Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
What is China's Two Sessions and what is actually happening in Xinjiang? We have a special guest with us today. Welcome to The Bridge, enlightening conversations on world cultures, life, and everything in between. Hey everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like this show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. Oh yeah.
Hi, everyone. My name is Jason. I'm originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Today's guest is author and journalist Danny Haifeng.
He's interviewed giants from Scott Ritter, Ben Norton, Richard Wolff, and far more. Danny writes for Black Agenda Report, Workers World, CGTN, Janata Weekly, Friends of Socialist China, and other publications. He's co-written books such as The East is Still Red and American Exceptionalism and American Innocence, A People's History of Fake News from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
He recently returned to China and traveled through Xinjiang. And you can find him on YouTube where he has 366,000 followers at Geopolitics Haifang. Welcome to the Bridge to China, Danny Haifang. It's great to be with you, Jason. Thanks so much for inviting me.
I'm delighted to have you. We've been trying to get this interview together for a bit. In March, two sessions comes around again, and I think most of our American or even just Western viewers have no idea about it. And the reason I say that is every article we read on mainstream media in the West is Xi Jinping's China this and Xi Jinping's China that. But there's far more to how China is governed than just one person.
What is two sessions? The two sessions are an annual meeting of the two biggest governing bodies in China, or I should say, perhaps the two most consequential
So there's the National People's Congress, which is the highest governing body in China that is made up of thousands of delegates, the highest of officials that comprise of the meat, so to speak, of what China calls whole people's process democracy, which starts all the way down to the village level. And then delegates are essentially promoted and
selected and elected, depending on what level we're talking about, all the way up to the National People's Congress, the most experienced of officials, but people from all walks of life. And the China's People's Political Consultative Conference
That is the other body that meets during this period. It's more of an advisory body. It does not have legislative power, so to speak, but is made up of China's eight other parties, which might come as a shock to people in the United States that there's more parties in China, political parties in China, than just the Communist Party of China. But while these parties don't necessarily have legislative power, they are consulted. It's right in the name. They are consulted by the Chinese government. They...
give suggestions, they participate in governance, and their suggestions are taken into account when policies and programs and resolutions and actions are
are then taken by the government. So this annual meeting is very important because it is essentially the meeting that sets forth how is this five-year plan implemented? How are the policies and proposals that were set forth by other governing meetings like the plenary sessions that occur every five years? How are these policies going to be put into practice? That is what is discussed.
Also, you have shifts in the legislature. People are replaced depending on their level of experience. And so this is a massive meeting that holds critical importance to China's development. And it's been very important for China to hold this annual meeting so that these benchmarks that it sets for itself, whether it's the economic growth targets or targets toward quality growth,
are given proper attention so that if there are issues, if there are achievements, they can all be consulted and discussed together as one system.
You know, one thing I find really interesting about the CPPCC is that it is comprised of people from all kinds of walks of life. You know, we're from America and we're used to the Senate being comprised of basically lawyers. You know, it's like almost all lawyers. Whereas the Congress in China, if we want to call it that, is comprised of people
and farmers, technicians, actors, scientists, entrepreneurs. It is, and also every one of China's 56 ethnic groups is also represented in
in that group. I find that really fascinating because in a way to me, it seems far more fair. It seems fairer because everyone from kind of every walk of life can contribute to the direction the country is taking. What do you think about the differences between the American system and China's system? Well, the American system, the United States' political system, is really the antithesis of this. No one is actually consulted with
the U.S. government, the United States' federal government, does not consult with ordinary people, does not consult with various sectors of society in order to come up with policy and implement policy. In fact, what the United States' political system does is it manipulates and it attempts to steer people into supporting two political parties, which actually represent interests that
that are not at all operating within the framework of democratic rule. These interests, corporate interests, military interests, these interests are more so serving rich people. And everyone else is essentially told that they should participate in this democracy in order to legitimize the political system, despite the fact that the benefits aren't
are reaped and no one's really consulting anyone. They are being spoke. We in the United States are being spoken to. We are being told how things should be in China and through bodies like the CPPCC. There is a conversation happening between the Chinese people and the Chinese government. And what's so interesting about the consultative element of
of China's governance system is that it's not about whether you are a member of the Communist Party of China. It isn't about your political affiliation. It is about what do you need? What are the problems? What are the issues? What
kind of involvement, what kind of voice do you have and contribution do you have to make to the overall development of society? That is far different from the United States, which privileges and exclusively promotes the quote unquote vote, you know, one vote, one person without any attention at all to what you are actually voting for.
So China is not bullying. You have to, I mean, you know this, Jason, in order to become a member of the Communist Party of China, you better be ready to work and work very, very, very hard. That is why, even though the Communist Party of China is very big, it does not comprise of the majority of the population. It comprises of a huge portion, if you count the family members of Communist Party members. But, you know, the CPC is about 96, 98 million people.
