Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Chris Marquis.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
The death of Mao Zedong, the fall of the Gang of Four, the return to power of Deng Xiaoping, and the inauguration of Reform and Opening, ushered in a period that was, in so many ways, a profound break with Maoist China. Once Reform and Opening had built up a head of steam, I mean, one could point to China and say, “Look, the country’s ruling elites were now drawn from an entirely different class following an explicit command from on high to radically change the composition of the Party from what it had been workers, and peasants, and soldiers into a class of educated technocrats with 80% of them holding college degrees. The fundamental economic order seemed to have been radically transformed as well, as the iron rice bowl was smashed and entrepreneurial energy was just unleashed, and getting rich was glorious.
China’s foreign policy orientation had changed abruptly too. It had entered into what was a de facto alliance with the United States, with the power that had, a few short years earlier, been the very embodiment of imperialist capitalism in order to check the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It was tempting then to think of the new leadership under Deng and his successors as representing a significant break from Mao. And, in many ways, they were, but there were continuities as well. Features of Maoism that endured long after the chairman’s death in 1976. And were more than just what I’ve called the load-bearing walls of Party power in organization of the revolutionary legacy of legitimacy, you might say, that Deng and those who’ve come since have allowed to remain intact or have even buttressed. And more than the superficial presence of Mao on the currency and the top of the central gate of Tiananmen Square.
Today, we’re going to be exploring some of those continuities in an area that’s perhaps surprising in enterprise, in business. And joining me to talk about Mao’s continuing legacy is my good friend, Christopher Marquis, who some of you may know as the host of the excellent China Corner Office Podcast. Chris is Sinyi professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge University’s Judge School of Business, and formerly a professor at Cornell’s Business School. He’s also the co-author, along with Kunyuan Qiao, of the book, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. And we’ll be discussing that book today on the show. Chris Marquis, a very warm welcome to Sinica.
Chris Marquis: Thanks so much, Kaiser. Wonderful to be with you.
Kaiser: Yeah, finally. It’s taken us a while to get you on, but-
Chris: Right.
Kaiser: So, Chris, let’s start off with just a chat about your book.
Chris: Sure.
Kaiser: I guess what compelled you to write it? Was there some conventional wisdom that you saw taking shape that you maybe wanted to challenge or some puzzling observation you were at pains to explain? And why the focus on business rather than on some other facet of Chinese life where the residue of Maoism is maybe a little more conspicuous?
Chris: Yeah, sure. So, a couple things. One, I think your intro really highlighted very well how many changes actually there were post Mao in the economy, in a variety of political arenas as well. And I think that my background is actually a bit different than many other China scholars. I’m not someone who has a PhD in Chinese studies. I have a PhD in sociology, although I did start going to China and spending a reasonable amount of time in China starting in 2009, 2010. And given everything that you said, that was how I understood China. So, when I would see very obvious displays towards Mao, towards the CCP, it was puzzling to me. And I wanted to sort of understand this. Was this just displays, or actually was there some sort of deeper ideological commitment? Because many of the structural things that you mentioned, I think, clearly there’s been changes.
I mean, as you mentioned, there’s still a deep legitimacy tie to Mao and the early CCP history that is continually buttressed, particularly under Xi. But I want to think, look at business actually, because I was at a business school, I was interacting with a lot of business leaders of SOEs, private firms, and they seemed to actually practice capitalism different than the business leaders I had actually interacted with in the West. And so, this is what started I guess about a 10-year journey of trying to analyze through a variety of different data sources and interviews, what actually are the sort of thoughts and ideology of entrepreneurs and business leaders in China.
Kaiser: So, what would you identify as the key Maoist elements that you still see in Chinese enterprise and what gives them this ability to endure despite all the other changes?
Chris: Sure. So, I think, I mean, first let me say a little bit about the enduring of property. A lot of business leaders, and these are private and entrepreneurs, not just SOE leaders, they were socialized into the CCP during Mao’s era. And this is different than the folks that got brought into the CCP under the Three Represents. So, those folks, they had actually had success in their business careers, like Robin Li of Baidu, who I think you worked with.
Kaiser: I did very closely.
Chris: I don’t know if he’s the CCP, but he attended the two parties, the Chinese Consultative Congress, and there was a real effort to co-opt successful business leaders. Actually, there’s a much… go ahead. There’s a much larger population of entrepreneurs and business leaders that actually were CCP members before they established the enterprises. So, they went through a variety of socialization, be it attending meetings and self-criticisms, and meeting with mentors, and watching documentaries, and watching speeches and eventually being admitted in the CCP. And these activities actually happened at a very influential time period in their lives. So, there’s research and psychology that suggests the period, like where you’re transitioning from being traditionally in your family’s home to being on your own around 18 to 20, 25 actually it has… have deep cognitive influence on you.
