UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 16 - The Cold War Resurges - 01h 21m 20s

Preliminaries

Okay, it's 9:40 so it's about time for us to get going. Looking at the room I fear that my observation on Tuesday that the weather might be a you know reason for not coming to lecture and staying at home and listening to it on the podcast may have been taken as a suggestion.

[00:19]

(laughter from the class)

At least I hope that was the case in that you didn't all think that the lecture on Tuesday was so appalling that you weren't going to bother showing up on Thursday. Well, it wouldn't be those of you here who reach that conclusion it would be those who aren't here. But anyway it's nice to see those of you who made it through the rain which is actually less rain then we had on Tuesday, but it's going to be worse tomorrow I think. So, it's good if you like skiing -- the precipitation.

Lecture Overivew

[00:40]

But that's not what we're going to be talking about today. This is not a class in meteorology. We're going to talk today about the transformations of the socialist world in the 1970s. And I'll try to conclude with some discussion of the sort of larger transformations of Cold War politics in the late 1970s.

[00:58]

So having focused on sort of the high geopolitics of the Cold War on Tuesday, on the political economic transformations of the West last week, today we take the story to the socialist world, the Soviet Union, and China and hopefully tie this all together within an hour and twenty minutes with the sort of resurgence of East-West rivalries towards the end of the 1970s, and if we can do this -- this will situate us well to transition to the 1980s and the story of globalization next week.

Transformation and Tumult in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

[01:30]

Tumult in The Soviet Union During the 1970s: The Brezhnev Years

Okay, first the Soviet Union. What do we need to know about the travails of Soviet-style socialism during the 1970s?

[01:40]

The Brezhnev↗ years, in the history of the Soviet Union, a period that begins, towards the late 1960s. It's difficult to put a specific point on the origins of the Brezhnev Era because Khruschev's fall, he was ousted in 1964, is followed by a period of collective leadership.

[02:01]

It's not Leonid Brezhnev but Alexei Kosygin↗, the Premier of the Soviet Union at the time, who meets with Nikita Khrushchev↗ in 1967. By the end of the 1960s the man pictured in the slide in the beautiful fur coat, Leonid Brezhnev, has emerged as the singular leader of the Soviet state.

[02:22]

The reason that I've selected a picture of Brezhnev in a fur coat is not altogether accidental. Brezhnev had a notorious taste for the good life, and for the things that affluence could provide. In the Soviet Union of course affluence was more or less synonymous with political power.

[02:38]

So Brezhnev as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union in the 1970s had access to quite a lot of it. And this...Brezhnev's taste for the good life became the butt of popular jokes in the Soviet Union. The Brezhnev years were great years for street humor, particularly in Moscow, and more urbane cities in the USSR.

[03:00 ]

And some of these jokes give us a pretty good flavor of the Brezhnev years as Soviet citizens experience them. So I'm going to try to tell you one of these jokes.

[03:10 ]

Okay.

(laughter from the class)

[03:12]

So, Brezhnev is showing his mother around the Kremlin, around all of his you know sort of official apartments, and limousines. He shows her his suite in the Kremlin. He shows her his dacha in the countryside. He takes his mother down to the Black Sea and shows her his villa -- his big Soviet limousine -- ZiL↗ limousine.

[03:30]

And what does Brezhnev's mother say? She says, well, dear, this is all very nice, but what are you going to do if the Bolsheviks↗ come back?

[03:38]

(laughter from the class)

And this is a real joke that was told...sort of in...Moscow dining rooms, Moscow apartments, during the 1970s. And you know the Brezhnev years were times of cynicism in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was himself cynical. I've got another little anecdote. This attributed to Brezhnev himself.

[03:58]

The veracity of this I can't confirm, but it's certainly attributed to Brezhnev in a number of secondary sources. Brezhnev is reported to have said, all that stuff about communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all we can't leave the people with no faith. The church was taken away, the Czar was shot, and something had to be substituted. So let the people build Communism.

[04:20]

Whether those words are, you know, were ever spoken by Brezhnev or not is, you know, questionable, but the fact that they could be attributed to him, plausibly, is in itself revelatory. Brezhnev didn't stand for ideology. He didn't stand for you know crusade to build a new and ambitious future. He stood for stability and he stood for the prerogatives of the bureaucracy.

[04:42]

The Brezhnev years were a time of stasis but also a time of stability in Soviet politics and Soviet society.

[04:50]

There were however some underlying changes that occurred within the Soviet Union during the 1970s that would have consequences for the future. During the 1970s members of the Communist Party, including fairly high ranking members, such as Mikhail Gorbachev↗ become disillusioned with Communism at least as it's being presently practiced in the USSR.

[05:11]

Despite the veneer of stability there is a widespread circulation within Soviet society among the ranks of the intelligentsia of dissident literature, of literature that would be known in the vernacular of the time as Samizdat↗, it literally means self-published literature -- literature critical of the Soviet party-state.

[05:30]

Besides the circulation of indigenous dissident material Soviet citizens during the 1970s enjoy growing access to ideas about the external world -- to information about the West. The Voice of America↗, for example, which broadcasts into the Soviet Union is one such source of information on the external world.

[05:52]

To some extent the politics of détente help to keep this sort of window onto the world open. The Soviet Union ceases blocking Western radio transmissions as a consequence of détente. So détente sort of cracks open space for Soviet citizens to learn a little bit more about the West, a little bit more about the world beyond the USSR, certainly more than they had known in the Stalinist era for example.

[06:19]

Outside of the Soviet Union Communism experiences something akin to a general crisis of legitimacy during the 1970s. It's really important to recall but in the '50s and well into the 1960s Western intellectuals, intellectuals of the left, had been very loath to criticize communism, even Communism as practiced in the USSR.

[06:40]

Probably the leading postwar French left-wing intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre↗, remained to the very end of his life an apologist for Soviet-style Communism -- an apologist even for Stalinism. During the 1970s Western intellectuals cease to be so indulgent of the USSR.

[06:58]

Why was this? Well, in part the answer has to do with a growing consciousness of what we might now call human rights -- of what was in fact at the time called human rights. The grievous human rights violations which have occurred within the history of the Soviet Union begin to attract more attention during the 1970s.

[07:18]

And here no single event is more consequential then the 1973 publication in the West of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's↗ book The Gulag Archipelago↗. Have any of you had the opportunity to read the The Gulag Archipelago?

[07:31]

Okay, a few of you. And this is a book that's really couched as a history of the gulag↗ system, the gulag being the immense system of political concentration camps which Stalin constructed, building upon a Leninist system of sort of internal concentration camps to oppress, imprison and terrify political opponents of the Communist regime.

[07:55]

So the gulag is symbolic of the violence that the Soviet-state has perpetrated against its own system, against its own citizens, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1973, when The Gulag Archipelago goes published in the West, sort of opens a window onto this world of hidden repression. And the consequences are sort of devastating for the legitimacy of the USSR.

[08:17]

At a time when Western intellectuals and political leaders and public opinion in general are all becoming more attentive to human rights this stark revelation of the political brutality that the Soviet Union has inflicted upon its own citizens is devastating to the legitimacy and credibility of communism in the larger world.

[08:38]

And you get some sense of this from one of the readings which was assigned for...I think this week -- it could have been last week -- Bernard-Henri Lévy's↗ book, Barbarism with a Human Face, is one of the texts that you know sort of powerfully reveals this shift in Western attitudes towards the USSR.

[08:56]

Lévy is coming out of an intellectual tradition, a French left-wing intellectual tradition, that has historically been indulgent towards, even sympathetic to Soviet-style communism. But Lévy breaks absolutely with this long sort of left-wing progressive history of you know sympathy and indulgence and offers a you know very harsh critique of Soviet-style communism.

