3/4: 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
⏱️ 14 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 China
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:03.0 | This is CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:06.0 | The Chinese Miracle, the book is wild ride a short history of the opening |
| 0:11.0 | and closing of the Chinese economy. |
| 0:14.0 | First, the opening part, there's been a international banking crisis |
| 0:19.0 | and the way that the Beijing Chinese Communist Party responds to it, as Anne says in |
| 0:26.2 | their tasseled loafers, is to host cash on the population and that creates opportunities. The opportunities, however, look like the creation of a |
| 0:37.6 | golden monster. And this is Anne's vision, Anne's metaphor. It works, but what we have is a change of opinion of the Chinese people, |
| 0:48.8 | no longer as Anne writes, or do you want a home in a car and access to cigarettes which at one |
| 0:55.4 | point were understood to be keeping your lungs healthy? But you want to be |
| 1:00.1 | rich, you want to grab the brass ring. Was this going on all across the country or just |
| 1:04.9 | the coastal cities, the big cities, and? |
| 1:08.8 | I think everybody had this idea that they could grab some of this cash that was raining down on China. |
| 1:14.6 | Everybody heard about the companies that were listing on international markets, |
| 1:19.7 | the and all of the private investment and so people wanted to you know |
| 1:25.8 | people in the in the countryside moved to the cities they weren't allowed to bring |
| 1:29.6 | their families but you know men and women would move to the big cities and try to get a bit of this. |
| 1:35.0 | Yes and they got a lot of it. We have the creation of what I came to first understand |
| 1:42.0 | with something strange called Ghost Cities. |
| 1:45.0 | Now Anne gives us details about what was going on with this enormous amounts of cash. |
| 1:50.0 | There were three Hong Kong's built, two Manhattan. |
| 1:54.0 | There was a little Paris, and there was a red square, |
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