So, we wanted to look at the folks that had gone through this process during that time period and see actually, do they run their businesses differently than entrepreneurs that did not go through this process? Or went through the process later, actually, under, you know, when Deng was the sort of supreme leader. And what we found, so the things that we actually identified as business operations that are consistent with Maoism include a greater nationalism. Business leaders that have this sort of deep Maoist imprint, we call it, have much less foreign investment, and they’re much less likely to go out. During this time period from 2000, 2003, ‘04, ‘05 on, I mean, there’s been increasing push from the Chinese government for companies to go out to establish foreign operations. However, these entrepreneurs were much less likely to actually engage in that, even though the government was telling them to.
Another item actually is, I would say, in regards to social responsibility. Mao talked about sort of mass line, serve the people, and we find that as well, these businesses with the deep Maoist imprint actually are much more likely to be engaged in their communities and work in social responsibility. Yeah. Another…
Kaiser: That’s ironic.
Chris: Yeah. Very ironic. Very ironic. And I think it’s interesting because I think it really talks about the depth, in some ways, of the socialization process. Another one is frugality, actually. Mao talked a lot about self-reliance, and the entrepreneurs actually with this deep Maoist imprint actually operate their business in a more frugal manner than other entrepreneurs.
Kaiser: So, corporate social responsibility aside, and maybe even going out aside, some of those other things seem like they might not necessarily be Maoist. I mean, it’s hard, I imagine, to tease out which elements are specifically Maoist and which are simply traditional Chinese, right? I mean, it’s tempting, I think, to see a 老板(lǎobǎn) at a Chinese enterprise who is, maybe has some Mao-like qualities. Maybe he’s capricious and arbitrary tyrannical, maybe strategically brilliant, but often really abstract and vague. We all know the type.
Chris: Sure.
Kaiser: But it seems like a type of leader who would, not only predate Mao, but who can also be found in non-PRC parts of the Chinese world. You could find that guy in Taiwan. You could find that guy in Hong Kong or in San Gabriel Valley.
Chris: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, I’ve interacted with a lot of these leaders as well. And how we try to study this is not actually by observing entrepreneurs or even interviewing them, but we have large-scale data on both entrepreneurs and public companies in China. So, thousands of entrepreneurs, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have been collecting data on private businesses and entrepreneurs going back to the early 1990s. So, we have this data. We’re able to use this data to understand, which type of entrepreneurs are actually engaging in these, what we sort of describe as Maoist practices, like more nationalism, some anti-foreign, more social responsibility, more frugality? And so, we can use statistical techniques to compare the entrepreneurs that go through the socialization process during Mao’s time period, which is about 25% of the entrepreneurs in this data. And they operate their business in very significantly different ways than people, let’s say, that actually grew up during those times, but did not enter the CCP. And then also people that were more recently socialized into the CCP under Deng, or more recently grew up but did not go into the CCP.
Kaiser: Let me get a sense of how big they are. I mean, you said about 25% of the people that you studied qualified, just basically in terms of that formative period of their lives that was spent marinating in Maoism. What percentage of the industrial output does that 25% of entrepreneurs represent, though? I mean, is it a significant piece of the Chinese GDP?
Chris: So, my guess is that it is a significant part of the GDP. And this is not from our data per se. There are 15 million plus Chinese entrepreneurs, and I think it’s over 60% of the GDP. Of course, the state and the CCP has been encroaching on them in recent years. And so the question, how actually private or non-state-owned are they, is I think a reasonable question. But what we look at is the data that was collected was just on thousands of entrepreneurs, representative across 30 provinces of China. So. It was a representative sample. So, we can’t really add up the sum of the folks that we studied, but we can sort of extrapolate to the broader population to suggest it is a big population because, surprising probably too many in the West, There’s actually many, many more private enterprises than state-owned firms and much greater GDP even from private firms than SOEs.
Kaiser: Yeah. I guess that’s the next logical question is do you find the extent of this Maoist imprint to vary by industry sector or between, like is there a disparity between private and SOEs? Is there a disparity between like, really, kind of tech-heavy industries and more kind of rudimentary basic industries?
Chris: So, we do not study SOEs as part of this. We actually only look at private firms because those are the ones… I mean, we assume that the SOEs, the leader, I’m sure, I don’t know if by definition, but there’s a very strong correlation between CCP membership and leader of an SOE, might be a correlation of one, perhaps. The data from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is actually only on private enterprises. That does not include SOEs. We look at Chinese publicly traded companies as well and find similar patterns. But for those, I mean, there’s Chinese public firms that are both SOEs and private firms, and so we exclude the SOEs just because we feel that, by definition, those are going to be CCP oriented.
Kaiser: You’d think they’d want to look though anyway, just to see, do they exhibit more frugality? Do they exhibit more nationalism? Do they exhibit less of a tendency to want to go out? I mean, I imagine it would probably confirm what you were thinking, but nice.