[09:21]

The key move that Lévy makes, which you'll have gather, if you've read the piece, is to conflate Soviet authoritarianism, authoritarianism of the left, with authoritarianism of the right. He subsumes them both under a common category -- the category of totalitarianism.

[09:36]

And for Lévy there's very little difference between, you know, left-wing shades of totalitarianism and right-wing shades of totalitarianism, they are all to be defined by their inability to respect basic human rights, basic human freedoms.

[09:51]

So even as Brezhnev preserves a sort of superficial political stability the crisis of, you know, the legitimacy crisis of Soviet-style socialism is proceeding apace. And it's a crisis that has both domestic aspects and international aspects.

[10:11]

Within the Soviet Union ordinary Soviet citizens are becoming much more cynical about the government under which they live. In the larger world any claim that Communism had to represent, you know, sort of the wave of the future -- a bright you know future for all of humankind is being exploded by revelations about the repressive and sort of tawdry nature of the Soviet system itself.

[10:33]

So those are the Brezhnev years.

[10:37]

Characterized by a superficial stability, underlying social and intellectual change within the USSR, and a willingness to interrogate the legitimacy of Marxism in the larger world.

[10:50]

Sorry that the bullet points weren't there while I was talking, but they'll be on the bSpace website.

Soviet Economic Gain from the Oil Crisis

[10:54]

In other respects however the 1970s are bountiful years for the Soviet Union. To explain this we need to think about what's going on in the global oil economy during the 1970s. We've already talked at some length about the energy crisis of the 1970s -- the fourfold increase in the price of oil that occurs during the fall of 1973.

[11:17]

The causes of the oil crisis we've talked about. It has to do with supply and demand and the trigger event that is the 1973 Arab-Israeli War↗.

[11:28]

But the consequences of the oil crisis are not restricted to the Middle East and the West. The Soviet Union is also powerfully implicated by the energy shocks of the 1970s. And this reflects the basic reality that the Soviet Union is in the 1970s a major exporter of energy to global markets.

[11:51]

The Soviet Union began shipping oil to the world market in the mid-1950s. By the turn of the 1970s energy is the Soviet Union's largest sort of export item. Indeed, energy exports account for about 80% of Soviet export earnings by the early 1970s. This is a big deal.

[12:10]

It's not only that the Soviet Union benefits directly from the export of energy. There are also indirect benefits to the Soviet Union of rising energy prices. Military hardware is another major item that the Soviet Union exports. As Arab and...oil exporters enjoy sort of more and more petrodollar revenue they have more money to spend on Soviet military equipment.

[12:37]

So indirectly as well as directly the Soviet Union benefits from rising energy prices. Indeed Russia, the primary successor state of the Soviet Union, continues to benefit from high energy prices through to the present day. Why do you think that Russia has been so recalcitrant on the issue of Iran?

[12:55]

Might it have something to do with the fact that the rise in energy prices that is a consequence of this prolonged diplomatic wrangling over Iran's nuclear program has some material benefits for Russia?

[13:07]

That may be too cynical, but...it should illustrate the basic point which is that the Soviet Union benefits from rises, increases, in the global price of oil.

[13:19]

What are the consequences of the petrodollar bounty that the Soviet Union experiences during the 1970s for the Soviet economy itself?

[13:29]

Obviously, a rise in oil prices, fourfold rise in oil prices, in a space of about six months, means a substantial increase in export earnings for the USSR. That's obvious enough. But what does this increase in export earnings, this petrodollar bounty, mean for the Soviet economy?

[13:49]

It has important consequences insofar as oil revenues work in the 1970s to prop up a failing economic system. The Soviet Union is able to use the money that it earns from exporting oil to the world economy to finance imports of Western technology.

[14:05 ]

If you can finance imports of Western technology then the imperative to develop high-tech technology yourself is diminished.

[14:13]

The Soviet Union can also finance grain imports from the West. Insofar as Soviet agriculture is woefully inefficient by comparison with say American agriculture oil helps to disincentivize reform. Rather than making domestic agriculture more productive the Soviets are able simply to import agricultural produce, grain, from the West instead.

[14:36]

Cheap energy incentivizes industrial inefficiency. When it comes to the things that the Soviet Union does make then cheap and abundant energy makes it...you know...sort of less advantageous for the managers of state-owned enterprises to devise ways to manufacture more stuff with less energy inputs.

[14:56]

Right, in a world in which energy is scarce, you have to figure out how to be more efficient in your utilization of energy. This is something that we've, you know, sort of begun to do in the, you know, West, since the oil crises. We've got better at, you know, reducing energy inputs to...to increase the productivity of our industries in relation to energy.

[15:17]

But the Soviets don't have these incentives during the 1970s. As a consequence abundant cheap energy forestalls you know sort of any prospect of undertaking serious structural reform.

[15:29]

Let's pose a counterfactual question: how plausible is it that the Soviet Union might have reformed its economy in a serious way in the absence of rising energy prices? It's really hard to say. But what I can tell you is that there is a serious debate at the beginning of the Brezhnev era as to how ambitious the Soviet Union ought to be in undertaking structural economic reform.

[15:51]

Alexei Kosygin who is the main rival to Leonid Brezhnev aligns himself with an economic reform agenda. Kosygin argues that the Soviet economy is faltering, that it needs to learn from the West, that it needs to become more efficient, perhaps that there needs to be expanded scope in the Soviet system for market incentives even.

[16:11]

Brezhnev is a conservative. He repudiates Kosygin's reform agenda. And says, well, we should just carry on doing things the way that we've been doing them.

Contrast with Japan

[16:21]

Oil makes it possible to do that. Or at least oil makes it easier to carry on doing things the way that we've just been doing them. It forestalls reform. And here I'm going to draw an example, or sort of, make a counterpoint with the experience of Japan in the 1970s.

[16:36]

Japan's economy after the Second World War is not essentially planned economy but it's an economy in which the government exerts substantial direction over you know sort of capitalist free market economic development.

[16:50]

Japan's Ministry of Industry and Trade, METI↗, is a very powerful force in Japan's economic life. And METI responds to the oil crisis in a you know sort of proactive dynamic way. Japan has a very different kind of relationship with the global oil economy from that that the Soviet Union has. Japan produces no oil, and imports all of its oil from abroad. As a consequence Japan is very seriously afflicted by the energy crisis. The energy crisis is bad news for Japan.

[17:19]

But METI, the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Trade, uses the oil crisis as an opportunity to push forward a very ambitious agenda for structural economic reform. What Japan does in the 1970s is to invest in less energy intensive technologies -- particularly in energy...in...to invest particularly in industrial...processes that produce consumer goods.

[17:47]

Consumer electronics, for example, become a priority for Japan in the aftermath of the oil crisis. And this reflects the experience of the oil crisis. Japanese economic planners and ministers conclude that in a world of high energy prices Japan has a comparative advantage in specializing in less energy intensive production, in specializing in producing you know Sony Walkman↗, for example, in producing less fuel thirsty automobiles.

[18:16]

So Japan does very well as a consequence of the energy crisis because Japanese industrialists and economics ministers realize what the long term consequences of the oil crisis are likely to be and take appropriate action.

[18:31]

In the Soviet Union on the other hand the petrodollar bounty forestalls the prospect of structural reform.

[18:39]

And this will be consequential for the long-term history of the Soviet Union. When global energy prices fall in the 1980s the predicament for a Soviet economy which has become dependent on expensive oil, even addicted to the export earnings that expensive oil provide, will be very serious indeed.

