shop floor bullshit. And

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Speaker 2: the result of this is that, you know, you can't

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Speaker 2: defeat the bureaucracy with democracy, so how do you actually

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Speaker 2: deal with it? And the result is what's called campaign

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Speaker 2: style mobilization. These are mass mobilizations of extraordinary large numbers

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Speaker 2: of people to do it, you know, to to do

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Speaker 2: a task right. There's a lot of different sort of

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Speaker 2: things they try to do with this. Sometimes they're tried,

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Speaker 2: they're used for economic ends. This is like the Great

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Speaker 2: Leap forward, which is this mass mobilization of people to

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Speaker 2: increase productive capacity is a fiasco. Now, part of this

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Speaker 2: also was political, right, Partly this is now trying to

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Speaker 2: use mass mobilization against the bureaucracy in a way reminiscent

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Speaker 2: of stalin but any much much larger scale. And the

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Speaker 2: other you know, part part of what's going on here

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Speaker 2: is that the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is much

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Speaker 2: stronger than the bureaucracy of China, right because you know,

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Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks kind of have a state like bureaucracy sort

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Speaker 2: of intact that they're able to sort of graft themselves onto.

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Speaker 2: China like doesn't have like a functioning government at all,

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Speaker 2: Like there's no functioning central state in China when the

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Speaker 2: Maoist eventually like knock off the Nationalists, So you know this,

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Speaker 2: this this always means that the level of bureaucracy station

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Speaker 2: is lower in China, but you know, it's still it's

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Speaker 2: it's still that's still like the state building process is

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Speaker 2: still one of the things that Maoists are trying to do.

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Speaker 2: And this is you know, this is sort of what

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Speaker 2: Mao is tending to check. But this doesn't work. The

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Speaker 2: Culture Revolution ultimately fails, and part of its failure is that,

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Speaker 2: you know, Okay, so in order in order to like

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Speaker 2: stop the dread specter of like democratic election of factory

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Speaker 2: councils and shit, Mao like cobbles together this coalition of

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Speaker 2: soldiers like loyalist Red Guard factions and some of the

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Speaker 2: pre existing bureaucracy. And these people are these are people

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Speaker 2: who end up running the country through the seventies, and

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Speaker 2: that is just another bureaucracy. And through this whole period,

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Speaker 2: Trya continues to get more and more bureaucratic. Now, this

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Speaker 2: is the most cliche thing that you can possibly say,

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Speaker 2: but unfortunately I do have to say it. The Culture

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Speaker 2: Revolution had a massive impact on subsequent Chinese policy. Every

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Speaker 2: Chinese leader from Dan Jouping on, including Xijianping, and this

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Speaker 2: is something that is not very well covered in the

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Speaker 2: American press, but every single one of these people agrees

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Speaker 2: that the Culture Revolution was a mistake. And you can

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Speaker 2: see the results of this analysis in how the modern

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Speaker 2: Chinese state mobilizes resources. Now, do you know how you

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Speaker 2: can mobilize resources. It's by buying the products and services

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Speaker 2: contained in these ads.

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Speaker 1: We are back.

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Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm saying we. It is kind

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Speaker 2: of just me and you the listener, But I guess,

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Speaker 2: I guess, I guess that's technically plural. So let's get

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Speaker 2: into how the modern Chinese state is very, very different

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Speaker 2: from the previous kind of Chinese state, right, because you know,

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Speaker 2: like the Mao era, for everything that goes wrong with it, right,

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Speaker 2: for all of the reality that is an absolute disaster

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Speaker 2: is based on in a lot of ways, what we

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Speaker 2: would call grassroots style organizing. Right, It's based on getting

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Speaker 2: a bunch of people to go out and do a thing. Now,

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Speaker 2: the modern Chinese date doesn't do this in the same way.

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Speaker 2: The closest thing that they have to sort of like

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Speaker 2: Maoist mobilizations are you know, there is still a thing

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Speaker 2: that's called a campaign stylen mobilization, but it's not the

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Speaker 2: same thing at all as the Maoist system. So let's

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Speaker 2: ask the question, what the fuck is campaign style mobilization?

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Speaker 2: So I'm going to go to the academic literature on this.

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Speaker 2: A group of professors writing for the journal Public Administration Review,

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Speaker 2: in a very colorfully named article called Campaign Style Enforcement

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Speaker 2: and Regulatory Compliance, describe it thus, following the literature, we

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Speaker 2: define campaign style enforcement as a type of policy implementation

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Speaker 2: involving extraordinary mobilezation of administrative resources under political sponsorship. Now

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Speaker 2: this definition is very interesting because if you look at

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Speaker 2: what is being mobilized here, right, it is not masses

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Speaker 2: of people. You're not trying to do mass popular mobilizations.

