Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the very special lunar New Year's episode of
Speaker 2: vik kadapp Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today
Speaker 2: we're talking about China, and more specifically, we are talking
Speaker 2: about the Chinese state and the persistent question that haunts
Speaker 2: American national security experts and leftists on social media alike,
Speaker 2: is China maoist? Now, if you, gentle listener, are not
Speaker 2: embroiled in a kind of running turf war with American
Speaker 2: China watchers like I am, you may rightly be asking, wait,
Speaker 2: what people actually believe this? And the answer, unfortunately is yes,
Speaker 2: yes they do. And those people get to write in
Speaker 2: major media outlets. Here's the New York Times how she
Speaker 2: returned China to one man rule. For decades, China has
Speaker 2: built guyard rails to prevent another Mao. Here's how Shi
Speaker 2: Jimping has dismantled them and created his own machinery of power.
Speaker 2: Here's also the New York Times. This one, I guess
Speaker 2: technically is from the opinion section, but h Xi Jiping
Speaker 2: is the second coming of Maosee Dung. Here's the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal. China wants to move ahead, but Shijimping is
Speaker 2: looking to the past. As China's leader embraces more elements
Speaker 2: of Maosee Dung's rule, its people are confronting a more
Speaker 2: uncertain future. Lest you think this is purely an American phenomena,
Speaker 2: here's Al Jazeera, which was funded by the government of
Speaker 2: catter is hijimping China's new Maosee Dung, which she casting
Speaker 2: himself as a twenty first century Mao. China risks arbitrary rule.
Speaker 2: Here's foreign policy, the Maoist roots of She's economic dilemma.
Speaker 2: In contrast with Dang, she has embraced a distinctly Maoist
Speaker 2: socialism that emphasizes personal sacrifice for the collective good, HARKing
Speaker 2: back to the Cultural Revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Speaker 2: The British, of course, are also not immune to this
Speaker 2: Mao derangement syndrome. I guess I would call it Chi
Speaker 2: Jimping's pilgrimage to Red Meha brings back the Mao factor.
Speaker 2: So you know this is this is a very very
Speaker 2: common sentiment. It's been a very common sentiment for most
Speaker 2: of the last decade. I I haven't even done some
Speaker 2: of the most common ones, like if you if you
Speaker 2: expand a little bit out from just Xi Jimping is
Speaker 2: the new Mao ones, you get a lot of like
Speaker 2: Xi Jimping is the most powerful leader since Mao, which
Speaker 2: is kind of true. And I think this is part
Speaker 2: of why this sort of strategy works, because people do
Speaker 2: not want to actually differentiate between different kinds of authoritarian systems.
Speaker 2: There are many, many different kind sentatorships and people people
Speaker 2: are just loath to actually look at the differences. And
Speaker 2: you see this. This is not just the sort of
Speaker 2: American media class thing. You see this in political science
Speaker 2: literature all the time. Political science literature, especially in the US,
Speaker 2: has this tendency to divide the entire world into this
Speaker 2: sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies. And as
Speaker 2: a product of this, I have had to read some
Speaker 2: truly truly appalling articles that were published in peer reviewed
Speaker 2: journals on my my absolute I don't know if favorite
Speaker 2: is the right term, or the most cursed one that
Speaker 2: I ever saw was it was an article about like
Speaker 2: the read the quote unquote resource curse and this argument
Speaker 2: about whether like having a bunch of oil means that
Speaker 2: you were inherently going to have an authoritarian government or whatever.
Speaker 2: So they have this chart that's supposed to be tracking
Speaker 2: like the quote unquote time to a democratic transition of
Speaker 2: a bunch of non democratic societies by like just how
Speaker 2: much how much natural resources they have. Now this this
Speaker 2: chart has in the same category Saudi Arabia, a theocratic monarchy,
Speaker 2: and also Hoaxayest's Albania, a country whose political line was
Speaker 2: that Mao did it, Mao hard enough. And these are
Speaker 2: just being treated neutraally as the same type of governments
Speaker 2: because it's not a representative democracy. North Korea is another
Speaker 2: good example of this. You see people in the US
Speaker 2: calling North Korea hereditary monarchy like all the time, and
Speaker 2: it just isn't. Leadership of the party state passes between
Speaker 2: members of a family. But that's not actually enough to
Speaker 2: make something a monarchy unless you're prepared to argue that,
Speaker 2: like the US is a monarchy because we had two
Speaker 2: Bushes as president. Now on the grounds that that's extremely funny,
Speaker 2: I'm not wholly unsympathetic to that argument, but it's not.