Chris: Yeah, I agree. I mean, that we should actually take a look at that. And in some ways, your first question was about what, I don’t know, sort of counterintuitive aspect of our research were we trying to examine. And this idea, the title of the book is Mao and Markets, and in some ways, we feel it’s a strong test of this idea that is Maoism or is a deep commitment to early CCC principles enduring by looking at private entrepreneurs? Because you would think that those would be the folks that would be the furthest away from Maoism.
Kaiser: You would. What about the technology divide? I mean, I’m trying to imagine.
Chris: That, we controlled for industry, but I don’t think that we found any particularly significant effects via industry. I’d have to go look back at the regression tables. But one thing that would be important to say is that, so if you think about, at a very simple level, it’s a little bit more complex than this, but a very simple level, you can think about four different types of entrepreneurs in China per se. You can think about entrepreneurs that were socialized in the CCP during Mao’s era and those that were socialized in the CCP after Mao’s era. So, you have before Mao and after Mao CCP members. You then also have individuals that grew up during Mao’s era, and those that grew up after Mao’s era. And so we find that actually the people that were not CCP members and grew up after Mao’s era are much less likely to engage in these Maoist type of activities. And that is the period actually when the tech industry really exploded. And so, my guess is there would be an industry difference, but it would be driven more by just the entrepreneurs being of different cohorts, basically.
Kaiser: But at some point, somebody’s going to look at this and say, “Well, yeah.” I mean, of course, right? It’s just a function of age then ultimately, right? What seems to be the only salient variable is how old were you when Mao died, basically? Right?
Chris: Sure. That is true. There isn’t a correlation with age, but there is a difference between actually the people that went through… that became CCP members. And again, these are only about 25% of entrepreneurs and 75%. So, if you look at even people that, let’s say someone who was born in like 1950, was 26 when Mao dies, so if you think of a hundred of those people, so 25 of those 26 years olds would be strongly adhering to what we predict. And the other 75 actually would be much less so. So, there is a difference via cohort, within the cohort. Part of what we’re trying to examine is how socialization into an ideology can have a lasting effect. And so, that is the way that we try to examine that.
Kaiser: Yeah. I imagine you’d probably find a similar effect if you went and looked at CEOs of American companies who had served in the military or not, right? They would probably have a distinctly different leadership style. Yeah, socialization.
Chris: And there’s research that looks at, if you go through the Great Depression in the West, that actually leads people to have much different leadership styles later in life. In the book, we actually look at three different aspects of Maoism to really try to understand how it has a lasting effect. So, this one we’ve been talking about is the ideological principles, and we also include in that military ideas and principles. And you probably know many of these, surround the cities from the countryside, a spark can lead to a wildfire. That’s sort of the first part of the book — ideology and military principles. The second part is the effect of mass campaigns. And so, Mao was really well known from the Yan’an Rectification to great leap forward, to cultural revolution, to even a campaign that I was not as familiar with when we started the work is the Third Front construction.
Kaiser: Sure. Yeah.
Chris: I’ve done a lot of work in Xi’an at one of the universities there. And they were telling me how Mao moved a bunch of the aircraft industry to Xi’an because it was safe from the U.S. and safe from the Soviet Union. And so we studied the Third Front construction as well. So, we looked at these three…. We didn’t look at the Yan’an Rectification, we looked at greatly forward Culture Revolution and Third Front construction is how these different campaigns have had a lasting effect on entrepreneurship and business. I’m happy to talk about those, but then the third part of the book looks at institutions. From political institutions, be it SOEs, how China actually, sort of, slowly broke away from more of a state-owned to more of a private owned economy.
Things like party branches or party sales, which are sort of in the news. Golden shares were not as in the news then, so we didn’t have a way to look at those. And also, interestingly, Mao, how he and the early CCP organized the economy was fundamentally different than the Soviet Union. So, there’s some discussion how it actually was from Mao’s experience as a military leader. He actually gave his generals relatively wide latitude to actually do, sort of conduct the war as was needed in those locations. And so, as a result of that, actually there was much greater latitude given to provincial governors than in the Soviet Union where industries are much more centralized. Whereas in China, it was much more economically decentralized, which, as you said, allowed for a lot of experimentation. In addition to just the ideological principles, those are the other areas of Maoism or sort of Mao’s ideas and influence that have had a lasting effect.
Kaiser: I always have trouble distinguishing what’s ideology and what sort of just style, for example, are mass campaigns ideological, irrespective of their content? I mean, if it has a clearly ideological content, then yeah, of course, it’s ideological. But they can be used in sort of ideologically secular purposes as well, no? So, I feel like some of this is more stylistic rather than ideological, so it’s hard to tweeze those two things apart.
Chris: Sure. Yeah. And I probably, because I think the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were…
Kaiser: So ideological.
Chris: … had a lot of ideology associated with them. But the Third Front construction, I mean, a little bit. Being fearful of attack, but not so much like the Great Leap Forward or Culture Revolution where it was like a political ideology. Even, I think, Xi Jinping is known for governing by campaign style now. You look at the semiconductor campaign, you look at even the campaign, people’s war against COVID, you look at even the anti-corruption campaign. So, some of those are more political than others, but I think you’re right. We talk about ideological principles in the first part of the book, and then the second part is not solely about ideological campaigns, it’s about campaigns as a key governance technique. And that actually having those campaigns actually does also have a lasting effect both on entrepreneurs and business ecosystems.