Eastern Europe During the 1970s

[19:02]

Let's talk now about Eastern Europe. I've talked a little bit about the Soviet Union and it's relationship to the global energy economy. What happens in Eastern Europe during the 1970s?

[19:11]

We've already talked about Eastern Europe's history of rebellion against Soviet leadership -- against the strictures of socialist domination. Hungary revolted in 1956. Czechoslovakia revolted in 1968. Poland sees an uprising in 1970. In Eastern Europe the legitimacy of Communist systems is always fragile.

[19:38]

These are not democratically elected systems. These are systems throughout Eastern Europe that are essentially Soviet impositions -- that lack basic sort of popular legitimacy.

[19:49]

The fundamental dilemma for Eastern Europe's Communist governments is always this: how to rule, how to maintain control over populations that do not accept...for the most part -- the legitimacy of Communist domination.

[20:04]

And there are basically two strategies that East European Communist governments can deploy in order to maintain political control. And the first is repression. And you see exemplary models of this in the experiences of Romania and Albania.

[20:20]

These are two repressive, sometimes violent, regimes. Regimes that depend upon brute force more than upon...you know, consensus, to maintain their basic political integrity and purpose.

[20:37]

But repression is not always a palatable option. Sometimes Communist leaders disdain repression on the basis only of principle. It's not very nice to depend upon repression in order to maintain political order.

[20:53]

So placation becomes an alternative strategy for maintaining control in Eastern Europe. And what does placation involve? Essentially it involves buying off populations. Providing sufficient increases in material well-being, sufficient supplies of consumer goods, in order to maintain the basic you know satisfaction of pop...or of ordinary people. You provide material things in order to maintain the legitimacy of the system.

[21:24]

This is what Hungary does in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising in Budapest. Hungary's so-called reform Communist leaders develop a strategy that provides material goods in exchange for political quiescence on the part of the population.

[21:38]

This formula becomes know in Hungary as Goulash Communism↗. You provide the people enough stuff that they can enjoy to eat reasonably well, and Hungary will remain relatively stable within the Communist paradigm.

[21:52]

This, you know sort of, strategy for placating unrest through the provision of material abundance works elsewhere. Poland's communist leaders pursue much the same basic concept. So too do East Germany's Communist leaders.

[22:10]

Though East Germany in some ways is a particular case because East Germany's leaders pursue a sort of mixture of repressive and...placatory strategies at the same time. East Germany is both the materially richest state in Eastern Europe and one of the more repressive countries. Elsewhere these two things, repression and placation, exist in a sort of inverse correlation.

[22:37]

Poland and Hungary are among the less repressive countries in the Soviet Bloc, but there are also among the richest. Romania and Albania, though Albania's not really in the Communist Bloc so it's a sort of particular case in and of itself. Let's just talk about Romania.

[22:51]

Romania is both poorer and more repressive than Poland and Hungary. So, repression and placation are the two strategies and you know to some extent they can substitute for each other. East Germany deploys a mixture of both.

[23:06]

But in order to placate your populations through the provision of material abundance you need to be able to finance you know consumer production. And this is costly for Communist regimes.

[23:22]

Of course if you're financing consumption then what are you not financing? What's the tradeoff if you're...consuming?

[23:30]

(student response)

That's right. Development. Investment. If you're consuming stuff then you're not investing in expanding production for the future. So there's always a tradeoff to be made between consumption and investment.

[23:43]

And this is a difficult tradeoff for regimes that are committed ideologically to a long-term agenda of Communist development.

[23:52]

It's also the case, particularly once we get into the 1970s, that Communist industries are simply not capable of producing the kinds of consumer goods that Eastern Europe's subject populations are coming to demand.

[24:06]

East European automobiles, for example, are shoddy, and by comparison with Western automobiles inefficient and expensive to manufacture. In order to sort of continue to placate subject populations East European Communist governments end up during the 1970s turning more and more to the West -- to imports from capitalist Western Europe in order to provide the consumer goods on which the sustenance of political legitimacy depends.

[24:35]

Foreign imports are really, really, important to the political survival of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and so on by the end of the 1970s.

[24:47]

The sort of opportunities for East-West opening that détente and Ostpolitik↗ and the Helsinki Settlement↗ provide are then conducive from a certain point of view to the sustenance of Communist led political systems in Eastern Europe. By opening up opportunities for trade and for economic exchange détente helps to sort of bolster the practical legitimacy of Communist governments.

[25:15]

And this is one of the reasons that some you know sort of conservatives in the United States are critical of détente at the time. They argue that the West, Western Europe and the United States, are helping sort of Communist governments to stabilize themselves by enabling them to provide Western goods for their citizens.

[25:34]

But it's important you know to think about the role of Western goods in the East Bloc during the 1970s and after not simply in terms of consumption and its political consequences. We should also think about the financial aspects of these transactions.

[25:51]

How are Eastern, how are Western goods to be paid for?

[25:56]

How is trade usually financed?

[26:00]

(student response)

Debt. Well, in this case the trade is to be financed with debt. But that's because the East European countries are not capable of manufacturing or growing the kinds of products that would balance their imports from the West. If Eastern European economies were producing you know the kinds of things that the West wanted then they might be able to...sustain balanced trade relations with the West.

[26:26]

But in the absence of you know sort of desirable East European exports, or East European exports that are desirable in the West, the only way to finance imports from the West is by borrowing money.

[26:38]

So the East Europeans borrow money from the West in order to finance imports of consumer goods on which political legitimacy depends. Now there's even an aspect to the story that ties back into the oil crisis, and I can try to tell that if it doesn't make the whole story even more complicated than it already is.

The Increase in Short-Term Capital Because of Oil Demand

[26:57]

One of the consequences of the oil crisis is to vastly expand the value of sort of short-term capital circulating in the global economy. In part this has to do with the petrodollar bounty that the oil exporting states enjoy.

[27:13]

You're Saudi Arabia for example. And you experience over a period of about six months a fourfold increase in your export earnings. What are you going to do with that money?

[27:24]

It's easier to answer that question if you're Iran. Because Iran is a big populous country. It's leadership under Shah Pahlavi↗ has big developmental aspirations. So if you're Iran it's easy to spend the money. You just spend it on domestic infrastructural development. You build nuclear power stations and so on, which is what Iran does.

[27:43]

But if you're Saudi Arabia, or if you're Dubai, if you're one of the little Gulf Emirates, you have a small population, your territory is basically desert. What are you going to do with that money?

[27:53]

(student response)

That's right. You bank it. But not necessarily in Japan. Because Japan by this point is a fairly developed economy. It's capable of providing its own investment capital. You bank it.

[28:06]

If you're Saudi Arabia what kind of investor are you? Are you an aggressive investor or are you a conservative investor?

[28:13]

(student response)

That's right. You're a conservative investor. So you don't do direct investment. Instead you put it with banks. You place it for the most part with -- you place your money with Western banks.

[28:25]

And this means that Western banks during the 1970s experience sort of a massive influx in deposits. There's a great deal of money in the global financial system during the 1970s. And some of this can be lent to sovereign borrowers -- including the sovereign states of Eastern Europe.

[28:43]

There's a similar story that plays itself out in Latin America which we're going to talk about next week. But in Eastern Europe the petrodollar led transformation of the global financial system helps to sustain economic strategies that will use imports from Western capitalist economies in order to preserve political legitimacy.

[29:07]

But ultimately this strategy has serious flaws. It doesn't prove capable of preve-- of staving off political unrest. Communist planners continue to confront, you know, serious economic dilemmas.

