4/4: 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
⏱️ 6 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.'
1860 Peking
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm John Dachtser, CBSi in the world. |
| 0:06.5 | Ann Stevenson Yang is here. |
| 0:08.0 | Her new book is Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and |
| 0:10.7 | closing of the Chinese economy. |
| 0:13.2 | We're at in 2020 COVID hits, we know the story is shut down of the Chinese economy. |
| 0:19.5 | Seal the apartment buildings in some instances quite severe and the Chinese |
| 0:24.2 | people are rattled. At the same time there is a financial crisis that accompanies |
| 0:29.4 | the shutting down of not just the Chinese economy but the global economy. We're still recovering. |
| 0:34.9 | And all of the bad credit that is now out there cannot be serviced easily. |
| 0:40.9 | What is to be done? It's not just the ghost cities because I have this fact from |
| 0:47.2 | man's reporting 25% of the GDP that's been reported all these years is based upon the real estate. |
| 0:55.6 | Those projects out there, the miracles, and the miracles have stopped and deflation sets in in and also a distrust entirely of authority and that's where we are right now looking at this model of recovery. |
| 1:12.0 | The expectation end was that as the US recovered |
| 1:15.9 | as Europe recovered from the pandemic China would as well, what's holding it back? |
| 1:20.3 | Why hasn't it recovered? Well, I think that a lot of people came out of these very, very severe lockdowns quite |
| 1:28.1 | disappointed in the government because, you know, internationally people got money while they had to stay home and leave their |
| 1:35.9 | jobs but in China that didn't happen and so they come out of these lockups and they find |
| 1:40.7 | well now I feel very insecure about the future is this going to happen |
| 1:45.2 | again and I don't have more money in my pocket I think I better hold on to what I |
| 1:49.2 | have in case something bad happens again. And the response by the central government, |
| 1:55.0 | Shejin Ping, was to increase surveillance, |
| 1:58.0 | was to distrust everybody, was to worry about protests, |
... |
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.