CHINA AND THE LOST DECADES AHEAD: 2/4: Wild Ride: A short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2024
⏱️ 8 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 China
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Besser with Anne Stevenson Yang. The new book is Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy. |
| 0:12.0 | Tiananmen is a catastrophe. |
| 0:14.0 | The tanks on students, the damage and then the pursuit of anyone who was in attendance |
| 0:21.0 | takes two years of closing the country down, brutalizing, we don't have a good |
| 0:26.7 | history. But in 1992, the country starts to open up again to capital, it needs capital, it needs money invested, it needs |
| 0:38.4 | to organize itself to attract investment. |
| 0:41.4 | And this is the period of creating the red capitalists which I |
| 0:45.3 | know Dan invariably were the sons and daughters of the leading political |
| 0:49.9 | figures all of them dung dung has a daughter whom you describe as Mausi, Deng Nan, who becomes |
| 0:59.2 | part of the free economy and other the premier have children or friends of children. |
| 1:06.1 | The one I love best is that Drexel University graduate name Jang Ming Hong, who is called Mr 10 percenter. |
| 1:15.8 | What was the 10 percent about? |
| 1:18.3 | Well, that's because in Shanghai where he lived then, |
| 1:22.1 | a lot of companies felt that they needed to give him |
| 1:24.8 | 10% of the equity in order to smooth their way to getting licenses and |
| 1:29.3 | getting capital he was the son of course of Jiang Zemin, who was the head of China. |
| 1:35.0 | I hate to use the word president, which Chinese people never use, but he was the head of China after Tiananmen. |
| 1:42.0 | And so his son was Mr 10% and this is red capitalism. This isn't |
| 1:47.2 | quite our idea of capitalism but it is red capitalism. The Premier's son, his name is Levin-JU. He runs something that, what is that, a sovereign fund, a CIC, |
| 1:59.6 | it's an investment fund? The state-owned investment bank that it eventually took a piece of all of the |
| 2:06.8 | Chinese companies that were listing on foreign markets. So what we're looking |
| 2:10.3 | at is the creation of royalties children then run the corporations or run the |
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