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Speaker 2: You're mobilizing administrative resources. And this is something that becomes

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Speaker 2: very clear the more you look into the sort of

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Speaker 2: literature here, I'm going to quote from a piece called

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Speaker 2: Revised Blue Sky Fabrication in China by Yongdongshen and Anna

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Speaker 2: l Ahlers during the Mao era, this is campaigns down

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Speaker 2: mobilizations aimed at nothing less than mobilizing society as a whole.

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Speaker 2: While when they occur today, political campaigns are usually foremostly

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Speaker 2: addressed at the state apparatus i e. Especially party and

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Speaker 2: government organizations, at all levels of the political hierarchy, and

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Speaker 2: ultimately at cadres in other words, the implementers of the

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Speaker 2: policy goals at stake. According to Elizabeth Perry has called

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Speaker 2: this transformation quote from mass campaigns to managed campaigns. Moreover,

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Speaker 2: contemporary campaigns, or better campaign style politics mainly take the

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Speaker 2: form of a disciplinary, supervisory and sanctioning campaigns such as

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Speaker 2: anti crime campaigns or the recently reinforced corruption campaign or

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Speaker 2: b regulatory enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns. So, Okay,

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Speaker 2: that's kind of a lot, but I think I think

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Speaker 2: it's worth actually, you know, taking this in a little

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Speaker 2: bit of detail. That same article defines up like the

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Speaker 2: characteristics of what campaign style. A campaign style mobilization is

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Speaker 2: so they have a defined goal, they have political sponsorship,

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Speaker 2: there's a high degree of urgency, there's a defined period

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Speaker 2: of time, tightly coordinated operation, the pooling of extraordinary resources,

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Speaker 2: and public involvement. So that article of the one about

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Speaker 2: blue sky fabrication is studying the twenty sixteen G twenty

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Speaker 2: meeting in Hangzhou where the government sets out to make

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Speaker 2: sure that there is actually like a blue sky for

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Speaker 2: the event. Now, this is a massive undertaking because Chinese

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Speaker 2: air pollution is fucking atrocious. This is something that I

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Speaker 2: might do you another fall episode about this at some point.

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Speaker 2: Chinese air pollution is unbelievably bad. It kills unfathomable numbers

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Speaker 2: of people every year. It's gotten a little bit better

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Speaker 2: since I was last there. But like when I was

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Speaker 2: last in Beijing, like I didn't fucking I only saw

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Speaker 2: the sky one time in the time I was there,

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Speaker 2: because and that was only because it rained, and so

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Speaker 2: after it rain, the sky was blue for like a

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Speaker 2: few hours in the small just like consumed it again.

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Speaker 2: So in order to make sure that there was like

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Speaker 2: a blue sky for pr purposes for this G twenty meeting,

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Speaker 2: because China wanted to sort of show off. There was

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Speaker 2: a massive, massive deployment of resources, and this becomes one

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Speaker 2: of the sort of campaigns mobilizations. And these mobilizations, you know,

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Speaker 2: they may not be sort of mauise style mass mobilizations

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Speaker 2: of like getting people to go do the thing, but

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Speaker 2: they are massively intrusive. They include things like shuttering factories,

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Speaker 2: moving millions of people, restricting like who can drive them

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Speaker 2: what days, like, restricting whether or not you can like

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Speaker 2: use like cooking stuff in your house. But Comma, we

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Speaker 2: need to look at how these things actually happen. So

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Speaker 2: the way that these campaigns start basically is for for

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Speaker 2: the large scale ones, you have mobilization that flows basically

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Speaker 2: down the lines of the state. Right, they start from

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Speaker 2: the federal governments and they go to local governments and

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Speaker 2: regional governments and implementation you know, for sort of scientific stuff. Right,

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Speaker 2: So if you if you look for you know, going

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Speaker 2: back to the sort of example of the G twenty

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Speaker 2: for you know, in order to do the scientific core

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Speaker 2: coordination for it, you get a very very broad, sort

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Speaker 2: of broadreaching like coalition or coordination between scientists at universities

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Speaker 2: as well as at research institutes and government agencies and

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Speaker 2: you're pulling them all together in order to produce like

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Speaker 2: I don't know, you're like air quality measures, right, And

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Speaker 2: these efforts also can very rapidly fold in the governments

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Speaker 2: of other provinces. So what does it actually mean in

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Speaker 2: terms of how these mobilizations work. What it means is

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Speaker 2: that mobilization is a way of moving around different state

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Speaker 2: and sometimes just kind of pseudo nonstate actors like universities

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Speaker 2: and research institutes. It's a way of moving those resources

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Speaker 2: around in such a way that you can accomplish a thing. Now.