No one in China, the CPC, isn't saying you have to be a part of the CPC in order to be politically involved. No. Bodies like the CPPCC, which is the highest consultative body, these bodies are meant...
So for the party to be able to understand the issues and understand what's going on for ordinary people, for everybody, even those outside, you even have the KMT represented in the CPPCC. And the KMT lost the war against the CPC over 80 years ago. And
And yet they have, or I should say about a little under 80 years ago, yet they have representation in this consultative body and can make suggestions, policy solutions. And if those policy solutions serve China, they may be considered as necessary changes. That is something you don't have in the United States. You have two parties. You have a duopoly. You have the Republicans. You have the Democrats.
You are told you have to be part of those. Third party alternatives are suppressed and repressed. These two political parties who are controlled and owned by an oligarchy, a corporate oligarchy, they set the policy, they set the agenda, they set the narrative, and you are supposed to vote for them based on how they set the narrative. There is no consultation. There is no participation. You simply are either going to vote or you're not going to vote, and then everything else happens to you.
Really, it is the opposite of a people's democracy. You're listening to The Bridge. I want to move on to Xinjiang because a lot of Western media and think tanks that are supported by the United States government and the Pentagon tell us that we should be very concerned about the ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and the people's ability to
to freely practice Islam. You just went to Xinjiang. What were your first thoughts? - Well, that was my second time in Xinjiang. And when I went the first time, I was exclusively in Irumuchi, the capital. This time I was also again in the capital.
of the Uyghur autonomous region of Xinjiang. But I also was able to visit the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, which actually has a shared border, Kazakhstan. And I was actually able to cross the border into Kazakhstan along a free trade zone and the Khorgos free trade zone. And that was incredible.
What's so interesting is that Xinjiang is often framed as this Uyghur concentration camp. It is oppressive and repressive to the single ethnic minority group, which makes up the plurality of this province. But the reality is, is that ethnic groups in this province, just like any other province of China,
actually live together, and they live together quite well. They respect their culture, they practice their culture, they practice their religion, if it's Islam or something else, and they live together in relative harmony. One of the things that people don't understand about Xinjiang is that it represents this key road into the...
outward from China's Belt and Road Initiative. It is really the land route in which China can then reach Central Asia and into, of course, West Asia and into Europe. That is critically important for China, and the United States knows it. So the United States has looked at Xinjiang as not just a propaganda talking point, because the United States can find many ways to
bash China. It has. If you look at the Western media as a whole, if you look at how the United States' mainstream media talks about China, you can find easily all sorts of stories about how bad China is in their eyes.
But Xinjiang really became a narrative because of how critical it is as a choke point to destroy China's Baltimore Initiative. And so it was really important for me to be able to go to the...
Kazakh autonomous prefecture, which has, of course, a plurality, if not a majority, of Kazakh people. Many people may not know that China's ethnic groups in Xinjiang include Kazakhs, they include Kyrgyz, they include, you know, a whole
Hui people. They include so many different kinds of ethnic groups, not just Uyghurs. And it would come as a shock because when you go to this part of Xinjiang, you don't actually feel like you're in Beijing anymore or Shanghai. You don't feel like you're in these bigger metropolitan areas where there's a majority of Han people. So
It's a really interesting experience. I really recommend people go because you can see when you go there just how much investment has been put into raise the standard of living of people there.
As China's westernmost province, it had historically once been one of the poorest. And people don't understand that just in 1978, China had a lower standard of living than Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. And now China has come up to this
place of being the biggest economy and purchasing power parity terms, where per capita GDP is around 12,000 US dollars, that progress has not been just exclusively seen in a place like Beijing or Shanghai. No, you can see it in Urumqi. You can see it in where I was in, let's say, Yining, which is a city in this Kazakh autonomous prefecture. So you can see how people are living better. It's not, you know, it's
It's one thing to understand Xinjiang as being a target of lies around genocide and concentration camps and targeting ethnic groups. But when you go there, you see that people's concerns are actually not about that. That's not a problem. That's not something that people will say, well, this is a big issue for me. I'm not being treated well because of
the religion I practice or the nationality or ethnicity that I identify as. No, most people are concerned about how well they're living economically. And in Xinjiang, in these cities that I was able to go to, like Yining, you see that people are living much better than they ever had been before. And so this, I believe, is just such a critical...
to emphasize because it's one of the strangest genocides in the world, one of the strangest concentration camp stories in the world where you have zero refugees and you have zero people actually inside of Xinjiang taking footage, talking about their plight.
