In the latest episode of The China Report, embedded below, hosts Amanda Yee and KJ Noh interview Professor Ken Hammond about his new book, China and the World. The three have a wide-ranging discussion about the trajectory of China’s foreign policy over the last half-century, as well as interrogating the dominant narratives about China in the West and exploring the nature of China’s economic development.
Ken details how the rapprochement between the US and China in the early 1970s, starting with the visits by Henry Kissinger in 1971 and Richard Nixon in 1972, opened a path for “China being able to open up to a broader range of outside engagements”, and in many ways enabled the Reform and Opening Up process that began in 1978. While improved relations with the US came at a not-insignificant cost to China’s role in promoting socialist and national liberation revolutions – contributing to some confusion in the West and elsewhere as to China’s political trajectory – “China was pursuing what could be described as a deep game, taking a long-term perspective that required making certain compromises or accommodations in the short term to achieve fundamental objectives in the long term”.
The three talk about China’s economic reforms and how, while they introduced serious contradictions and imbalances into Chinese society, they ultimately enabled China to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. Ken points out that the country achieved an average of 10 percent GDP growth for several decades and that “this growth didn’t just benefit the wealthy; it flowed directly to the people”. On this topic, KJ recounts discussions with Chinese officials in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who described market reforms as “like getting onto a wild horse – but we believe we can contain this horse”. The record shows that they have indeed been able to do so.
Talking about China’s whole-process socialist democracy and its extremely high levels of public consciousness and engagement, Ken describes China as “a state in which the interests of the working class are at the heart of everything that goes on”, and contrasts this with the money-driven politics of the US in which the interests of the capitalist class are at the heart of everything.
China and the World is available to pre-order from 1804 Books.