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Speaker 2: One of the kind of defining characteristics of a lot

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Speaker 2: of these campaigns, and not all of them, like the

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Speaker 2: anti corruption campaigns obviously are sort of different, but a

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Speaker 2: lot of these campaigns rely on scientific and technical mobilization,

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Speaker 2: both in the sense of what resources they're moving, right,

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Speaker 2: moving you moving scientists around, but also in terms of

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Speaker 2: public justification. And this is also something that's very different,

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Speaker 2: Like there is ideological justification going on, but like in

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Speaker 2: like a Maoist sort of like like a high culture

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Speaker 2: revolution like period or even greatly forward period, you're mostly

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Speaker 2: using sort of ideological like direct ideological motivation to get

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Speaker 2: people to go do a thing. Here. It's very technical,

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Speaker 2: it's very scientific, it's very technocratic. And one of the

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Speaker 2: products of this, one of the products of sort of

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Speaker 2: how technocratic everything is, is that And this is something

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Speaker 2: Shen and Ahlers are very clear about. There is like

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Speaker 2: there's no public comment here, right Like the way these

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Speaker 2: campaign mobilizations work is the state tells you what you

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Speaker 2: are doing, and you are not telling them back like anything.

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Speaker 2: Like you are not negotiating with them, you are not

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Speaker 2: in a dialogue, you are not submitting comments. They are

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Speaker 2: just telling you what to do. And this goes from

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Speaker 2: like regular people all the way up to like corporations,

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Speaker 2: right like even large corporations. A lot of times with

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Speaker 2: these like campaign style things don't get a like negotiate

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Speaker 2: a deal or whatever the fuck, It just it just

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Speaker 2: sort of happens. Now, you may have noticed in the

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Speaker 2: original one of the original descriptions, I was talking about

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Speaker 2: one of the things they have as part of the

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Speaker 2: definition is public mobiles mobilization of like the public. But

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Speaker 2: we need to be clear about what that means so

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Speaker 2: that it doesn't get confused with like maoism. So when

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Speaker 2: we say there's mobilization of the public, it's stuff likely

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Speaker 2: so during the G twenty campaign, they were like they

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Speaker 2: would the CCP would like have old people volunteer to

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Speaker 2: like walk around their neighborhoods and like snatch on anyone

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Speaker 2: who was like using their cooking stove. So like that's

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Speaker 2: the kind of mobilization we're talking like. These are not

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Speaker 2: like these are not like Red Guard tribunals, like dragging

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Speaker 2: people out of their houses. This is like a seventy

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Speaker 2: year old's person incredibly nosy seventy year old going like, ha,

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Speaker 2: this person using their cooking stove. You know how you

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Speaker 2: can get a cooking stove that you can actually use? Uh,

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Speaker 2: maybe these products and services. I don't know if we're

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Speaker 2: sponsors by cooking stoves, but you know we could be

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Speaker 2: there could there could be a cooking stove product and

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Speaker 2: service out there waiting for you and we're back. Now

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Speaker 2: we should also look more at some of the methods

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Speaker 2: of how this stuff happens. Right. So one of the

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Speaker 2: things that's happening as part of this campaign is part

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Speaker 2: of the part of the plan to reduce pollution, is

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Speaker 2: they need Chinese government wants to move a bunch of

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Speaker 2: people out of out of the city. Right now, a

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Speaker 2: Maui style thing would just tell the people to fucking leave.

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Speaker 2: The way that the way that the modern Chinese government

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Speaker 2: does this is to send people like basically free travel vouchers.

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Speaker 2: Shennon Ayler's report, the value of these vouchers is more

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Speaker 2: than one point five billion dollars, So like that's dollars, right,

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Speaker 2: that's that's like, you know, this is this is these

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Speaker 2: are very expensive campaigns. But but you know, this is

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Speaker 2: the way that the Chinese state moves in a lot

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Speaker 2: of these cases, right when they're trying to move, when

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Speaker 2: they need to move a bunch of people, they deploy vouchers.

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Speaker 2: So some of these campaigns are using even more like

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Speaker 2: technocratic means to get things done. So looking back at

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Speaker 2: the article of campaign style enforcement and regulatory compliance, we

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Speaker 2: find examples of what is technically campaign style mobilization. Okay quote.