Inflation in the East Bloc During the 1970s

[29:27]

And probably none is more consequential during the 1970s then the issue of inflation.

[29:35]

Prices are sort of controlled in the Soviet Bloc, but central planners have to set prices at such a level as to be able to sustain relatively high, you know, sort of rates of investment over the long-term.

[29:49]

If you set prices too low then you're incentivizing consumption that will occur at the expense of sort of long-term investment. So controlling prices is a, you know, sort of really delicate act for central planners to perform.

[30:04]

Because if you set prices too high then you're going to incentivize political unrest. Populations will recoil from high bread prices. They might demonstrate in the streets. So high prices are a recipe for political destabilization and tumult, but setting prices too low encourages more consumption than your economy will likely be able to sustain.

[30:26 ]

It will probably produce you know disruptions in supply as available demand exceeds supply and so on. This is a sort of basic market economics and the rules are not all that different even in the context of a socialist society.

[30:40 ]

Because consumption is never something that socialist societies can plan, right. Socialist societies plan production but they can't plan consumption. The only way that they can control consumption is by adjusting the prices of commodities that consumers purchase.

[30:55 ]

So it's always a very delicate you know sort of act that has to be performed.

Upheaval in Poland During the 1970s

[31:01 ]

And...the case of Poland is you know sort of illustrative of some of the you know difficulties that are inherent in the performance of this act. So we should talk about it you know...in particular. I'm going to...you know sort of couch the next couple of minutes with particular respect to Poland -- not with respect to the Communist system writ large.

[31:25 ]

In the late 1970s...1978, 1979 the Polish government decides that it has to sort of increase prices because the cheap you know sort of prices for food and consumer goods which have been sustained through most of the 1970s in order to stave off popular unrest following the 1970 uprising are unsustainable.

[31:51 ]

This is really important. Prices increases are sort of politically unpopular. The Polish system experiences an economic crisis borne of the basic unsustainability of low prices for consumer goods. Other factors too stimulate dissent and unrest in Poland in the late 1970s.

[32:13 ]

In 1978 a Polish national is elected Pope -- becomes Pope John Paul II↗. And this stimulates sort of Polish nationalism, Polish anti-Sovietism, even Polish anti-Communism. Amidst this you know sort of combination of economic instability borne of an officially mandated price increase and political nationalism stirred by Pope John Paul II's election Poland at the end of the 1970s experiences a major round of political upheaval -- a major sort of political crisis.

[32:49 ]

This crisis is you know usually known as the episode of the Solidarity Movement↗. What is Solidarity? Why does it pose such a political challenge to the Polish Communist regime? Solidarity is an independent trades union movement that emerges in 1980.

[33:09 ]

The fact of Solidarity's being a labor union, an independent trades union, is in itself consequential. Remember that Communist governments, socialist governments as they you know call themselves, proclaim themselves to be governments of the workers, you know government of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers.

[33:28 ]

That workers would need an independent labor union to represent their interests against the state is sort of anathema to the you know basic ideological framework that is Soviet-style Communism. So the emergence of an independent trades union movement in Poland is ideologically disruptive and contentious.

[33:47 ]

But it's also in the summer of 1980 a major political phenomenon. Lech Wałęsa↗ emerges as the leader of Solidarity, this independent trades union movement. He's a shipworker in Gdańsk with a sort of long history of political activism.

[34:07 ]

By the summer of 1970 Solidarity numbers over 700,000 workers as members. This is a very big political mobilization. The Polish government initially tries to appease Solidarity by recognizing it as a legitimate sort of representative organ of Polish workers.

[34:27 ]

As a consequence of this initial act of recognition Solidarity's membership increases very, very quickly. By the summer, by the end of 1980, there are about 8 million Poles who count themselves as members of Solidarity.

[34:39 ]

By the summer of 1981 one in four Polish people is a member of the Solidarity Movement. So Solidarity sort of explodes onto the Polish scene as an independent political force -- as a political force autonomous from the party-state, headed by a non-Communist membership, sorry, headed, led by a non-Communist leadership -- the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. And this poses a you know sort of serious, even existential threat, to the legitimacy, even the survival of the Polish Communist party-state.

[35:13 ]

How is a party-state that derives its legitimacy from its claim to represent the workers and the interests of the workers going to deal with the emergence of a independent labor union that presents itself as a political rival to the Communist Party?

[35:30 ]

In a sense what Solidarity means is that plural politics have arrived within the context of the party-state. This is very, very disruptive. So what does the Polish Communist state decide to do?

[35:43 ]

It does essentially the only thing that it can do if it wants to remain a party-state -- and that is the government at the end of 1981 turns the tanks on Solidarity. Martial law is declared. Solidarity is declared illegal and popular street demonstrations are violently and viciously repressed.

[36:04 ]

So the Polish state ultimately embraces repression because it's unable to control the political consequences of this mass mobilization that a combination of you know economic instability borne of rising consumer prices and political nationalism produce.

[36:24 ]

Solidarity in effect demonstrates, or the Solidarity Crisis in effect demonstrates, that there are severe limits to what political reform can accomplish within the context of the party-state. There might be you know an opportunity within the party-state to satisfy some of the you know consumer aspirations that subject populations have but the party-state will not be able tolerate plural politics. That is sort you know persuasively demonstrated.

The Economic Lag Between Eastern Europe and the West

[36:53 ]

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe's economies continue to lag further and further behind the capitalist West. This is really, really important. Though the West experiences a slowdown in growth rates during the 1970s the gap between East and West just continues to get bigger and bigger.

[37:15 ]

Let's took not at overall GDP but at per capita GDP which is what this chart displays. Per capita GDP is a pretty good index of basic economic well-being, of ordinary people. And what you can see is that from sort of the early 1970s in particular the rates of growth in per capita GDP in the East Bloc slow. During the 1980s the story will essentially be one of stasis.

[37:43 ]

In relative terms however the East Bloc is going backwards. As the West continues to get richer and richer in per capita terms the failures of the socialist system to match the affluence that Western capitalism is capable of producing for it citizens become more and more glaring.

[38:03 ]

So the slowdown is a relative slowdown. There's still a very you know sort of incremental improvement in per capita GDP in the...in say Eastern Europe between you know 1970 and 1980. So relative to sort of...its own experience Eastern Europe's position does improve very, very sluggishly. But relative to the West Eastern Europe is falling behind.

[38:29 ]

And this is really, really important. Because the example of the West will be absolutely crucial to the legitimacy crisis of state Communism in the 1980s. The example of the West exposes the basic dishonesty of Communist propaganda. Insofar as Communist leaders proclaim themselves to be building a future that is even brighter than the future that capitalism could deliver the actual you know historical accomplishments of Communism debunk the myth that Communism is a more advanced economic system -- that the command economy is somehow more productive than the capitalist economy.

[39:08 ]

This...disjoint between the theory and the reality of Communism is profoundly consequential. It is in a sense what causes the basic legitimacy crisis of the system. The fact that Communist governments end up depending upon violence and repression to control political unrest only you know sort of exacerbates the basic legitimacy problem. These regimes are brutal and violent sometimes but even more consequential I would argue is the fact that their in...is that they prove unable to deliver the material bounty which they promise to provide for ordinary people.

[39:45 ]

Communism...sorry...

(student question)

[39:52 ]

Yeah.

(student question)

[40:02]

No, that's, that's a really good question. Well, that would be you know sort harder to do because the data on which this chart is produced is just population data and GDP data. So the mean average is the one that you know can be easily produced based upon you know the best available data.

