1/4: Wild Ride: A short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy by Anne Stevenson-Yang (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
by Anne Stevenson-Yang (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Ride-history-opening-closing/dp/173942431X
How did China grow from an impoverished country to become the second largest economy in the world in just over four decades? And how did this economic miracle come to an end, as seems the case today? To understand the story of China's rapid rise and equally rapid fall, author Anne Stevenson-Yang takes us back to the beginning, when Deng Xiaoping took over and opened its moribund economy to Western money and know-how. Stevenson-Yang, who lived and worked in China for a quarter of a century, traces each decade of China's tumultuous development, from the roaring 1980s to today's malaise. In her first-hand account, Wild Ride, Stevenson-Yang concludes that China is returning to the poverty and isolation of the Mao era. What happened to the promise of the political change that would come with the opening of the economy? And the institutional reforms of the last four decades? The author says all that change was all an illusion. Communist China, being interested only in survival, played along and the West fell for it. With the rise of Xi Jinping, that capitalist experiment is over. 'It took me years to understand that I was an unwitting player in an elaborate dramatic confection.'
1900 Beijing
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World. |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS I on the World. |
| 0:08.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | This is CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor. It is 1994. Sheehan, a city in China, the People's |
| 0:19.9 | Republic of China, undergoing a transformation from a poverty-damaged culture, 5,000-year-old |
| 0:27.0 | culture, poverty damaged by geopolitics and the insistence on the Chinese Communist |
| 0:32.4 | Party to brutalize the population in the |
| 0:35.1 | 50s and 60s and 70s. |
| 0:37.0 | And here we are 1994. |
| 0:40.2 | And the author, Anne Stevenson Yang Yang has returned to China. |
| 0:44.6 | She was there once before as an editorialist, |
| 0:47.7 | returned to China, representing a business council |
| 0:50.6 | and she's invited to Sheehan's presentation of business and |
| 0:56.5 | manufacturing and development and she arrives and ised into the hall and taken upstairs and there's a velvet curtain and it pulls back and |
| 1:09.0 | and congratulations a very good evening to you. |
| 1:13.0 | Thank you for this. |
| 1:14.0 | The book is Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. |
| 1:20.0 | You are privileged to have witnessed the five decades you preview for us here and then analyze. |
| 1:28.4 | And this is 1994, so it's the second decade of the Chinese miracle. The screen pulls the velvet |
| 1:36.5 | curtain pulls back and what do you see and what do you do next? Good evening to |
| 1:42.0 | you Anne. Good evening John. Thanks for having me. It was nuts because you know I'm just this this you know 20-odd year old person from Washington DC. I don't know a thing about business and I really do not expect to be treated like a VIP. |
| 1:58.0 | So, you know, I go to this trade show expecting to be in the audience and listen to esteemed speakers and then they escort me onto the stage that turns out I am the esteemed speaker and everybody speaks only Chinese so I have to come up with something to say in Chinese so I kind of |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.