Kaiser: How do you know how much of what you see as fundamentally Maoist, isn’t just paying lip service or a performed, kind of recitation just to signal loyalty? It’s kind of hard to tweeze these two things apart too, right?
Chris: Totally. I think this is why trying to do quantitatively oriented work is important. I mean, I’m someone, I mean, I have a PhD in sociology. I was in a PhD program in history a long time ago. I really believe in a need to try to understand the context. And that’s why I lived in China for a reasonable period of time, still try to be learning Chinese and get around okay. Although I can’t say my Chinese is that good. I mean, I do really believe that you need to understand the context. You can’t just sort of run regressions on databases. But I think also a lot of the studies I read on China, excellent studies, but I wonder the extent to which they’re just confirming the author’s existing biases or what they already have in their head.
Because if you just go out and look for stories that confirm what you think, it’s sort of easy to actually write a compelling book. There is a lot of lip service, certainly. And this was, in many ways, the motivation behind what I studied. I started going to China, and because I was a professor at a leading business school, had pretty good access to a variety of different audiences. And people were talking like this, and I’m like, is this just lip service? And so, through these quantitative databases that have data that’s representative across a variety of different geographies and age classes and types of businesses, you can see which businesses actually are run in different ways. And so, it’s not just people saying it, but they’re actually running their business with different strategies.
And I think that’s a little bit deeper of a connection than… Because probably, at certain time periods, probably the people that don’t have this Maoist imprint we talk about might even be the most vocally Maoist at times because they want to appear legitimate and they want to actually sort of signal their loyalty or whatever. We interviewed a lot of people actually as well for this project. I mean, I’ve interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, politicians, business leaders, but we… To really try to ask entrepreneurs about Maoist strategies, their commitment to Mao. And we found, in these factors that we’re looking at, we found stronger commitment to Mao among the CCP members, the people that were in the CCP.
However, still, universally, people that were not CCP members still quoted Mao, they said how much they were influenced by Mao. So, there is definitely still a lot of lip service. And one of the reasons why I think trying to study this with a large-scale representative data is important.
Kaiser: So, when they would say they were influenced by Mao, these non-Party people, was it often in the way that sort of, that popular genre of business book is written about? Some of them are based on the teachings of Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Others are based on Mao, right? There was a whole popular genre of these, like in the late 1990s, how to do… And it was stuff like, the countryside surrounds the city. I remember writing a story about 小灵通 (xiǎolíngtōng), this sort of primitive phone service, this kind of quasi-mobile phone service called Limited Loop or something like that, or Local Loop, closed Local Loop, I think it was called. And people would constantly invoke, yeah, the countryside surrounds the city or things like that. Was it that sort of thing or?
Chris: There is definitely that. There’s a variety of, yeah, the surround the city… cities from the countryside is sort of the most famous. Think that that China has a very large rural population. So, it’s…
Kaiser: Sure. Smart strategy. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. It’s sort of you go where the people are. You go where the people are, and they’re sort of less touched by larger companies. But the importance of Mao as a leader people talked about, I think I saw surveys on, I forget what the Chinese version… is it Zhihu, the version of Quora?
Kaiser: Yeah, Quora. Zhihu, yeah.
Chris: Zhihu, yeah. I saw some survey on that, that the most important person in history is Mao under some sort of survey. And so I think there is a deep reverence for Mao, not just among entrepreneurs, but among Chinese in general. And I mean, I’ve seen this. I mean, I’ve been to Mao’s birthplace. I mean, it’s more like Graceland than Mount Vernon, certainly.
Kaiser: Yeah. Mao more than ever, baby.
Chris: Yeah, that’s the case.
Kaiser: I remember when I was at Baidu, one morning I went with then boss, Robin Li, to give a talk. And he was talking about how one of the things that he has learned from the Chinese Communist Party is the way that they will tackle large problems by breaking them down into manageable, smaller pieces, like discrete subroutines and functions. He says it’s very much like coding; that they’ve introduced that same kind of a practice. So, yeah, I mean, even he was making direct references to, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if it was a Maoist thing, but it was certainly a Party practice.
Chris: Yeah. No, I mean, the Party has certainly a lot of practices in managing the economy that have turned out well for China, although last few years under Xi, maybe less so.
Kaiser: Yeah. Well, let’s get to that in a second. But I guess a lot of us would see the good old red versus expert kind of tension at play here in what we’re talking about, and conclude that after Mao’s death, well, the pendulum just kind of swung increasingly in the expert direction as the state got increasingly technocratic, increasingly market oriented. And that red had really little to do with it, except in a kind of pro forma sense, in that lip service sense. But that’s not what you’re seeing. You’re seeing that there’s this kind of stubborn kernel that’s persisted and that it is actually, in some cases, not such a bad thing for the performance of these businesses.