[40:19]

Estimating, this is sort of a subsidiary point, statistics from the East Bloc are notoriously difficult to work with because you know they're frequently manufactured are bare little relation to reality. But it's a very good question. I mean to what extent does this you know sort of tail off in GDP per capita growth in the East Bloc veil sort of important differences between East and West that have to do with the distribution of well-being.

[40:48 ]

Because there's a plausible you know sort of alternative viewpoint here -- which is that Western societies produce more in the aggregate but that wealth in the West is so...unevenly distributed that most of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few very wealthy people.

[41:07 ]

Meaning that ordinary Westerns are not necessarily any better off than are ordinary East Bloc citizens. In that circumstance the East Bloc would not have experienced its legitimacy crisis because leaders of East European countries could have said that for, so far as ordinary people were concerned, they were really much better off under Communism than they would be under capitalism.

[41:27 ]

I wish that I had that chart to show you. Unfortunately, I don't have it in the slide show. So you just have to take this on faith, that...the relative decline in sort of....in aggregate economic well-being is experienced by ordinary people in the East Bloc.

[41:47 ]

Sure, the Western countries even, the countries of Western Europe, which are less unequal than the United States is, remain relatively less equal than the economies of Eastern Europe do but the difference isn't all that much.

[42:01 ]

And this actually gives me an opportunity to talk about a really important point which was a point that we should think about when we're thinking about sort of economics and equality in Communist societies and capitalist societies.

[42:15 ]

One of the key you know distinguishing characteristics of a Communist society is that economic wealth ends up being sort of synonymous with political wealth. Economic power ends up being synonymous with political power. Those who control the state, those who control the political apparatus are also those who enjoy the greatest material abundance -- hence, Brezhnev and the fur coat.

[42:41 ]

If you want to make it in the Soviet Union your best opportunity for making it comes through advancing yourself through the party bureaucracy -- through the party hierarchy. It's political power that can deliver you know the things upon which the good life depends: a nice dacha in the countryside, a well appointed well-furnished apartment in Moscow. Well, these things go to the people who wield political power.

[43:06 ]

In the West by contrast there's a disjoint between political power and economic power. At least there ought to be in principle, right -- is the case that political power exists apart from economic power. Money can influence elections but it doesn't necessarily determine them. You know of course in the present moment you know I think we're experiencing something of a national conversation as to what the relationship between economic power is...and...but as to what the relationship between economic and political power is and what it should be.

[43:37 ]

Whether economic power is excessively influential upon political power is a question that we're debating and there are you know different perspectives that we could bring to that conversation and it's not really my intention to discuss that today because it takes us away from where we need to be going.

[43:53 ]

But the...point which is crucial to remember about Communist societies is that economic power and political power are in essence synonymous. And as a consequence of that people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who wield power enjoy you know relatively greater abundance.

[44:13 ]

They shop in special shops. They're special shops for high ranking party members that provide access to you know much better Western consumer goods than those that are available to ordinary people.

[44:23 ]

And this basic you know sort of...the fact that inequality is so implicated with political power further exacerbates the legitimacy crisis of the system. You know ordinary Eastern Europeans who don't enjoy the special prerogatives that party members enjoy will call out party members for you know self-serving hypocrisy.

[44:46 ]

So far as the comparison with the West goes. I'm just going to make one last point on this issue. It's important, and we'll talk more about this, but it's important to think about the role in which you know sort of the media plays in giving East Europeans a sense of what ordinary life is like in the West.

[45:04 ]

American television shows, like Dallas↗ and Dynasty↗, which probably none of you remember, are...screened on West European television. You know Germany for example you know screens American soap operas constantly.

[45:19]

These transmissions can be you know easily viewed, you know picked up, by antennae, and viewed in Eastern Europe. And this you know sort of window on Western abundance that television you know drama -- well, drama is probably too good a word to use, that television you know series like Dallas provide, gives you know sort of East Europeans, a, you know sense, perhaps an exaggerated sense, of what life looks like in the West.

[45:47 ]

But it's not altogether misrepresentive. Right, by the turn of the 1980s what kinds of lives are middle class Americans enjoying? Well, they you know usually inhabit single family homes in suburbs. They'll drive probably two automobiles in a household. Putting food on the table is not a concern.

[46:08 ]

This is a standard of material abundance that the East has entirely failed to match. So the more that Easterners know about how people live in the West, and about the kinds of expectations that Westerners have, the less credible becomes the proclamations of you know Communist leaders to be giving their people better lives than the lives that Westerners live.

[46:29 ]

But we'll talk more about sort of these contrasts in the 1980s and how they inflect the end of the Cold War.

[46:35 ]

Okay, but the...point I think that the data conveys really powerfully which is a point that you want to bare in mind carefully is that the example of the West is a very subversive one from a Eastern standpoint in the 1970s and the 1980s. The West is growing faster than the East even as the West experiences difficult political and economic transformations of its own.

Political Tumult in China in the Late 1960s and 1970s

The Cultural Revolution

[46:58 ]

Let's move on now to talk about China. Another country that experiences some consequential transformation in its relations with the West during the 1960s and into the 1970s.

[47:10 ]

I'm going to take the Chinese story back to the Cultural Revolution↗ because I don't think that we've yet had the chance to sort of go through the Cultural Revolution in a systemic way and getting the history of the Cultural Revolution right is really important for understanding what comes next.

[47:25 ]

It's what comes next that should interest us today but to understand that we'll take the history back to the Cultural Revolution.

[47:33 ]

What was the Cultural Revolution? How did it come to pass? Just to give me a quick sense of the room how many of you had already studied the history of the Cultural Revolution in some other context? In some other class?

[47:46 ]

Okay, a few of you. So you're just have to bare with you because I'm not probably going to take this into the kind of detail that you've encountered elsewhere but for those who haven't studied the Cultural Revolution it's important just to get a handle on this. Because this a really big, really consequential event, set of events in the making of contemporary China.

[48:05 ]

The Cultural Revolution emerges out of the catastrophic aftermath of China's Great Leap Forward↗. The Great Leap Forward of course was the developmental plan introduced in 1956 that aimed to construct an indigenous Chinese path to socialist modernity.

[48:21 ]

It was a path that would involve the promotion of you know all kinds of ambitious things like rural industrialization. Backyard steel furnaces as we've discussed are one of the you know preeminent symbols of the Great Leap Forward.

[48:35 ]

Yet the Great Leap Forward for all of its overwhelming ambition is in practice a horrible catastrophe. Tens of millions of people starve to death as a consequence of the havoc that the Great Leap Forward produces.

[48:48 ]

The Great Leap Forward does not accomplish what Mao↗ wanted to accomplish which is nominally as least to make China prosperous and strong. Instead the Great Leap Forward brings Chinese society to its knees.

[49:00 ]

There's a massive famine. Tens of millions of people die. It's really, really horrible. This disaster brings not just the legitimacy of you know Communist rule, but Mao Zedong's legitimacy as a wise and farseeing leader into question.

[49:16 ]

Indeed Mao recognizes by you know the turn of the 1960s that he has overreached himself. That he has set something in motion which has been catastrophic in it consequences. And Mao retreats from the sort of front lines of political leadership in China. He goes back home and retreats to his study and undertakes a long phase of you know sort of reading and contemplation.

[49:41 ]

As Mao retreats from the forefront of Chinese politics new leaders emerge and they pursue different kinds of policies. The two most important leaders are Liu Shaoqi↗, pictured on the bottom of the slide, and Deng Xiaoping↗. And these are the two men who come to the fore in the immediate aftermath of the Great Leap Forward.

[50:02 ]

And they pursue policies that are aimed at moderating the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and restoring a more normal and a more sustainable path towards modernization and development.

