history podcast

During this podcast, the hosts discuss the effects of changes in Chinese economic policy during the Cultural Revolution and after. They focus on the impact of Deng Xiaoping and his policies on China's economy. They talk about how Mao Zedong's methods during the Cultural Revolution were seen as cruel and led to economic decline. Deng Xiaoping implemented policies such as the reform and opening up policy, which aimed to open up China to foreign investments and develop new industries. They also discuss how Deng's policies led to job creation and a shift towards a market-driven economy. They mention the establishment of Special Economic Zones, such as Shenzhen, which greatly contributed to China's economic growth. They also mention the challenges China faced, such as the Tiananmen Square incident, which had negative effects on foreign investments. Overall, Deng Xiaoping's policies had a significant impact on China's economy and future growth will depend on continued openness to foreign inv Hi guys, welcome to our podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the effects of changes in Chinese economic policy during the Cultural Revolution and after and how Deng Xiaoping made a giant impact on the way we see China's economy. I'm one of your co-hosts, Chase, and I studied some of the policies that Deng implemented to help the Chinese economy. Hi, I'm Eric. My research favorite topic is China's economy policy from 1990s to 2020s. So there's a lot. China was a very impactful country during this time period, wouldn't you say, Eric? Yes. From the late 70s to 2020s, China's economy grows rapidly and brought a big influence to the whole world. What do you think about the effects during the Cultural Revolution? Because obviously Mao Zedong had a really big impact and really, really pushing for this communist approach to the economy. But some of his methods could be seen as kind of cruel, and we see this with the culmination during Tiananmen Square where the government's kind of going against its people. So what do you think about how his ideas compare to Deng's? Yes. China under his rule is a very closed country and has very small communication with outer world. And during the Cultural Revolution, the economy development has stopped and even the economy decreased for this 10 years due to Mao's rule of China. And people are not paying attention to the country's basic development. They're just cleaning Mao's political components for 10 years. And after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping took over the China economy, and he promoted a series of policies to restart China's economy development. Yeah, I think Deng was definitely favored by a lot of people. To quote one of a Chinese person's views on him, the day he passed, my mother cried while watching the TV announcement. Later, she told me she didn't cry when Mao passed nor when Zhou passed. In fact, none of the previous Chinese leaders passing instilled a sense of loss to her to make her cry. I think this shows how much people really cared for Deng and the difference that he made compared to like other leaders in the past. Because we see there's such like, he really connected with the people. And I think Deng's ideologies were really like, they weren't for just the country, they were also for the people. And I think he wanted to have that closer connection with the people. So his policies spread, got more widespread throughout China. So what do you think about like some of the policies that Deng introduced? What do you think, like, were some of his main goals? Yeah, Deng introduced a very major policy that is still working today, which were from 1978, that is the reform and opening up policy. And in this policy, Deng's main purpose is first to open up the country and to receive more foreign investments and also invest more in foreign lands. And reform is mainly about to make the economy system more market, more market and, and reform the country owned companies and also develop new industries such as real estate and other new industries. Yeah, I think another important part of opening up this country was he established the Special Economic Zones, which really helped Chinese GDP, one of which being Shenzhen province, or Shenzhen city. And there was a lot there, it was from this 13 million people, which was our which is a lot of people to have this impact on China's economy. So each year, it rose 21.6%. The GDP of the Shenzhen was 21.6% per year, all the way up to $2.7 trillion, which is a lot. And its GDP climbed from 606 Yuan to 203, 200,000 Yuan in that amount of time. And it was also home to like a lot of these really important companies that really fostered this super rapid economic growth in China. Now talking about like, the job market, obviously, with so many people living in China, it's probably hard for all of them to get jobs. So what do you think about the ways Deng was trying to get more people into the job market? Yes. So reform and opening up policy do create a lot of new industries. That's one of the main part, which provided much more new jobs. Second, and China is raising their basic construction investment that also created a huge amount of jobs and also pushed the economy development. Yeah, so he also, you know, added, he pushed for it to go from state sector. So from being government run, job market to private sector. So now, these people are able to start their own businesses and have a little bit more freedom and, you know, who they're hiring to be their jobs. And I think it's a lot more convenient this way, because now there's a lot more independence in the economy. And it wasn't so much government oriented, like how it was with Maoist ideas. Yeah, so as you said before, it's a lot more market driven. It was based on the consumer. So now we're really switching to what the people need instead of just really what the government wants. So just for some numbers, the employment increased from 75 million to 110 million in 20 years from 1970 to 1990, which is around the time, which is during the time Deng implemented these new policies. So we see this growth of 35 new million workers really shows how effective his policies were. Like while that may not seem a lot like the 1 billion of China, during like the late 1900s, there weren't as many people. So this is like a large percentage of the Chinese population. Um, yeah, I think it really just shows how much he really cared for the people. And his main goal is to increase the economic status of the people. And he definitely achieved that. Going to my next point, he wrote he had these two phases of rolling it out. So he had the opening of investment, which we kind of kind of already and decollectivization of agriculture, and people are also able to start businesses. So he really had a lot of different policies to help China really grow as an economy. I can add on that. Yes, I'm actually doing the reform and opening policy. In the first 20 years, there are actually a lot happened in China. First is the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. And that shocked the world and the China's use of force of protest on the protesting students puts the Chinese government like in a very disadvantaged position, and also brought several international condemnation to the Chinese government. So after this, after this incident, many countries have withdrawn their originally planned investments in China. And, you know, China's net immigration reached 60 627,000 in 1989, more than twice than that immigration in last in 1988, which is one year before the Tiananmen Square incident. And several years after the incident, two years after the incident, China has been in a difficult situation in economic development. But in 1991, Deng started his southern tour, which strengthened reform and opening policy and promoted the development of the market economic system. His southern southern tour to last lasted more than 40 days and give many speeches and restarted China's economic development. Yeah, so that's really he really wanted to really widespread his message throughout China. And this further bolsters the fact that, you know, he wants his policies to be seen over a lot of others. And he really wants to, I guess, push away from these malice ideologies that a lot of the Chinese people, you know, still favor because they kind of felt so forced into favoring this with them. I've had the Cultural Revolution, you had all these people really funny each other, just because of like, for like the communist police and for like, a more like democratic system, almost like the US. So it's really interesting to see like, almost these, these people who used to always fight all the time coming together under this one leader who kind of represented the hopes of China and what it really wanted to become as a country. One more thing to add, privatization was also a major part of this, because the market was very private before. So a lot of the state owned businesses were really slow and didn't always work in people's favor, because they weren't for the people, they were for the government, the government, the government really wanted to benefit from the businesses themselves, and didn't really put so much effort into the people. So Deng really privatized this economy and allowed the state businesses to go into the hands of like many other separate companies, which can be bought and sold, kind of like how we have stocks in the US. It's the same system. So it's a lot more oriented towards the people and straying away from the government. So kind of wrapping up here, what do you think, in the future? How do you think, you know, Deng's had such a big influence on China? What do you think could be some like next steps for trying to grow even further? Or do you think like, this growth can be replicated again? Well, the main, the core of this growth is to open up, but right now China seems to be starting to closing again. So that's not going to help China's economic development. So I think all what Deng did is to open up the country to foreign investments. And, for example, they, after Deng retired from the president, China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. That's a great step in like, joining the world.