Chris: Yeah. It may not actually be good for the performance. I mean, I think that not going, sort of eschewing internationalization probably hurt these businesses economically. And it was actually-
Kaiser: I’ve seen also businesses that have been not ready for prime time and have gone out and gotten burnt because they just did not understand foreign markets. I mean, if you’re a real parochial kind of a business and you know you’re really parochial, you’re probably better off than being really parochial and not being aware of that and thinking you’re ready for the foreign markets.
Chris: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. And I would say on the red versus expert, I mean, that is, in some ways, personnel and people way to think about it. You opened with talking about the different, in some ways, structural changes. And when Deng actually articulated the Reform and Opening in the late ‘70s, and then I think it was written in the Constitution in the early ‘80s, it was actually one of two basic points, and it was the second basic point. And the first basic point was, I forget what it’s called, all these different terms, like the four cardinal principles maybe.
Kaiser: Sure.
Chris: I forget what it is in… Yeah, and so one of those was holding onto Mao thought. Another one was having the CCP at the center of all activity.
Kaiser: The dictatorship of the proletariat, right?
Chris: Yeah, exactly. I do think that, and we, in the West, and this is where I think, when I take students to China, my own self, as someone who read a lot about China but had actually not really spent time there until I was I was a little older, had not been educated per se in Chinese history and culture. I think I overestimated the reform and opening in my mind. I think my students, when they go to China, overestimate that. And I think that it’s maybe partially wishful thinking. Thinking, of course, China wants to open, they want to be like us. They want to grow economically. And maybe ignore the first of the two basic points, basically, because we like the second one.
Kaiser: Right. No, I’ve seen that happen. There’s certainly people who do that. But you can also go too far in the other direction. I don’t think that you do here, but you aren’t arguing that Chinese business, as practiced today, still is fundamentally Maoist. But you’re just saying that there are, look, there’s noticeable, recognizable strains of it in there. So, what’s significant about that? What do we do with that? I mean, how does that affect us in the way that say we want to have business relationships with Chinese enterprises? How should this enter into our thinking in the way we deal with Chinese enterprises that may be helmed by somebody who’s formative experiences were during the Maoist period?
Chris: Sure, definitely. Because really, I mean, that’s in some ways the important question. I think a couple things. And I think that actually it extends beyond just business to also politics as well. I think the… what we try to argue is that the depth of, in some ways, Maoism, CCP ideology in China is much greater than we in the West appreciate. And I think, structurally, how China is set up is very different than the West. I think we’re very used to having very separate state market. But Deng is famous for many of these great sayings like, “If it is a black cat or white cat; as long as it catches a mouse.” And a little bit of state, a little bit market, it doesn’t matter because they’re just tools.
I think that last one is really both insightful and also telling because it’s… both the state and market are tools because they’re both under the CCP. And so, I don’t want to get too political necessarily, but I do think that the depth and enduring nature of the ideology and institutional aspects of the CCP, I think are hard for westerners to see because we naturally, both naturally sort of think of the state of market as discrete entities that are in tension and competition. Not that a single entity would be, in some ways, using either of them as tools. And also, I think a real kneejerk reaction against anything communist or socialist. I mean, you see this in the Republican Party in the U.S., everything gets labeled socialist, and no one actually thinks about what is actually socialism or not.
And then it’s just sort of this kneejerk negative reaction. And so, I think that we have this knee-jerk reaction against China, in many cases, that I think impedes our understanding of how the system works on a more fundamental level. I think it’s really important to try to dig into the institutions, to the ideology in a neutral way, and not just be wishful thinking or kneejerk condemnation. Because the U.S. and China are the two largest economies in the world, there’s going to be continued trade, hopefully continued educational exchange. And so, let’s try to understand China.
Kaiser: I’m still having trouble with what we are defining here as ideology. I have this with everyone I talk to basically, because when we say Maoist ideology, what is that really? So, is it just it’s got a foundation of Marxism, Leninism? So, are these entrepreneurs, these capitalists, is the ideological content something along the lines of: yes, I am part of an exploitative class that is siphoning officer plus value from the laborers who I exploit? No, obviously not. Are they like Hegelians? Are they thinking about the Marxist operation of history? Probably not. They seem to be more sort of stylistic rather than ideological to me. That they embrace this idea of mass campaigns, we call nationalism an ideology. It certainly isn’t supposed to be part of Marxism. It certainly is part of Maoism, but it’s also kind of a generic thing, right? Nationalism as an ideology. I’m always wondering, what is the content of ideology when somebody talks about China is now more ideological than it was? Is it more than just nationalism?