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Speaker 2: For instance, the central government either waived the loan interest

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Speaker 2: for corporate spending on basically these like desulfurization things to

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Speaker 2: make industrial like exhaust not have sulfur in it, or

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Speaker 2: cover these expenses using central environmental cential environmental funds. In addition,

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Speaker 2: an innovative green electricity policy offered that point Zhoo two

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Speaker 2: three sent price premium per kilowatt hour to power plants

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Speaker 2: that installed one of these systems. So this is like

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Speaker 2: exactly the opposite of how a booist campaign would do this, right,

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Speaker 2: Like they are these factory people are getting like price subsidies,

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00:24:19,960 --> 00:24:25,760
Speaker 2: and like they're waiving the interest on loans. Now, we've

399
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:28,399
Speaker 2: been focusing on campaign stylen mobilization because those are the

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Speaker 2: most sort of extraordinary kinds of mobilization. But most policy

401
00:24:31,400 --> 00:24:35,480
Speaker 2: isn't even implemented by campaign. It's implemented by normal bureaucratic processes.

402
00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:37,720
Speaker 2: And this is even less booist than the sort of

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Speaker 2: campaign stylen mobilizations. Now, most people, a lot of people

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00:24:44,000 --> 00:24:47,920
Speaker 2: who describe China as Baoist are describing their oppressive apparatus,

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Speaker 2: But here they have things exactly backwards. Right, Contrary to

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Speaker 2: the government of the socialist period, which was sort of

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Speaker 2: governed by mass mobilization, the modern Chinese government is almost

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Speaker 2: pathologically adverse to anything that even smells like mass popular mobilization.

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Speaker 2: And this isn't to say that China doesn't have protests

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Speaker 2: like it does. There are protests in China, but Comma,

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Speaker 2: like a lot of these you know, there there are

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Speaker 2: protests like there are like ecological like nimbi protests. There

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Speaker 2: are like real estate there's a lot of real estate protests,

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Speaker 2: and some of those, some of these are allowed. There

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00:25:24,760 --> 00:25:26,680
Speaker 2: there are protests that one of the very common forms

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Speaker 2: of protests against not getting paid by your boss, but

417
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Speaker 2: even attempting like and most of these protests aren't like

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Speaker 2: so just aren't really anti government, right, Like they're not

419
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Speaker 2: sort of like they're not calling for the downfall of

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Speaker 2: the regime or whatever. They're like pissed off about a

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Speaker 2: corrupt local government. But even attempting to documents. All of

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Speaker 2: the protests that happened in China in a given year

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Speaker 2: canon has landed people in prison. So you know, the

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Speaker 2: state is not super happy about this. And if we

425
00:25:54,920 --> 00:25:57,680
Speaker 2: look at what happened to mass protests in twenty twenty two,

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Speaker 2: they were brutally suppressed and you know, the sort of

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Speaker 2: anti like the even even things that weren't even really

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Speaker 2: that big but we're kind of antecedent service that attempted

429
00:26:06,880 --> 00:26:11,560
Speaker 2: to use sort of maoist politics were also unbelievably quickly

430
00:26:11,880 --> 00:26:13,960
Speaker 2: like stamped out. Right. There was the oppression of the

431
00:26:13,960 --> 00:26:17,200
Speaker 2: student workers movement in late twenty tens on the student

432
00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:20,600
Speaker 2: sort of worker like Maoist movements. The Chinese state does

433
00:26:20,640 --> 00:26:24,359
Speaker 2: some sort of like limited mobilization online, you know, in

434
00:26:24,400 --> 00:26:27,200
Speaker 2: terms of sort of like they have this like pr

435
00:26:27,440 --> 00:26:32,119
Speaker 2: strategy thing overseas of like wolf warrior diplomacy or whatever.

436
00:26:32,200 --> 00:26:35,360
Speaker 2: It's unbelievably cringe. But even then, these are not even

437
00:26:35,359 --> 00:26:37,240
Speaker 2: close to the kinds of mobilization the state and the

438
00:26:37,280 --> 00:26:40,320
Speaker 2: party could like nationalists mobilizations they could unleash if they

439
00:26:40,320 --> 00:26:44,160
Speaker 2: wanted to. And this is because instead of working through

440
00:26:44,160 --> 00:26:47,800
Speaker 2: mass popular mobilization, the state isn't maoist, and because it's

441
00:26:47,800 --> 00:26:52,080
Speaker 2: not maoist, it works through their bureaucracy. Policy implementation works

442
00:26:52,240 --> 00:26:54,439
Speaker 2: by going from the top and then if they go

443
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:56,719
Speaker 2: down to local government's local government respond it goes back

444
00:26:56,800 --> 00:26:58,080
Speaker 2: up to the top again, it comes back down and

445
00:26:58,119 --> 00:27:01,640
Speaker 2: the policy gets it implemented. Right like you know, when

446
00:27:01,720 --> 00:27:05,000
Speaker 2: when there are mask like you know, mass campaign style things,

447
00:27:05,280 --> 00:27:09,080
Speaker 2: they're not they're not mass mobilizing people. They're mobilizing research institutes.