Speaker 2: Calling the US a monarchy because of the two Bushes
Speaker 2: is not a very serious academic argument. It is just
Speaker 2: a joke. And that's I think how we should be
Speaker 2: treating people like people calling North Korea a monarchy because
Speaker 2: it's not. A monarchy is not just there's a guy
Speaker 2: who's in charge and as to another person who's related
Speaker 2: to them. It's not just that there's someone who you
Speaker 2: could call a king. There is a whole political system
Speaker 2: beneath it, right, there's a whole network of like princes
Speaker 2: and courts and land titles and inheritances and who and
Speaker 2: who doesn't have royal blood, and there's there's you know,
Speaker 2: there's a whole you know, and the economic system of
Speaker 2: a monarchy as has changed over time. Right, monarchies are
Speaker 2: very old, you know. We now have like capitalist monarchies
Speaker 2: like the Saudis. You know, we've had feudal monarchies, we've
Speaker 2: had sort of pre feudal monarchies. But you can't simply
Speaker 2: reduce monarchy to one guy in charge. That is absolutely absurd.
Speaker 2: But people just do this all the time. Now, North
Speaker 2: Korea is organized along the lines of a party state,
Speaker 2: where this is you know, a sort of shortening of
Speaker 2: one party state. Technically speaking, there are actually other parties
Speaker 2: in North Korea, and this is true of China as well,
Speaker 2: but they don't really do anything. And this is not
Speaker 2: the episode where I'm going to have to try to
Speaker 2: and the difference between the United Front and the United
Speaker 2: Front Works Department, that's another time. But they are functionally
Speaker 2: one party states. There is one party that actually does
Speaker 2: the ruling, and then there's a couple of other parties
Speaker 2: that keep around for appearances, who might do consultative stuff.
Speaker 2: But even in terms, even knowing that something is a
Speaker 2: party state doesn't actually tell you a huge amount about
Speaker 2: how that system actually functions. And this is where we
Speaker 2: come to the core elements of today's episode. How does
Speaker 2: the modern Chinese state operate and how is it different
Speaker 2: from previous iterations of the Chinese state. So to answer
Speaker 2: this question, we need to start. We need to start
Speaker 2: with the origins of the party state itself. And the
Speaker 2: party state really in the sense that we're dealing with,
Speaker 2: is born with the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess it technically creates the Soviet Union a little bit,
Speaker 2: but it's born it's bored of the October Revolution and
Speaker 2: the Bolshevik taking and consolidation of power. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: you know, party states are not built in the image
Speaker 2: of Lenin. They're built in the image of Stalin. And
Speaker 2: the thing that makes you know, a sort of like
Speaker 2: what the party stays that come after it, what makes
Speaker 2: them function is the way that sort of Stalin consolidates power,
Speaker 2: and Stalin consolidates power by using the rules of the
Speaker 2: Bolshevik Party to maintain control over members of the state apparatus,
Speaker 2: even though technically speaking he doesn't he doesn't have like
Speaker 2: you know, he keep be doing. He doesn't technically have
Speaker 2: the formal authority to do as a member of the government,
Speaker 2: but he has the authority to do as a member
Speaker 2: of the party. And this is how Stalin consolidates his power,
Speaker 2: and soad of walls out trotsky Eta et cetera, et cetera. However, Comma,
Speaker 2: this is where people make mistakes when that when they're
Speaker 2: trying to sort of understand what Stalinism was, which is
Speaker 2: that they make this mistake of looking, you know of
Speaker 2: kind of projecting back the later Soviet Union onto you know,
Speaker 2: onto sort of like nineteen thirty's Stalinism. And the mistake
Speaker 2: they make is the assumption that Stalinism is purely a
Speaker 2: bureaucratic doctrine, right, It's purely about seizing control of the
Speaker 2: bureaucracy and using a bureaucracy to consolidate power, and that
Speaker 2: is just not true. Part of Stalin's success and you know,
Speaker 2: as bleak as that like success is. Part of what
Speaker 2: Stalin does is mobilize masses of people against parts of
Speaker 2: the party and in parts of the state bureaucracy that
Speaker 2: oppose him, that you know, to do things like denunciations
Speaker 2: to like you know, and to weaken their bureaucratic power.