Chris: Yeah, sure. Really good question and a very hard one to answer, I must say. I mean, first of all, the dictatorship of the proletariat, sort of Hegelian approaches of history, I mean, I would say that those are very traditional Marxist ideas. And Mao, in a variety of ways, tried to adapt. And maybe not even adapt, but he tried to create a system that resonated with Chinese culture. I mean, certainly the ideas of sort of frugality are deeper in Chinese culture than Maoism. I think he was well known for sort of his On Practice essay, which I think was the first Maoist essay that got sort of read in the Soviet Union, which is a big, sort of triumph for him. And that is actually seeking truth from facts, which I think underpins a lot of dominant ideas as well.
Kaiser: What a novel idea.
Chris: What we try to do is identify what, from sort of Mao’s speeches and what are seen as sort of key elements that he emphasized in his little red book, all of his other writings, and say, okay, so people went through the Great Leap Forward, they went through the Cultural Revolution. They became part of the CCP or not. Did those early experiences have a lasting effect on their later life? And then we study this through the methods I mentioned. I think that it’s reasonable to say that there are a variety of ideological principles that Mao espoused, and some of these may be overlapping a bit with traditional Marxist-Leninist ideas, and some of them may not. But I think that’s sort of how we approach it. And I can’t say… I think your point about people talking about China becoming more ideological now is a good one because, yeah, what does that mean?
I mean, ideology is a very broad term that can really relate to anything. I mean, you need some of the adjectives around ideology to really explain what it means.
Kaiser: Exactly, yeah. I mean, because most of the time when people say this, it just seems to me to boil down mainly to some variety of nationalism, which is not to me…
Chris: Sure. Yeah.
Kaiser: I mean, sure, nationalism is an ideology, but that’s not usually what they mean. That’s not what they mean.
Chris: Right. Yeah.
Kaiser: I guess this just takes this takes up this idea that everyone seems to see a lot of Mao in Xi Jinping. I honestly don’t see that much. I mean, they’re both strongmen, obviously. And again, stylistically, yes. Their temperament, though, their exercise of power, to me that seems to have very little in common. And a lot of people see this last decade of Xi as a return to Maoist values as a key driver in the way that the Chinese economy operates. But again, I don’t see that very much. So, I’m wondering what you guys concluded, whether you see a sort of revival of it during this last decade in under Xi.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, we do sort of discuss a change under Xi as opposed to Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao period between Mao and Xi, and clearly, stylistically, they’re different. I mean, Xi Jinping seems much more like a control maniac or micromanager, I guess, as opposed to Mao who is much more sort of laissez-faire in some ways. However, I do think, and you could, I mean, you may argue, as you’ve been talking about, that nationalism doesn’t really… That’s something that you could say about any country in some way. And I think that’s true. But Mao, China had just gone through the century of humiliation.
He used, I think, really a lot of “China’s standing up, China’s a loose pan of sand that I’m going to bring together” discourse, and I think was very assertive against the U.S., against the Soviet Union in a way that is echoed in some ways now. And the nationalist discourse is also being echoed. I think that actually, you may disagree, but I do think that there is a connection around nationalism. I do think there’s also a connection around sort of this campaign style of leadership. I forget what the term is that I’ve seen used. It’s the Chinese term, it’s sort of like concentrate efforts to do big things in the semiconductor industry.
Kaiser: Oh, no, I don’t dispute that at all. Absolutely. There’s quite a bit of that.
Chris: I think that these are things where there is echoes of Mao, and I think that Xi Jinping, he was socialized in China during a time period that Mao was very strong. He is part of a set of institutions that Mao played a hand in creating. And so, I think that the, I don’t know, the worldview of Xi is limited to a set of assumptions and guardrails around institutions, I would think, that do have an influence of Mao. There is a lot of simplistic, Mao 2.0 discussion. And I’m not saying you know that, but I’m saying that I do think that by trying to understand the systems that Mao put in place, we can get some insight into Xi.
Kaiser: No, I totally get where you’re coming from, and certainly there’s insights to be derived from that. I mean, you go beyond this claim that, well, yeah, since you’re socialized into this, this is the stuff that you read. If you were a Shakespeare scholar in college, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if many of the stock phrases that you drew on came from his more famous plays, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Kaiser: But it’s obviously more than that. Like you said, I mean, there’s a lot of that Mao 2.0 thing going around, and these just very kind of ignorant comparisons to the cultural revolution that are constantly happening that betrays, not only an ignorance of what the cultural revolution was, but also just this tendency to just kind of hyperbole when it comes to Xi and what he’s been doing.
Chris: Sure. I would say, though, Kaiser, just a quick comment. So, you mentioned about sort of reading Shakespeare. And I think that that is maybe one way to think about it, but I see it more as actually socialization into like a religion. And there is a lot of work-
Kaiser: Okay. So, quotes from the King James bible then, right?
Chris: Yeah. But a deeper influence, I mean, being raised into a religion actually has a deep enduring influence on the way people think. I mean, I know myself at least, I haven’t been to a Catholic church in, I don’t know, 30, 40 years, but my first 20 years, I actually spent a lot of time and going to class on Saturdays and Sundays. And I do think that I catch myself at times thinking like, “Ah, man, that’s that damn early Catholic education that’s sort behind all this.”
