The Suicide of the East?
foreignaffairs.com
foreignaffairs.com
"The Chinese were probably influenced less by the example of the United States itself than by U.S.-backed examples closer to home, such as Japan, South Korea, and--although they would not admit it--Taiwan."
Yes. The startling fact near the end of the 1970s is that the economic gap between China and Taiwan had become so large (because Taiwan was prospering while China was stagnating) that Taiwan's overall economic strength was becoming almost as great as that of all of China, even though China has SIXTY times the population. That much economic strength attracts the attention of a dissatisfied population in a poorer nearby country. ("Democracy Wall" writers in this transition period referred to the example of Taiwan as a basis for criticizing the Communist Party regime in China.) And that much economic strength provides more military options even to a country that is heavily outnumbered. (Meanwhile, China's army was humiliated during its brief incursion into Vietnam in 1979.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
So China had no choice but to loosen economic regulation and tacitly reject orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist doctrine to catch up to Taiwan. And, yes, Korea's south prospering while the north stagnated was also a cautionary example to the rulers of China.
There's an old story that once, in a meeting, Milton Friedman was chastising Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, for not collecting the economic statistics that Milton and other economists wanted. Cowperthwaite replied that the omission was intentional; he knew that if he collected the data, the bureaucrats back in the UK would see the numbers and expect him to do something about them.
If you want to make this an Asian foot race for prosperity, I think China is better compared with India for size and poverty level before China went communist. Productivity, literacy, infant mortality rates, and general health all became much better in China than India under communism.
China was not following a Soviet model. The Soviet Union became revisionist after Stalin's death causing the rift with China. The Chinese communist revolution focused on the countryside peasants, encircling the cities. The Bolshevik's organized the workers. China was not following a Soviet blueprint dogmatically.
Besides the wealth of First World nations, I don't see Third World countries benefiting from capitalism all that much, the poor nations stay poor. With the resultant starvation, dysentery, and infant deaths all but ignored by the West.
So China had no choice but to loosen economic regulation and tacitly reject orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist doctrine to catch up to Taiwan.
I agree with the original article's limited claims about market reforms, but since you seem to reference more than economic reform:
China only made the market reforms, and politically, Taiwan was still at the time, an authoritarian, one-party Leninist state. Many Chinese Communists were former members of the Kuomintang and their similarities weren't just superficial; they both learned their bag of tricks--propaganda, how to organize their party-state-military structure, how to suppress dissent, how to control the larger population--from the Soviets. To this very day, Taiwan still has political military officers stationed at all public high schools and colleges (though thankfully their role has changed a lot). If Taiwan was showing China anything, it was that they could keep around the party and the authoritarianism and open up their markets at the same time. As you are well-aware, martial law wasn't lifted until 1987 and Taiwan wasn't even really anything you could even nominally call democracy until the 90s.
So basically 1) Taiwan was still Leninist and 2) I don't get what the Democracy Wall writers are inspired by when Taiwan wasn't a democracy then.
Ironically, one foundation for economic prosperity in Taiwan was the land reform the Kuomintang copied--although they would not admit it--from the Communists and implemented after they occupied Taiwan after World War II. They forced all the big landlords at gunpoint to trade in their land for largely worthless stock in state-owned companies. Prior to that, much of the population were landless tenant farmers. The possibilities for entrepreneurship change quite a bit when you go from being a tenant farmer to a small time farmer with your own land.
1) Taiwan was a dictatorship at the time China made its economic transformation (I lived there at the time)
and
2) Taiwan's land reform was forced on the landlords.
But I have studied the history of the Taiwan land reform from several sources, and it wasn't based on a model copied from the Communist Party of China. As you wrote, "The possibilities for entrepreneurship change quite a bit when you go from being a tenant farmer to a small time farmer with your own land." That end result is quite a bit different from what happened in China.
Responding to pg above, the political control that the KMT had in the late 1970s is why Taiwan, even more than Hong Kong, was a model for China's loosening of control on the economy while keeping control of politics. But even in the late 1970s, while Taiwan was literally a Leninist dictatorship under the KMT, it was already a much freer place with much more rule of law than China was until much later (or has ever been in my lifetime?). And that is what inspired Democracy Wall writers as early as the 1970s, not only Taiwan's prosperity. Taiwan did make a transition into full multiparty democracy during the 1990s (and I saw several elections while I lived there around the turn of the last century), and that is a transformation the Communist Party of China still fears and resists. But maybe that will be the result of peaceful evolution of the political-economic system of China soon, on the model of most neighboring countries.
"The words "Soviet" and "union" are worth a moment's reflection. They were extremely meaningful, and they were originally devised to replace two other words: "Russian" and "empire." If the republics were no longer bound together by their supposed Marxist-Leninist ideological fraternity, what would happen to a "Soviet Union"?"
This is not clear to non-slavic speakers, but Soviet is the anglicized form of "suvetski", from the base "Suvet" meaning "committee". These Suveti/committees were the secret gatherings of communists/bolsheviks dating back to the late 1800s/early 1900s.
We'll never know how much we owe Mike Jackson.
Let me know if you want to borrow my copy ;-)
Ok. I'm done.
No, not at all.
If you think the cold war was a kind of global election, you need to go back and study up some more. Somebody has convinced you that you know what you are talking about, and that person has, unfortunately, defrauded you.
I guess the rewriting and oversimplification of history will continue as long as there are writers. But it sure is a pain in the ass.
Western-Europe was in one camp pretty much by default, and lot of us feared what would happen if world war III would break out. The peace movement had a slogan which doesn't translate very well but which effectively was 'better red than dead'.
States that didn't align themselves openly with either the Soviets or the western block were bullied or bribed in to doing so, one way or the other usually proximity determined the outcome there.
I don't think it was a global election either, but there were definitely elements of an elective process in there, and to this day there are plenty of people in former eastern bloc countries that would gladly return to the former state of affairs simply because life was more certain for them then.
In a true elective process these people would vote for a re-alignment with Moscow in a heartbeat (even today).
They're a minority, but they do exist.
So, even if the analogy is flawed it does have its valid points.
I can't summarize it in a few hundred words. If I could then my point would be invalid! Suffice it to say that the voluntary parts of the non-aligned countries were based just as much on the use of soft and hard powers, ideologies, and internal political disputes as some overall narrative.
I don't mind simplification and the use of analogies. And I agree that in the long run the natural democracy of the populace will win out, no matter what the system. But to say that somehow these countries were acting in the same sense as a person acts when they go to vote is really taking the broad brush a little too much, I think.
Ideally you use analogy to illustrate a point or to carry an idea further. When you just throw it out there, mid-essay, it shows that you're taking a lot of shortcuts in your thinking. Shortcuts that may not be justified upon closer inspection.
Over the past week I have read about a dozen articles about the Berlin wall falling. Each of them made a completely different argument for why it fell! And each were credible and well-sourced!
So when the author just threw out the analogy of other countries as voters -- as if the world operated like some giant election -- I simply had enough and bailed out.
It's a great topic for an article, but if I let the author get away with an oversimplification half-way through I have little confidence that it's going to end up anywhere worth going. Kind of like building a house on the sand.
But I was wrong to be so terse here. Sorry about that. If I had something to say, I should have taken the time to explain myself.