[50:16 ]

Both men and fairly pragmatic. Deng Xiaoping is well known for sort of citing an old Sichuan saying which is: it doesn't matter if it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice.

[50:30 ]

And this is a statement that well captures you know Deng Xiaoping's pragmatism. He's less concerned with ideology as Mao was than with achieving tangible results. So for a period in the first half of the 1960s China experiences a sort of moderate turn in which Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping are temporarily at least preeminent.

[50:53 ]

And they try to restore a stability, sort of normalcy to use Calvin Coolidge's↗ language to the Chinese socialist project.

[51:02 ]

Meanwhile Mao Zedong, sort of sitting, festering in retirement, is plotting a return to the political fore.

[51:11 ]

As Mao contemplates a sort of return to the front line of Chinese politics he is spurred by his wife Jiang Qing↗ who is a very hard line radical. I mean a real...sort of doctrinaire ideologue. And she argues that China has taken a sort of bourgeois turn under Liu and Deng -- that it is time to reradicalize the revolution, to reenergize the revolution, perhaps even to launch a new revolution in order to overthrow the bourgeois stability that has set in under Deng and Liu and to sort of restore the revolutionary project to its maximum fervor.

[51:52 ]

Jiang is particularly resentful of China's cultural establishment. This may have something to do with the fact that she was a actress by trade before she became a political leader. She sees Chinese culture as a bastion of sort of bourgeois tradition. And she is absolutely adamant that if a new revolution is to be launched that it needs to be a Cultural Revolution in its thrust.

[52:16 ]

That it needs to focus not just upon a transformation of economic and political structures but on transforming Chinese culture and Chinese values -- to create a truly radical, a truly revolutionary society.

[52:29 ]

Spurred by Jing Qing Mao returns to the front line of Chinese politics in 1966. He convenes a special plenum of the Chinese Communist Party that August and it sets in motion the train of events that will become known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

[52:48 ]

And this is how Mao proclaims it. You know China is now going to have a great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This involves the demotion of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. These two men are sort of pushed aside. And Mao appoints a radical Lin Biao↗ as his anointed heir.

[53:07 ]

Lin Biao is a devoted Maoist. He was responsible a couple of years earlier during Mao's period of exile for collecting a host of Mao's, you know, political sayings into a you know single volume -- a book, that became known as the Little Red Book↗.

[53:22 ]

So Lin Biao is sort of more responsible than anybody else for developing what would become in the context of the Cultural Revolution a cult of Maoism.

[53:34 ]

So the Cultural Revolution is launched in 1966 with the purpose of transforming China -- of revolutionizing China's revolution. In a sense the Cultural Revolution represents an effort by Mao to launch a bottom-up revolution against the Communist party-state.

[53:53 ]

So this a really you know sort of peculiar thing. After the 1949 revolution the Communist Party sort of assumes the responsibilities of governance. It assimilates itself to the state and it becomes a well-defined, well-established power structure. This is the power structure that Deng and Liu come responsible for in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward -- the Chinese party-state.

[54:16 ]

But outside of power, Mao, who is still the nominal leader of this party-state becomes convinced, prodded in part by his wife, that the party-state has become conservative, that it's become bourgeois, that it's become reactionary.

[54:29 ]

So the launching of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represents an effort to revolutionize the state that the 1949 Communist Revolution created.

[54:40 ]

And in order to accomplish this Mao turns to the masses. He turns to the Chinese masses to launch a revolution against the party-state that the Communist Party has created.

[54:51 ]

Mao in 1966 proclaims a campaign against what he describes as the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. This is to be a revolution against the old -- out with the old, in with the new.

[55:06 ]

Nowhere is this revolution fiercer than on Chinese university campuses. There is a sort of demographic aspect to the Cultural Revolution that is really important to think about. China, like the United States, like Western Europe, experiences a sort of youth bubble, a baby boom after the Second World War.

[55:25 ]

By the mid-1960s children born in the aftermath of the Second World War are becoming teenagers. They're becoming seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-olds who are becoming you know sort of politically conscious and who are susceptible to...how do I put this politely?...far-fetched ideological doctrines.

[55:43 ]

Not that you ever see any evidence of that on Berkeley's campus because this is a, you know, sober, responsible place. But in China it's an altogether different story, and young people are you know susceptible to a kind of radicalization that serves the purposes that Mao now wants to accomplish.

[56:01 ]

So Chinese campuses become a recruiting ground for Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Inspired by Mao radical Chinese students form units called Red Guards↗. These are sort of paramilitary units that establish themselves to advance the revolution, to impose Maoist orthodoxy, and to sort of challenge so-called right-wing deviationists -- rightists.

[56:30 ]

Students form Red Guard units. They carry Mao's Little Red Book which becomes in the late 1960s you know absolutely ubiquitous as an ideological and political symbol. Carrying the Little Red Book implies a sort of devotion or signals a devotion to the cult of Maoist Revolution.

[56:48 ]

Politically the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution sort of...targets...you know the bureaucracy. It targets people like Deng Xiaoping who is persecuted in the context of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

[57:08 ]

The denouncication of rightists becomes sort of the overriding theme of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And this has catastrophic consequences for the state. Important leaders Deng and Liu Shaoqi are purged. They become the targets of particular opprobrium.

[57:26 ]

But it's not just you know leaders at the top who are purged. Around two-thirds of all Communist Party officials are removed from their posts in the context of the Great Proletarian Revolution. Red Guards in a sense overthrow the basic institutions of political order that have developed in Communist China.

[57:46 ]

And this is a drama that is played out at many different levels. It's not just at the top leadership level of the party. But at the level of you know sort of social institutions like schools and universities. Red Guards seek out reactionaries and purge them. Bourgeois teachers are purged in schools, bourgeois reactionary professors are purged in universities, which would be a really bad idea.

[58:07 ]

Intellectuals are the target of special assault. Rightists are singled out for public humiliation and are forced to confess their so-called sins against the Maoist Revolution. This is a catastrophic tumultous phase in Chinese life. It's a period in which a revolution from below sort of overthrows you know much of what the Communist Party has built since 1969 -- since 1949.

[58:32 ]

What are the human consequences of this? I mean there are some mass killing. Around half a million deaths, up to half a million deaths, are attributable to the chaos that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unleashed.

[58:45 ]

To situate this in context it's substantially less people than died during the Great Leap Forward. But it's still you know a weighty toll, and a toll that we should contemplate particularly when we consider that the death toll that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution caused was entirely ideologically motivated.

[59:07]

Unlike the Great Leap Forward which represented an ambitious effort to industrialize, to modernize China, and in which the catastrophic famines were in a sense an indirect consequence of a modernizing project, virtually all of the people who died during the Cultural Revolution were singled out for political murder.

[59:27 ]

So this is a you know weighty topic with which to grapple. But the political consequences, more than the sort of ethical or moral consequences, are those that shape what comes next. Authority, central political authority, effectively collapses as Red Guards remove Communist bureaucrats from their post.

[59:48 ]

The central planning system breaks down. The Great Leap Forward had presented an alternative model to Soviet-style central planning. The Cultural Revolution obliterates the mechanics of central planning virtually entirely. After the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution the opportunities for implementing Soviet-style economic planning will be very limited because the planning structures have been dismantled. The bureaucracies have been depopulated and dismantled.

[1:00:17 ]

Virtually the only you know political leader in China who is able to hold the whole thing together, which is to say to hold the state together, during the period of the Cultural Revolution is Zhou Enlai↗ -- the Premier of the Chinese state. And a man who while a, you know, sort of very close lieutenant of Mao Zedong throughout Mao's life doesn't share Mao's ideological radicalism or ideological fervor.