Kaiser: Yeah. And so many people compare the Catholic church to the Chinese Communist Party that maybe, at this…
Chris: Right, yeah.
Kaiser: Hey, so your formal academic training was in sociology, as we’ve said. And it’s not unusual for business professors to come out of that discipline. I mean, because sociology has an obvious link to business. But for somebody with a background like yours to tackle a book that’s so wrapped up in politics, that has to be somewhat challenging. Now, how did you decide to take on such a sort of deeply political thing, when you, yourself, and you’re probably lucky for it, weren’t steeped in all of that turgid party prose? And I had to study all that stuff when I was coming up with that. Ah.
Chris: Yeah. I think part of it at least has to do with, when I first started researching China in depth in 2009, one of the reasons that sort of attracted me to study it is how different it was as far as the strength of the state than the U.S. And so, I’d studied a lot the U.S. and some global phenomena. And in sociology, part of what you’re trying to do is gain somewhat of an understanding of general relationships. And so, studying a system that’s very, very different is appealing to try to see what is idiosyncratic to the different systems versus a more general process. So, it was obvious when I started studying China that actually state-government relations were crucial to examine. And a number of the peer-reviewed studies, some of which are touched on in the book a bit, look at different, sort of advantages or ways that the government co-ops business and entrepreneurs through social networks.
So, people that are former bureaucrats that go on to run a business, entrepreneurs or business leaders that are on these different two sessions bodies, which, not just exist at the national level, but also provincial and city and on down. So, I think that for the 10 years,10 plus years that I really was spending time in China when I was studying Chinese companies, it was about really trying to understand how business interacts with the government, and conversely then, how the government and CCP, influences business. That was, I think, what led me. I mean, it was just a knack. If you’re going to study business in China, or you’re going to be a business person in China, I think you have to focus on the state.
Kaiser: Get pretty steeped in it.
Chris: Yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah. No question. Hey, Chris, so you were a recipient of one of those controversial Thousand Talents awards, and that program obviously has come under some criticism. How did that happen? How did that come about? And what was it specifically for? What did you do to gain their attention and to receive this honor?
Chris: Sure. And actually, and it was an honor really. I mean, I think, I appreciate you mentioning it like that. I mean, now it’s a very controversial, and I think has sort of a negative tinge to it because of all these controversies.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah.
Chris: It was 2017 that I got the award. And yeah, I mean, I definitely was grateful and saw it as an honor, to be very honest. So, at least as far as I know, the way that scholars get the 10,000 Talents is that they’re applied from a university. And so, I’d gotten to know, and I mean, I’ve worked at a number of Chinese universities from Beida and Shanghai Jiao Da, and Fudan, sort of the universities that people probably know well, but there’s a university in Chengdu, it’s one of these 985 universities. So, top 40 universities in China. And I’ve gotten to know a lot of the folks there. I got to know the dean of the business school very, very well. And they have a program, like many, probably all Chinese universities, have a program to gain access to these government talent funds, basically. So, I was invited to apply, basically, through the government for a Thousand Talent award.
It took a probably at least a year and a half, submitting a bunch of information, and then finally was awarded this. And I think the government, or excuse me, the school was really very supportive and active in this because I assume that they get some money as well associated with this. And so, part of my work then was I established an academic center at the university UESTC, University of Electronic Sciences and Technology of China, or 电子科技大学 (diànzǐkējìdàxué). I established a center on sustainable business which operated for five years during the five years of my, sort of Thousand Talents contract. And yeah, I think it was not on anything technology related.
It was business management, entrepreneurship, sustainable business. Although I must admit, when all this China initiative stuff was happening and all these cases, like Charles Lieber, you know, I was a bit scared, to be honest.
Kaiser: I can’t blame you. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. I always reported my activities to Cornell. I mean, all of the people that actually got called out for not reporting this to the different, sort of their schools or agencies, that always struck me as… Every year, there is conflict of interest reporting that you have to do. The university is on your case about it. It’s very detailed questions. So, Cornell actually, so diànzǐkēdà, they were actually on the entity list. They became on the entity list while I was at Thousand Talents. I was an employee of…
Kaiser: Wow.
Chris: And so the Cornell legal department called me up and said, “On your reporting is this university that is now on the entity list, we would like to talk to you about this.” And this was at the time when a lot of these controversies were going on. I was a little scared. I mean, they actually, they wanted to know what I was doing. And I was mentoring graduate students. I was working with faculty on publications. I held a summer camp every year for up-and-coming Chinese PhD students to help them learn how to research and publish in Western journals. And they said, “Okay, that’s all totally fine. No issue with that. But you cannot transfer any Cornell property to them.” And they said, “I mean, even like a pen. Even a pen of Cornell’s, you cannot give to this university.”
Kaiser: Wow.