Speaker 2: And this means that Stalinism is not a pure politics
Speaker 2: of state bureaucracy the way that sort of later Soviet
Speaker 2: governments are. It's a combination of bureaucratic power and also
Speaker 2: the direction of mass mobilization, of the mobilization of large
Speaker 2: numbers of people to go do a thing towards the
Speaker 2: end of consolidating power. This interplay, the control of bureaucratic
Speaker 2: power checked by mass popular and mobilizations, is the characteristic
Speaker 2: element of Stalinism. Both of these tools, both the bureaucratic
Speaker 2: apparatus and mass mobilization, are used to maintain Stalin's personal power. Now, Maoism,
Speaker 2: for all of its claims to be the direct ideological
Speaker 2: air of Stalinism, Maoism is Stallanism are not the same thing.
Speaker 2: In sort of like Mao era China, And you know,
Speaker 2: you can trace this towards from sort of like Mao's
Speaker 2: insurgency era through the time he's in power to the
Speaker 2: end of the seventies. During that period, China is if anything,
Speaker 2: even more prone to mass popular and mobilization as a strategy.
Speaker 2: Some of this is ideological. Maoism is to a large
Speaker 2: extent a kind of internal critique of Stalinism that you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, like so people in like you could argue about,
Speaker 2: you know, how good were the intentions of the people
Speaker 2: who are in charge of the Chinese Communist Party in
Speaker 2: like the twenties and thirties, right, But they're not They're
Speaker 2: not stupid, right, These people are smart. These people understand
Speaker 2: that there are a lot of problems with the Soviet system.
Speaker 2: These are people who watched a bunch of their comrades
Speaker 2: get murdered because the Soviet's fucked up. So these are
Speaker 2: people who understand the threat of bureaucratization to a revolutionary
Speaker 2: movements and the formation the potential formation of a new
Speaker 2: ruling class composed of sort of like management and bureaucratic cadres.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, because it's an internal critique
Speaker 2: of Stalinism, and not like an external critique of Stalinism,
Speaker 2: Baoism is utterly unwilling to try to solve these problems
Speaker 2: by actually giving like workers or peasants, like any kind
Speaker 2: of autonomy or democratic control over anything, except for like
Speaker 2: the most trivial minutia of like shop floor bullshit. And
Speaker 2: the result of this is that, you know, you can't
Speaker 2: defeat the bureaucracy with democracy, so how do you actually
Speaker 2: deal with it? And the result is what's called campaign
Speaker 2: style mobilization. These are mass mobilizations of extraordinary large numbers
Speaker 2: of people to do it, you know, to to do
Speaker 2: a task right. There's a lot of different sort of
Speaker 2: things they try to do with this. Sometimes they're tried,
Speaker 2: they're used for economic ends. This is like the Great
Speaker 2: Leap forward, which is this mass mobilization of people to
Speaker 2: increase productive capacity is a fiasco. Now, part of this
Speaker 2: also was political, right, Partly this is now trying to
Speaker 2: use mass mobilization against the bureaucracy in a way reminiscent
Speaker 2: of stalin but any much much larger scale. And the
Speaker 2: other you know, part part of what's going on here
Speaker 2: is that the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is much
Speaker 2: stronger than the bureaucracy of China, right because you know,
Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks kind of have a state like bureaucracy sort
Speaker 2: of intact that they're able to sort of graft themselves onto.
Speaker 2: China like doesn't have like a functioning government at all,
Speaker 2: Like there's no functioning central state in China when the
Speaker 2: Maoist eventually like knock off the Nationalists, So you know this,
Speaker 2: this this always means that the level of bureaucracy station
Speaker 2: is lower in China, but you know, it's still it's
Speaker 2: it's still that's still like the state building process is
Speaker 2: still one of the things that Maoists are trying to do.