[1:00:46 ]

It's not to say that Zhou Enlai was a closet liberal. It would be wrong to see him in those terms. But he recognizes the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and struggles against you know very difficult odds to preserve the basic stability of the Chinese state -- to protect the institutions of central power and central authority against the rampages of the Red Guards.

[1:01:07 ]

And in those Zhou Enlai is more or less successful. He manages to sustain a semblance of a political center through the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

[1:01:18 ]

Ultimately though it's Mao Zedong who brings the whole production to an end. Mao realizes by the end of 1968, early 1969, that things are going far too far. That if the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is permitted to continue that it will result in the effective you know destruction of China as a nation-state.

[1:01:39 ]

That the Chinese polity will fall apart as a consequence of this revolution from below. So having launched a popular revolution against the state Mao now very abruptly shifts course and moves to implement a state clamp down on the popular revolution. Mao turns to the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, to purge the Red Guards.

[1:02:05 ]

Having previously instructed the Red Guards to purge bourgeois rightist elements in the People's Liberation Army and other you know Communist Party bureaucracies Mao now turns to the army in order to restore order.

[1:02:18 ]

This attempt to bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to an end inaugurates a very sort of peculiar phase in the history of the People's Republic -- a late Maoist phase in which Mao remains the singular preeminent leader of China but in which Mao...does not pursue the sort of revolutionary political and social transformation that characterized the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

[1:02:49 ]

So you might think of the era of late Maoism as an era in which China is delicately poised between revolutionary politics on the one hand, because the forces that have produced the cultural revolution are still present, and Mao is still in many respects sympathetic to them, and the forces of stabilization on the other. It's a very interesting and very delicate phase in China's history.

[1:03:13 ]

(student question)

[1:03:17 ]

Because Mao was a brilliant political leader. I mean Mao was extremely adept at balancing political factions and playing off personalities and interests against each other.

[1:03:28 ]

I mean Mao may...you know have made a number of catastrophic decisions as regards China's economic development. But when it came to politics -- both domestic politics and international politics. I mean Mao was one of the most gifted political tacticians of the twentieth century.

[1:03:46 ]

And what Mao does through the era of the Cultural Revolution and into the late Maoist Era that sort of follows the heights of the Cultural Revolution is to balance the centrists, people like Deng Xiaoping, against the radical left, people like his wife Jiang Qing.

[1:04:03 ]

And ultimately he's successful in performing that delicate balancing act through to the very end of his life. It's sort of remarkable when you think about the tumult that China experiences in the second half of the twentieth century that Mao Zedong dies a peaceful death in his sleep. The fact that he does so is testimony I think to the brilliance of Mao's political skills.

Maoist Rule in the 1970s

[1:04:25 ]

So Mao, you know, as I've sort of explained, performs this delicate balancing act in the first half of the 1970s. He works to balance the left against the center.

[1:04:40 ]

Meanwhile Mao orchestrates, as we've already discussed, a major shift in China's international relations. In 1972 he welcomes Richard Nixon to Beijing. This does not necessarily signify a shift in China's international goals. Mao will continue to talk about global revolution as an objective for China but the realignment with the United States serves a very clear tactical purpose. It serves the purpose of gaining China a tacit ally against the Soviet Union.

[1:05:12 ]

The Soviet Union by 1972 is a major concern for China. 1969 brings actual fighting between Chinese and Soviet forces over the Ussuri River. That year China experiences a major war scare. Indeed this war scare one of the factors that prompts Mao to wind down the Cultural Revolution. Because Mao recognizes that amidst the upheaval that the Cultural Revolution is performing China is essentially open so far as foreign aggression is concerned.

[1:05:39 ]

So Mao implements a sort of major tactical shift in the Cold War. He tries to realign with the United States against the Soviet Union, but this does not signify necessarily a strategic reorientation towards the West. There's a big difference between a tactical opening and a strategic opening and what Mao pursues in 1972 is a tactical opening. Mao's overarching goals remain consistent: to make China strong and prosperous and to promote and pursue global revolution.

[1:06:10 ]

But there are significant changes in Mao's you know sort of political discourse during this era of you know late Maoist rule that will help to prefigure what comes next. Probably the single most important sort of revision of Maoist doctrine that Mao orchestrates in this period is the so-called Three Worlds Theory↗ which Mao first develops in 1973 and which is publicly presented in a speech that Deng Xiaoping gives at the United Nations in 1974.

[1:06:42 ]

In this speech Mao, which Mao writes, the world is divided into three parts: the world of the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, the rich capitalist world, countries like West Germany, and Canada and Australia and so on, and then the Third World -- the rest of the world, the poor world, the world of which China is a central part.

[1:07:06 ]

There are really important implications to the way in which this Three Worlds Concept is presented. Whereas Mao had previously described the world in terms of class struggle, the workers versus the bourgeoisie, the Three Worlds Concept implies a more developmental...framework.

[1:07:25]

It suggests, or in some ways it sort of echoes the Three Worlds Concepts that Latin American developmental economists offer, you know, during the 1950s and 1960s. And this is really consequential. Mao talks about the need to develop and build the developing world: China.

[1:07:46 ]

This is not so different from what developing economics proposes. Though Mao continues to talk about revolution as a goal for China in the world his political rhetoric in the last years of his life is increasingly inflected by a discourse of development.

[1:08:03]

This doesn't necessarily mean that Mao personally wanted to orchestrate a new course but Mao says things that Mao's successors will be able to hold onto as a way of relating their priorities to sort of Maoist doctrine. Because this is really important. Look Mao remains, continues to be venerated in China, through to the present day. Even as China for the past thirty years has pursued policies at home and in the world that are almost diametrically at odds with most of what Mao said.

[1:08:35 ]

So how to relate policies that repudiate the substance of Mao while paying fealty to the dogma? Well, to do that you seize upon things that Mao said that might rationalize the things that you want to do.

[1:08:46 ]

And this is what Mao's successors will do. They will invoke Mao's Three Worlds Concept and the developmental implications of it in order to legitimate and defend policies that serve quite different purposes to those that Mao wanted to achieve, policies from the late 1970s onwards, that will serve the purposes of development rather than the purposes of global revolution.

[1:09:11]

There are other key developments during the Mao Era -- none more consequential than the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping. Deng was purged in 1969, stripped of his official office, sent to work in a tractor factory in Xinjian Province. But in 1974, Deng Xiaoping reforms, sorry, he returns, he doesn't necessarily reform -- that's key. Deng returns -- unreformed.

[1:09:36 ]

Deng returns in part because Zhou Enlai promotes him. Zhou Enlai is really Deng Xiaoping's primary sponsor in the power structure in the late phase of the Cultural Revolution. And Zhou Enlai promotes Deng to become First Vice Premier of the Chinese state with particular responsibility for economic reform. This is a major return because Deng will of course become China's preeminent leader in a post Maoist Era.

[1:10:06 ]

The 1969 purge is not the last purge of Deng Xiaoping however. Deng is purged again in 1975. And that's really important. Because it tells us something about how fractious Chinese politics remain through to the end of the Maoist Era.

[1:10:21 ]

At the instigation of rightists, sorry of left-wingers, of the radicals around Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, Deng is forced to sort of incriminate himself, to draw up a list of self-criticisms, to renounce his so-called ideological deviations.

[1:10:39 ]

So up to the end of very Mao's life the conflict between the radicals around Mao's wife and the political moderates around Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping remains very fierce. And the second purge of Deng Xiaoping in 1975 is excellent sort of illustration of this point.

