The moderator tried to control things, but people weren’t waiting for their turn. “We need democracy in the Chinese Communist Party,” and suddenly voices, arguments, and opinions bursted out.
This interview is kind of like a time machine, back to the 2000’s when people actually believed in democracy and free speech.
Post 2016, most people, except the unapologetic boomers, of course know better. China has the CPC. The US and Europe have their own deep state managed “our democracy” systems that pantomime as the real thing. But everyone who pays attention knows that it’s a charade.
A great interview. As someone who has been a close observer of the PRC (and resident there over more than 20 years during my adult life) since I was in high school in the 60s in Australia, taking a stand for emancipation and democracy has been difficult at times. In the early 70s I was a high school leader of the Moratorium Against the Vietnam War where I lived in the State of Victoria. I was a leftist activist in the early 70 at Monash Uni in Melbourne, spoke Chinese and the Maoists hated me, though none could string a sentence together in Mandarin if their life depended on it.
At one time in the 80s I threw myself into studying the Chinese labor movement. Chinese professorial mentors at Nanjing University were enthusiastic about my interest. At the time I was close to Arif Dirlik who had led Duke Uni student groups to NanDa. My plans to do a PhD at Duke got scuppered by defunding of area study scholarships for foreigners under Reagan. I was deeply into the intrigues of early CCP leaders such as Li Lisan and even Mao involving the use of secret societies to organise the urban working class and get close to peasants in the country side. Later, when doing a PhD at ANU that began from that focus at NanDa I realised there was virtually no archival data that would address these issues. Only memoirs. And instead I focused on Chinese railway workers for whom there is a huge mass of institutional documentary evidence such as registration forms, wages books, pension files, sickness files, and so on that allowed me to reconstruct a story about the working and family lives of one of the most important modern industrial workforces from the late 19thC to 1937.
Fast forward a few years. The early 2000s really seemed like change would take place. That Chinese civil society would be transformed, even democratised. The experiment in democracy, village elections, profusion of NGOs. It was not quite as exciting as the ‘discovery’ young Chinese uni students experienced in the early 1980s, with ‘salons’ being formed at universities to discuss hitherto forbidden topics, but the local elections movement reached down to the village, to those who could never have been involved in the ‘liberation’ of thought in urban areas in the early 1980s. In that sense, it was more profound and potentially transformative of China. But all that began to unravel in 2008. It was probably the Tibet events that year and the criticisms of China in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games that led the party to begin to rapidly backpedal on local elections. Xi Jinping did not begin the retreat from openness. But more than other party leaders he saw with a clarity and a vengeance the danger for the party of the changes that had been unleashed in China since the 1980s. And that is where we are today. Thanks for sharing the interview. Another great contribution to oral history of those who have walked through the experiences of China’s amazing changes over the past few decades.
Funny how boomers always talk wistfully about “democracy” in other countries, but just accept the status quo in the western world: Whether we’re talking about the 2020 election or for example the recent coup in Romania.
This interview is kind of like a time machine, back to the 2000’s when people actually believed in democracy and free speech.
Post 2016, most people, except the unapologetic boomers, of course know better. China has the CPC. The US and Europe have their own deep state managed “our democracy” systems that pantomime as the real thing. But everyone who pays attention knows that it’s a charade.
A great interview. As someone who has been a close observer of the PRC (and resident there over more than 20 years during my adult life) since I was in high school in the 60s in Australia, taking a stand for emancipation and democracy has been difficult at times. In the early 70s I was a high school leader of the Moratorium Against the Vietnam War where I lived in the State of Victoria. I was a leftist activist in the early 70 at Monash Uni in Melbourne, spoke Chinese and the Maoists hated me, though none could string a sentence together in Mandarin if their life depended on it.
At one time in the 80s I threw myself into studying the Chinese labor movement. Chinese professorial mentors at Nanjing University were enthusiastic about my interest. At the time I was close to Arif Dirlik who had led Duke Uni student groups to NanDa. My plans to do a PhD at Duke got scuppered by defunding of area study scholarships for foreigners under Reagan. I was deeply into the intrigues of early CCP leaders such as Li Lisan and even Mao involving the use of secret societies to organise the urban working class and get close to peasants in the country side. Later, when doing a PhD at ANU that began from that focus at NanDa I realised there was virtually no archival data that would address these issues. Only memoirs. And instead I focused on Chinese railway workers for whom there is a huge mass of institutional documentary evidence such as registration forms, wages books, pension files, sickness files, and so on that allowed me to reconstruct a story about the working and family lives of one of the most important modern industrial workforces from the late 19thC to 1937.
Fast forward a few years. The early 2000s really seemed like change would take place. That Chinese civil society would be transformed, even democratised. The experiment in democracy, village elections, profusion of NGOs. It was not quite as exciting as the ‘discovery’ young Chinese uni students experienced in the early 1980s, with ‘salons’ being formed at universities to discuss hitherto forbidden topics, but the local elections movement reached down to the village, to those who could never have been involved in the ‘liberation’ of thought in urban areas in the early 1980s. In that sense, it was more profound and potentially transformative of China. But all that began to unravel in 2008. It was probably the Tibet events that year and the criticisms of China in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games that led the party to begin to rapidly backpedal on local elections. Xi Jinping did not begin the retreat from openness. But more than other party leaders he saw with a clarity and a vengeance the danger for the party of the changes that had been unleashed in China since the 1980s. And that is where we are today. Thanks for sharing the interview. Another great contribution to oral history of those who have walked through the experiences of China’s amazing changes over the past few decades.
Do they? Hmmm … will need to take myself down the back for a talking to. 🤪
Funny how boomers always talk wistfully about “democracy” in other countries, but just accept the status quo in the western world: Whether we’re talking about the 2020 election or for example the recent coup in Romania.