Speaker 2: And this is you know, this is sort of what
Speaker 2: Mao is tending to check. But this doesn't work. The
Speaker 2: Culture Revolution ultimately fails, and part of its failure is that,
Speaker 2: you know, Okay, so in order in order to like
Speaker 2: stop the dread specter of like democratic election of factory
Speaker 2: councils and shit, Mao like cobbles together this coalition of
Speaker 2: soldiers like loyalist Red Guard factions and some of the
Speaker 2: pre existing bureaucracy. And these people are these are people
Speaker 2: who end up running the country through the seventies, and
Speaker 2: that is just another bureaucracy. And through this whole period,
Speaker 2: Trya continues to get more and more bureaucratic. Now, this
Speaker 2: is the most cliche thing that you can possibly say,
Speaker 2: but unfortunately I do have to say it. The Culture
Speaker 2: Revolution had a massive impact on subsequent Chinese policy. Every
Speaker 2: Chinese leader from Dan Jouping on, including Xijianping, and this
Speaker 2: is something that is not very well covered in the
Speaker 2: American press, but every single one of these people agrees
Speaker 2: that the Culture Revolution was a mistake. And you can
Speaker 2: see the results of this analysis in how the modern
Speaker 2: Chinese state mobilizes resources. Now, do you know how you
Speaker 2: can mobilize resources. It's by buying the products and services
Speaker 2: contained in these ads.
Speaker 1: We are back.
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm saying we. It is kind
Speaker 2: of just me and you the listener, But I guess,
Speaker 2: I guess, I guess that's technically plural. So let's get
Speaker 2: into how the modern Chinese state is very, very different
Speaker 2: from the previous kind of Chinese state, right, because you know,
Speaker 2: like the Mao era, for everything that goes wrong with it, right,
Speaker 2: for all of the reality that is an absolute disaster
Speaker 2: is based on in a lot of ways, what we
Speaker 2: would call grassroots style organizing. Right, It's based on getting
Speaker 2: a bunch of people to go out and do a thing. Now,
Speaker 2: the modern Chinese date doesn't do this in the same way.
Speaker 2: The closest thing that they have to sort of like
Speaker 2: Maoist mobilizations are you know, there is still a thing
Speaker 2: that's called a campaign stylen mobilization, but it's not the
Speaker 2: same thing at all as the Maoist system. So let's
Speaker 2: ask the question, what the fuck is campaign style mobilization?
Speaker 2: So I'm going to go to the academic literature on this.
Speaker 2: A group of professors writing for the journal Public Administration Review,
Speaker 2: in a very colorfully named article called Campaign Style Enforcement
Speaker 2: and Regulatory Compliance, describe it thus, following the literature, we
Speaker 2: define campaign style enforcement as a type of policy implementation
Speaker 2: involving extraordinary mobilezation of administrative resources under political sponsorship. Now
Speaker 2: this definition is very interesting because if you look at
Speaker 2: what is being mobilized here, right, it is not masses
Speaker 2: of people. You're not trying to do mass popular mobilizations.
Speaker 2: You're mobilizing administrative resources. And this is something that becomes
Speaker 2: very clear the more you look into the sort of
Speaker 2: literature here, I'm going to quote from a piece called
Speaker 2: Revised Blue Sky Fabrication in China by Yongdongshen and Anna
Speaker 2: l Ahlers during the Mao era, this is campaigns down
Speaker 2: mobilizations aimed at nothing less than mobilizing society as a whole.
Speaker 2: While when they occur today, political campaigns are usually foremostly
Speaker 2: addressed at the state apparatus i e. Especially party and
Speaker 2: government organizations, at all levels of the political hierarchy, and
Speaker 2: ultimately at cadres in other words, the implementers of the
Speaker 2: policy goals at stake. According to Elizabeth Perry has called
Speaker 2: this transformation quote from mass campaigns to managed campaigns. Moreover,
Speaker 2: contemporary campaigns, or better campaign style politics mainly take the
Speaker 2: form of a disciplinary, supervisory and sanctioning campaigns such as
Speaker 2: anti crime campaigns or the recently reinforced corruption campaign or
Speaker 2: b regulatory enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns. So, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's kind of a lot, but I think I think
Speaker 2: it's worth actually, you know, taking this in a little
Speaker 2: bit of detail. That same article defines up like the
Speaker 2: characteristics of what campaign style. A campaign style mobilization is
Speaker 2: so they have a defined goal, they have political sponsorship,
Speaker 2: there's a high degree of urgency, there's a defined period
Speaker 2: of time, tightly coordinated operation, the pooling of extraordinary resources,
Speaker 2: and public involvement. So that article of the one about
Speaker 2: blue sky fabrication is studying the twenty sixteen G twenty
Speaker 2: meeting in Hangzhou where the government sets out to make
Speaker 2: sure that there is actually like a blue sky for
Speaker 2: the event. Now, this is a massive undertaking because Chinese
Speaker 2: air pollution is fucking atrocious. This is something that I
Speaker 2: might do you another fall episode about this at some point.