The Death of Mao Zedong and the Question of Succession

[1:10:57 ]

Mao Zedong of course dies in September 1976. This is a really big, really, really big shift. Even more tumultuous perhaps than Stalin's death in 1953 had been. The Chinese revolution after all has been singularly associated since the 1920s with the personality and the leadership of Mao Zedong. Mao's death after fifty years...after twenty-five years of head of state, twenty-fives as a revolutionary leader, is a...dramatic and profound disjuncture in the history of the Chinese revolution.

[1:11:33 ]

Who will succeed Mao Zedong? This is the big question. There are...a number of factions struggling for influence. Probably the most coherent is the radical faction, the Gang of Four↗, led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing.

[1:11:52 ]

At the same time there are anointed successors. The key anointed successor is Hua Guofeng↗ -- who's the person who Mao designates as his heir as China's political leader.

[1:12:05 ]

Other however have claims to make besides. Deng Xiaoping, though he has recently been sort of exiled and purged can make a strong claim to being one of China's most effective and proven administrators. Deng has a record of proven accomplishment which will be you know very much to his advantage as China's political future is determined.

[1:12:27 ]

The succession is complex but let's try to trace out some of the you know key steps. Hua Guofeng, the anointed successor, moves initially against the radical left. And this is really key. Hua moves to purge the Gang of Four in late 1976. Just months after Mao dies the radicals are purged.

[1:12:50 ]

They're arrested. And a sort of campaign against the extreme left is set in motion. This is really consequential for Deng Xiaoping. Insofar as the radical left, the Gang of Four, had been sort of Deng's primary antagonistic, antagonist, their removal from the political scene creates opportunities for Deng to reassert himself. And this is what he does.

[1:13:15 ]

The power struggle ceases to be three-way or power struggle between Hua, Deng, and the Gang of Four, and it becomes a sort of two-way conflict between Deng and Hua after the removal of the Gang of Four.

[1:13:29 ]

And here the you know conflict assumes a sort of ideological aspect. Hua Guofeng aligns himself very closely after the purge of the Gang of Four with Mao Zedong's legacy. Hua proclaims himself loyal to what he characterizes as the two whatevers. He says, and here I quote, whatever policy Chairman Mao decided upon we shall resolutely defend, whatever policy Chairman Mao opposed we shall resolutely oppose.

[1:13:56 ]

So Hua, after Mao's death, presents himself as the heir not only of Mao's political role but also of Mao's ideological commitments.

[1:14:08]

Deng by contrast is much more pragmatic. Deng argues that policies should be grounded not in Maoist doctrine but in empirical evidence. That China needs to allow its you know policies to be determined by practice, what works and what doesn't, rather than by revolutionary ideology. Deng's cat theory: it doesn't matter whether it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it captures, catches mice, is you know sort of illustrative of Deng's pragmatism.

China Under Deng Xiaoping

[1:14:37 ]

Deng Xiaoping establishes control fairly quickly. The key event here is the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party which takes place in December 1978. This is the moment at which Deng and his allies sort of outflank and overwhelm Hua Guofeng and his allies.

[1:14:57 ]

The Eleventh Central Committee is the sort of key turning point in China's history. At this meeting the Chinese Communist Party renounces basic Maoist revolutionary concepts. The concept of class struggle as the sort of key to history is quitetly discarded. The concept of continual revolution, the idea that the Communist Party needs to be waging a continual revolution, is also discarded -- instead pragmatic policies are embraced.

[1:15:29 ]

It's as if the Communist Party decides that the revolution has been accomplished with the attainment of its own political power and that the task ahead is now to develop China, to make China strong and prosperous.

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These pragmatic policies will include economic deregulation and soon enough market oriented reforms. Equally consequential Deng Xiaoping visits the United States. The visit to the United States comes after a formal normalization of diplomatic relations which occurs at the beginning of January. It's negotiated in December 1978, but on the first of January 1979 the United States of America and China normalize diplomatic relations.

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This is a major turning point. It signals a new sort of opening towards the United States a new kind of relationship between the people's republic and the United States.

Deng Xiaoping's Policy Towards the US Contrasted with Mao Zedong's Policy Towards the US

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It might be useful to compare and contrast Deng Xiaoping's US policy with Mao Zedong's US policy. What did the two leaders want to accomplish? Well, what Mao Zedong wanted to accomplish, in the context of a war scare with the Soviet Union, was a tactical alignment that would use the United States as a sort of counterweight to the Soviet Union to the advantage of Chinese diplomacy.

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What Deng contemplates is something entirely different. For Deng the opening to the United States is to be strategic rather than political. It's not just an alliance of convenience against the Soviet Union that Deng wants -- though we may note that Deng Xiaoping is fiercely anti-Soviet.

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But what Deng wants is something more, far more far reaching than that. He wants to open not only China's sort of political alignments towards the United States but also China's economy, and ultimately China's society.

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When Deng travels to the United States, which he does in February 1979, he's extremely interested in American industry. He wants to visit factories, car factories, he pays a visit to the space program I think in Texas, and is you know immensely impressed with American high technology -- with American space technology as well as with technology aimed at ordinary consumers. And he seeks to realize for China a future based upon this American high technology model.

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In order to accomplish that Deng recognizes he will have to open China towards the United States, towards the West, towards the capitalist world. To do this he implements major structural reforms. Foreign investment will be solicited and encouraged. Market incentives will be opened. China in a sense will transition from having been...will transition from the status of a sort of autarkic communistic economy which is what China was, for, through the Maoist Era, to a relationship in which China will begin to reintegrate with the capitalist liberal open world economy that the United States tried to build after the Second World War.

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An economy that was built in the West but which was of course divided by the advent of the Second World War. So this is a profound strategic realignment.

The Enabling of Market Reforms Under Deng Xiaoping

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How are we to explain it looking back? Let's conclude with some quick reflections. Why did Deng try to do what he did and why was he able to accomplish so much? We'll talk much more about reforms after 1980 in due course but at this stage let's just reflect on four points.

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First socialization in China was always less advanced that it became in the Soviet Union. The socialist project by the mid-1970s was only twenty-five years old. The Great Leap Forward did not achieve everything that it wanted to achieve. The Communist Party found, when it looked carefully at the countryside, that the reach of socialization was very limited. That ordinary Chinese, ordinary Chinese peasants, continued to display sort of entrepreneurial impulses, entrepreneurial habits.

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In the 1960s this seemed disturbing to the leadership of the Communist Party. It was one of the reasons that the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was launched. But the limits of socialization will in due course facilitate a market oriented transformation of China's economy and society.

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The disruption that the Cultural Revolution causes is also crucial. The Cultural Revolution does much of what Mao accomplish, wants is to accomplish, which is to sweep out the olds. Having swept out the olds the opportunity for new thinking, for new approaches is rather more open than it will be by contrast in the Soviet Union.

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The international reorientations are also crucial. Mao pursues an opening towards the United States for realistic even cynical purposes. Mao wants to bring the United States on board as a tactical asset against the Soviet Union. But Mao's 1972 tactical opening towards the United States makes it possible for Deng Xiaoping to pursue a far more far reaching strategic opening towards the United States in 1979.

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Finally we should be attentive to the subtle shift in Maoist discourse during the last phase of Mao's political career. The fact that Mao will be begin to emphasize development as well as revolution as a goal for China at home and in the world makes it possible for Mao's successors, preeminently for Deng Xiaoping, to orchestrate a transition from revolution to development and modernization as the overarching purpose of Chinese statecraft.

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The consequences of this in the 1980s and beyond we'll come to in due course.