448
00:27:09,080 --> 00:27:13,440
Speaker 2: They're mobilizing like government bureaus. They're they're they're they're shifting

449
00:27:13,520 --> 00:27:18,400
Speaker 2: bureaucrats and technocrats around. Now I think I think there's

450
00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:21,520
Speaker 2: a lot of reasons for why the Chinese governments is

451
00:27:22,400 --> 00:27:26,200
Speaker 2: sort of like pathologically adverse to anything that even sort

452
00:27:26,240 --> 00:27:29,480
Speaker 2: of smelled like kind of smells like male style politics. Right.

453
00:27:30,240 --> 00:27:33,440
Speaker 2: One of them is that, you know, these are we

454
00:27:33,520 --> 00:27:36,760
Speaker 2: talked about this before, but like these are people who

455
00:27:37,320 --> 00:27:39,359
Speaker 2: a lot of these people lived through parts of the

456
00:27:39,320 --> 00:27:46,000
Speaker 2: Cultural Revolution, like they saw really fiascos emerge out of

457
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:49,680
Speaker 2: this stuff. But you know, the other thing that they're

458
00:27:49,720 --> 00:27:52,000
Speaker 2: that these people are afraid of is that so you know,

459
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:53,919
Speaker 2: when I say these people were around for the Culture Revolution,

460
00:27:55,480 --> 00:28:00,480
Speaker 2: like these people saw the Chinese working class take the

461
00:28:00,480 --> 00:28:03,159
Speaker 2: city of Shanghai nineteen sixty seven. Right, this is all

462
00:28:03,200 --> 00:28:04,840
Speaker 2: and this is part of the reason why Tiana then

463
00:28:04,920 --> 00:28:08,280
Speaker 2: rattles them so much, because they you know, they nearly

464
00:28:08,400 --> 00:28:12,640
Speaker 2: watch the working class take another Chinese city. And these people,

465
00:28:12,680 --> 00:28:14,960
Speaker 2: these are people who have a you know, and I

466
00:28:15,359 --> 00:28:18,760
Speaker 2: think understand this on a more visceral level than most

467
00:28:18,800 --> 00:28:23,600
Speaker 2: other political leaders understand that if they if they don't

468
00:28:23,720 --> 00:28:27,600
Speaker 2: correctly manage situations and like stamp up populamobilization like they could,

469
00:28:27,720 --> 00:28:31,879
Speaker 2: you know, there there are worlds where they fucking wake up.

470
00:28:31,880 --> 00:28:33,720
Speaker 2: They dragged out of their houses and the Chinese working

471
00:28:33,720 --> 00:28:37,240
Speaker 2: class hangs them from lamp posts. Right, that's a real threat.

472
00:28:37,800 --> 00:28:40,360
Speaker 2: And this is part of why you know, they're using

473
00:28:40,600 --> 00:28:44,320
Speaker 2: something that's something that's called neoliberalism, right, the disenchantment of politics.

474
00:28:44,360 --> 00:28:46,840
Speaker 2: They this is, this is why the state, even when

475
00:28:46,840 --> 00:28:51,000
Speaker 2: it's doing repression, operates through sort of technocratic and bureaucratic means. Now,

476
00:28:52,600 --> 00:28:58,000
Speaker 2: journalists resort to calling this maoism because they're lazy hacks

477
00:28:58,000 --> 00:29:01,480
Speaker 2: who are also racist. But you know, now we can

478
00:29:01,520 --> 00:29:04,200
Speaker 2: see pretty clearly by actually looking at how the state

479
00:29:04,280 --> 00:29:08,960
Speaker 2: functions that this is not maoism. Maoism is built on

480
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:13,280
Speaker 2: mass popular mobilization. The modern CCP is built on stamping

481
00:29:13,320 --> 00:29:18,520
Speaker 2: out mass popular mobilization. This has been nickeld happen here, Yeah,

482
00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:24,200
Speaker 2: happy lean your New Year's everyone.

483
00:29:26,320 --> 00:29:28,680
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

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00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:31,600
Speaker 1: For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website

485
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:33,840
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486
00:29:33,880 --> 00:29:37,280
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00:29:37,720 --> 00:29:39,800
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Speaker 1: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,