Speaker 2: Chinese air pollution is unbelievably bad. It kills unfathomable numbers
Speaker 2: of people every year. It's gotten a little bit better
Speaker 2: since I was last there. But like when I was
Speaker 2: last in Beijing, like I didn't fucking I only saw
Speaker 2: the sky one time in the time I was there,
Speaker 2: because and that was only because it rained, and so
Speaker 2: after it rain, the sky was blue for like a
Speaker 2: few hours in the small just like consumed it again.
Speaker 2: So in order to make sure that there was like
Speaker 2: a blue sky for pr purposes for this G twenty meeting,
Speaker 2: because China wanted to sort of show off. There was
Speaker 2: a massive, massive deployment of resources, and this becomes one
Speaker 2: of the sort of campaigns mobilizations. And these mobilizations, you know,
Speaker 2: they may not be sort of mauise style mass mobilizations
Speaker 2: of like getting people to go do the thing, but
Speaker 2: they are massively intrusive. They include things like shuttering factories,
Speaker 2: moving millions of people, restricting like who can drive them
Speaker 2: what days, like, restricting whether or not you can like
Speaker 2: use like cooking stuff in your house. But Comma, we
Speaker 2: need to look at how these things actually happen. So
Speaker 2: the way that these campaigns start basically is for for
Speaker 2: the large scale ones, you have mobilization that flows basically
Speaker 2: down the lines of the state. Right, they start from
Speaker 2: the federal governments and they go to local governments and
Speaker 2: regional governments and implementation you know, for sort of scientific stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: So if you if you look for you know, going
Speaker 2: back to the sort of example of the G twenty
Speaker 2: for you know, in order to do the scientific core
Speaker 2: coordination for it, you get a very very broad, sort
Speaker 2: of broadreaching like coalition or coordination between scientists at universities
Speaker 2: as well as at research institutes and government agencies and
Speaker 2: you're pulling them all together in order to produce like
Speaker 2: I don't know, you're like air quality measures, right, And
Speaker 2: these efforts also can very rapidly fold in the governments
Speaker 2: of other provinces. So what does it actually mean in
Speaker 2: terms of how these mobilizations work. What it means is
Speaker 2: that mobilization is a way of moving around different state
Speaker 2: and sometimes just kind of pseudo nonstate actors like universities
Speaker 2: and research institutes. It's a way of moving those resources
Speaker 2: around in such a way that you can accomplish a thing. Now.
Speaker 2: One of the kind of defining characteristics of a lot
Speaker 2: of these campaigns, and not all of them, like the
Speaker 2: anti corruption campaigns obviously are sort of different, but a
Speaker 2: lot of these campaigns rely on scientific and technical mobilization,
Speaker 2: both in the sense of what resources they're moving, right,
Speaker 2: moving you moving scientists around, but also in terms of
Speaker 2: public justification. And this is also something that's very different,
Speaker 2: Like there is ideological justification going on, but like in
Speaker 2: like a Maoist sort of like like a high culture
Speaker 2: revolution like period or even greatly forward period, you're mostly
Speaker 2: using sort of ideological like direct ideological motivation to get
Speaker 2: people to go do a thing. Here. It's very technical,
Speaker 2: it's very scientific, it's very technocratic. And one of the
Speaker 2: products of this, one of the products of sort of
Speaker 2: how technocratic everything is, is that And this is something
Speaker 2: Shen and Ahlers are very clear about. There is like
Speaker 2: there's no public comment here, right Like the way these
Speaker 2: campaign mobilizations work is the state tells you what you
Speaker 2: are doing, and you are not telling them back like anything.