Chris: I mean, it was a little strange, but that made me feel reasonably well that what I was doing was not a file of any sort of government regulations. Because I do think things got a little crazy there, or in the U.S. with that China initiative because people were being labeled spies when probably they had done some unethical things around not reporting of their taxes or not reporting, not disclosing those relationships, but that’s very different than spying.
Kaiser: So, the spirit of Mao still haunts Chinese entrepreneurs. The spirit of Joseph McCarthy still haunts American bureaucrats.
Chris: Sure thing. Yeah.
Kaiser: Chris Marquis, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this book. It’s called, once again, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. And the authors are Chris Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao. Pick up a copy today. And congrats on publishing.
Chris: Great. Thanks so much, Kaiser. It was great to talk to you.
Kaiser: Yeah. Well, let’s move on to recommendations. I’ll keep you here for a little bit. And first, a very quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is powered by the China Project. If you like what we do with this and other shows in the network, like Chris Marquis’s China Corner Office, the best thing that you can do is to sign up and become an Access member. Once you do, you’ll get early access to this show, usually on Monday afternoons, but not always, and you don’t have to wait until Thursday and listen to the ads, right? So, go to thechinaproject.com/subscribe. It’s only a buck for a month-long trial, so what do you have to lose? All right, let’s move on to recommendations. Chris, what do you have for us?
Chris: Sure. The thing that jumped to mind was a book by the economist Mariana Mazzucato. She has a book a number of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, called The Entrepreneurial State. The reason why it jumped to mind is actually she has a new book out called The Big Con, which is about how the consulting industry is filled with a bunch of lies and is running a bunch of businesses into the ground, is basically what I can sort of understand. But made me think about this other book of hers, and really resonates, I think, with my thinking around this Mao and Markets book, about how our ideas of what economic activity is, is really shaped by our culture. And what she describes is that people have this idea that government is inefficient, and so they really undervalue the deep innovation of government, things like the internet or pharmaceuticals.
Kaiser: Sure.
Chris: Hugely innovative things have come from the government. Conversely, then we overestimate the value of things like investment banking, which is just basically a middleman pulling, sort of extracting value, in some ways, from a transaction between sort of individuals or companies. And so, this idea that the value in economics actually has a deeply sort of cultural and perception element, I think is an important insight of her work.
Kaiser: Wow, that sounds fantastic. Great, and I want to read The Big Con, too.
Chris: Yeah.
Kaiser: All right. Great recommendations. I’ll put both those books down as your recommendations then.
Chris: Great.
Kaiser: Mine for this week, I was at my friend, Alison’s house last night here in Chapel Hill. She’s been on the show previously and will be again. She’s a good friend of mine from Beijing who used to run Ping Pong Productions and then was hired to run the West Kowloon Cultural Center in Hong Kong. She’s now here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and runs Carolina Performing Arts. She’s doing a bang-up job. Amazing. she’s just one of the most… the people with the greatest energy I’ve ever met. But my recommendation is this. So, on her wall in her kitchen was this lunar phase calendar, and I realized that I’m always clueless about the phase of the moon at any given time.
I’m always sort of surprised when I walk outside and see my God, it’s a full moon. So, turns out she had extras of this same calendar. It’s very attractive that she was giving folks as a gift. And she gave me one, and you can buy them online at theoriginallunarphase.com. Really cool. They’re just sort of this long rectangular matte little fit, like nicely on a column or sort of in a wall, so It’ll be a nice addition to your home. Check it out. My other recommendation is just a weird obsession of mine from Suutei tsai or Mongolian milk tea, which if you ever traveled in that part of the world, you’ll know from its distinctive salty taste. Not everyone likes it. In fact, a lot of people just can’t stand it.
But I had this bizarre craving for it the other day. And so I just went online and I looked it up and figured out how to make it. And so, it’s really simple. You just take like a liter of water, get it boiling, and throw in whatever tea you’ve got around. I’d use about the equivalence of maybe four or five tea bags. I threw some pu’er in there. I had some lying around. I threw some old Lipton in that we use for making iced tea. It doesn’t have to be good tea. You can use green tea. I prefer black or pu’er for it, but they used like low grade brick tea, so I thought pu’er was a good way to go. Anyway, I add a little bit of salt, like a teaspoon of salt if you’re making about this much, and then the same amount of milk. So, like a liter of milk, like whole milk. You want to use whole milk. You want that milk fat in there. Add a little butter if you want, or add some half-and-half or some cream.
Then you bring it almost to a boil again, and it’s ready to serve. It’s really nourishing and tasty and it’s heavily caffeinated too as a bonus. Mongolians drink this all of their time. So, it was great. It made me inspired to shoot a lot of arrows with my Mongolian bow
Chris: You’re going to turn Mongolian.
Kaiser: I am. All right. Chris, man, thanks so much for taking the time. That was really a pleasure to talk to you.
Chris: Yeah, thanks so much, Kaiser. Loved it.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