Speaker 2: Like you are not negotiating with them, you are not
Speaker 2: in a dialogue, you are not submitting comments. They are
Speaker 2: just telling you what to do. And this goes from
Speaker 2: like regular people all the way up to like corporations,
Speaker 2: right like even large corporations. A lot of times with
Speaker 2: these like campaign style things don't get a like negotiate
Speaker 2: a deal or whatever the fuck, It just it just
Speaker 2: sort of happens. Now, you may have noticed in the
Speaker 2: original one of the original descriptions, I was talking about
Speaker 2: one of the things they have as part of the
Speaker 2: definition is public mobiles mobilization of like the public. But
Speaker 2: we need to be clear about what that means so
Speaker 2: that it doesn't get confused with like maoism. So when
Speaker 2: we say there's mobilization of the public, it's stuff likely
Speaker 2: so during the G twenty campaign, they were like they
Speaker 2: would the CCP would like have old people volunteer to
Speaker 2: like walk around their neighborhoods and like snatch on anyone
Speaker 2: who was like using their cooking stove. So like that's
Speaker 2: the kind of mobilization we're talking like. These are not
Speaker 2: like these are not like Red Guard tribunals, like dragging
Speaker 2: people out of their houses. This is like a seventy
Speaker 2: year old's person incredibly nosy seventy year old going like, ha,
Speaker 2: this person using their cooking stove. You know how you
Speaker 2: can get a cooking stove that you can actually use? Uh,
Speaker 2: maybe these products and services. I don't know if we're
Speaker 2: sponsors by cooking stoves, but you know we could be
Speaker 2: there could there could be a cooking stove product and
Speaker 2: service out there waiting for you and we're back. Now
Speaker 2: we should also look more at some of the methods
Speaker 2: of how this stuff happens. Right. So one of the
Speaker 2: things that's happening as part of this campaign is part
Speaker 2: of the part of the plan to reduce pollution, is
Speaker 2: they need Chinese government wants to move a bunch of
Speaker 2: people out of out of the city. Right now, a
Speaker 2: Maui style thing would just tell the people to fucking leave.
Speaker 2: The way that the way that the modern Chinese government
Speaker 2: does this is to send people like basically free travel vouchers.
Speaker 2: Shennon Ayler's report, the value of these vouchers is more
Speaker 2: than one point five billion dollars, So like that's dollars, right,
Speaker 2: that's that's like, you know, this is this is these
Speaker 2: are very expensive campaigns. But but you know, this is
Speaker 2: the way that the Chinese state moves in a lot
Speaker 2: of these cases, right when they're trying to move, when
Speaker 2: they need to move a bunch of people, they deploy vouchers.
Speaker 2: So some of these campaigns are using even more like
Speaker 2: technocratic means to get things done. So looking back at
Speaker 2: the article of campaign style enforcement and regulatory compliance, we
Speaker 2: find examples of what is technically campaign style mobilization. Okay quote.
Speaker 2: For instance, the central government either waived the loan interest
Speaker 2: for corporate spending on basically these like desulfurization things to
Speaker 2: make industrial like exhaust not have sulfur in it, or
Speaker 2: cover these expenses using central environmental cential environmental funds. In addition,
Speaker 2: an innovative green electricity policy offered that point Zhoo two
Speaker 2: three sent price premium per kilowatt hour to power plants
Speaker 2: that installed one of these systems. So this is like
Speaker 2: exactly the opposite of how a booist campaign would do this, right,
Speaker 2: Like they are these factory people are getting like price subsidies,
Speaker 2: and like they're waiving the interest on loans. Now, we've
Speaker 2: been focusing on campaign stylen mobilization because those are the
Speaker 2: most sort of extraordinary kinds of mobilization. But most policy
Speaker 2: isn't even implemented by campaign. It's implemented by normal bureaucratic processes.
Speaker 2: And this is even less booist than the sort of
Speaker 2: campaign stylen mobilizations. Now, most people, a lot of people
Speaker 2: who describe China as Baoist are describing their oppressive apparatus,
Speaker 2: But here they have things exactly backwards. Right, Contrary to
Speaker 2: the government of the socialist period, which was sort of
Speaker 2: governed by mass mobilization, the modern Chinese government is almost
Speaker 2: pathologically adverse to anything that even smells like mass popular mobilization.
Speaker 2: And this isn't to say that China doesn't have protests
Speaker 2: like it does. There are protests in China, but Comma,
Speaker 2: like a lot of these you know, there there are
Speaker 2: protests like there are like ecological like nimbi protests. There
Speaker 2: are like real estate there's a lot of real estate protests,
Speaker 2: and some of those, some of these are allowed. There
Speaker 2: there are protests that one of the very common forms
Speaker 2: of protests against not getting paid by your boss, but
Speaker 2: even attempting like and most of these protests aren't like
Speaker 2: so just aren't really anti government, right, Like they're not
Speaker 2: sort of like they're not calling for the downfall of
Speaker 2: the regime or whatever. They're like pissed off about a
Speaker 2: corrupt local government. But even attempting to documents. All of
Speaker 2: the protests that happened in China in a given year
Speaker 2: canon has landed people in prison. So you know, the
Speaker 2: state is not super happy about this. And if we
Speaker 2: look at what happened to mass protests in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: they were brutally suppressed and you know, the sort of
Speaker 2: anti like the even even things that weren't even really
Speaker 2: that big but we're kind of antecedent service that attempted
Speaker 2: to use sort of maoist politics were also unbelievably quickly
Speaker 2: like stamped out. Right. There was the oppression of the
Speaker 2: student workers movement in late twenty tens on the student
Speaker 2: sort of worker like Maoist movements. The Chinese state does
Speaker 2: some sort of like limited mobilization online, you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of sort of like they have this like pr
Speaker 2: strategy thing overseas of like wolf warrior diplomacy or whatever.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievably cringe. But even then, these are not even
Speaker 2: close to the kinds of mobilization the state and the
Speaker 2: party could like nationalists mobilizations they could unleash if they
Speaker 2: wanted to. And this is because instead of working through
Speaker 2: mass popular mobilization, the state isn't maoist, and because it's
Speaker 2: not maoist, it works through their bureaucracy. Policy implementation works
Speaker 2: by going from the top and then if they go
Speaker 2: down to local government's local government respond it goes back
Speaker 2: up to the top again, it comes back down and
Speaker 2: the policy gets it implemented. Right like you know, when
Speaker 2: when there are mask like you know, mass campaign style things,
Speaker 2: they're not they're not mass mobilizing people. They're mobilizing research institutes.
Speaker 2: They're mobilizing like government bureaus. They're they're they're they're shifting
Speaker 2: bureaucrats and technocrats around. Now I think I think there's
Speaker 2: a lot of reasons for why the Chinese governments is
Speaker 2: sort of like pathologically adverse to anything that even sort
Speaker 2: of smelled like kind of smells like male style politics. Right.
Speaker 2: One of them is that, you know, these are we
Speaker 2: talked about this before, but like these are people who
Speaker 2: a lot of these people lived through parts of the
Speaker 2: Cultural Revolution, like they saw really fiascos emerge out of
Speaker 2: this stuff. But you know, the other thing that they're
Speaker 2: that these people are afraid of is that so you know,
Speaker 2: when I say these people were around for the Culture Revolution,
Speaker 2: like these people saw the Chinese working class take the
Speaker 2: city of Shanghai nineteen sixty seven. Right, this is all
Speaker 2: and this is part of the reason why Tiana then
Speaker 2: rattles them so much, because they you know, they nearly
Speaker 2: watch the working class take another Chinese city. And these people,
Speaker 2: these are people who have a you know, and I
Speaker 2: think understand this on a more visceral level than most
Speaker 2: other political leaders understand that if they if they don't
Speaker 2: correctly manage situations and like stamp up populamobilization like they could,
Speaker 2: you know, there there are worlds where they fucking wake up.
Speaker 2: They dragged out of their houses and the Chinese working
Speaker 2: class hangs them from lamp posts. Right, that's a real threat.
Speaker 2: And this is part of why you know, they're using
Speaker 2: something that's something that's called neoliberalism, right, the disenchantment of politics.
Speaker 2: They this is, this is why the state, even when
Speaker 2: it's doing repression, operates through sort of technocratic and bureaucratic means. Now,
Speaker 2: journalists resort to calling this maoism because they're lazy hacks
Speaker 2: who are also racist. But you know, now we can
Speaker 2: see pretty clearly by actually looking at how the state
Speaker 2: functions that this is not maoism. Maoism is built on
Speaker 2: mass popular mobilization. The modern CCP is built on stamping
Speaker 2: out mass popular mobilization. This has been nickeld happen here, Yeah,
Speaker 2: happy lean your New Year's everyone.
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