All you have are Western media, mainstream media, mouthpieces, people who are simply being anointed as voices for a region that the Western mainstream media won't cover, honestly. So it's an incredible place to go. It's beautiful.
you know, it's mountainous, it's scenic. But the biggest, I think, takeaway from my Xinjiang trips have been that China is really spreading the economic growth that it has experienced over the last several decades everywhere. It's not simply concentrated in the metropolis areas or in northeast China or southern China. It's
Southeast China, it's everywhere in China. And while there's much left to do, you can tell that the government as well as the people in China are very committed to ensuring that all
all parts of China are developed to the highest extent possible. Those are really good points. I kind of want to make it problematic on behalf of people watching. So I want to ask you some specific questions about the area that our viewers might be curious about. And one of those things is,
about young people between the ages of, say, 18 or 16 and 35. Those are the people we would be expecting to maybe be put away. So when you were there – by the way, I've also been to Xinjiang twice, and I can answer these questions as well as I go. When you were there, in your own experience, were young Uyghur men –
Between the ages of 16 and 35, were they out on the streets? Did you see them? Were they represented in the population? Most definitely. Actually, I was very fortunate to be able to go to a mosque that I know that other reporters have gone to, like Jingjing Li, Li Jingjing, Majirong's Mosque, I believe it is in the Yili Autonomous Prefecture. We were able to go there.
All ethnic groups. I mean, it's mostly Hui people practicing at this mosque, but there are Uyghurs there. And most of the men, I mean, it was, you know, it's separated based on gender where people practice. And most of the men there, well, you could assume that they're older. There are plenty of younger people around my age also there practicing their religion, practicing Islam.
This is something that shouldn't even be controversial. If you go to the bazaar in the Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, you can see the same thing. You see people from all walks of life, all ages. This is actually one of the most interesting parts of all of China, in my estimation. It's how intergenerational it is, how people come together from all
age groups. You'll see a 90-year-old dancing in the middle of the bazaar, and you'll also see young women and young men doing the same thing. It's all together, and that's something that might seem strange in the collective West, where we have
a lot of exclusionary, like most of the things that we do in the United States, they're exclusionary. We don't generally go hang out with our elders at any given point unless they're family and unless it's required or obligated. And so this is something that you'll just see everywhere in Xinjiang. And it's just, it's so interesting that we even have to have a conversation like this because I think it speaks to the extent of,
of how the Western mainstream media has dehumanized people, the people of China, to such a great extent in Chinese society and China's social system, to such an extent that the ordinary, something that should be seen as just
common sense that you would find, you know, Uyghur men who make up a plurality of the province just living their lives, that something like that would seem like a smoking gun. But the truth is, is that that's where we have been plunged into as a society. And it really is more of an indictment, I believe, on the collective West as a whole, and of course, the United States at the lead, that
It is these kind of conversations, and I get them all the time as well, these questions. Well, and they're all about these kind of minute talking points about people's day-to-day lives.
without any attention to why exactly is this province, why exactly is this part of China, and why exactly is China as a whole being targeted in this way? It's truly baffling. But when you go to Xinjiang, it's one of these experiences that I hope that everybody in the collective West in the United States can have, is when you actually go to a place that has been demonized so much and you see the opposite of what you've been told, it is...
One of the most important experiences you can have in your life because it does change you and it will change how you not only perceive and evaluate and assess this problem in this particular subject, but it will likely also commit yourself to the truth and hopefully commit yourself to the cause of peace because this is what ultimately undergirds the propaganda war and
this narrative war that the United States and the West are waging against China in Xinjiang. It is a broader war to try to contain China, and it is one that's very dangerous that every single American and person in the West should be concerned about and should be getting involved with to the extent
calling for a true and genuine and lasting peace that includes cooperation that will benefit us all. Those are really, really good points. I don't think that all of my guests have been so deep on the subject as yourself, actually. You're listening to The Bridge.
I would like to point out a couple of things for those listening. Number one, Danny actually interviewed the imam of mosque that he went to visit, and you can find that on his channel, and you can also find that on his ex-account. So I encourage you to go and watch that interview. But I also wanted to point out an
and ask you about your experience of seeing other languages. You mentioned all of these other ethnic groups, which I think is really fascinating because that's not something that the Western media really talks about. They talk about Xinjiang as though it were a large homogenous group of Uyghur people, which do make up the majority of the population. I just was also a couple months ago in Xinjiang, and I was at a dinner. It was kind of wild. We were in this huge tent. It
It was actually a Mongolian tent. We were in a Mongolian restaurant that was out in the desert. And one of the people there gave me a gift and this knife. And you can see on this side, it has Uyghur written on it. And on this side, it has Han written on it. It was a gift from one of the people there at the table. And I thought that was really fascinating because one of the things that I noticed personally as I was traveling on both of my trips is
is that there was language on signage everywhere in Kazakh, in Uyghur, in Han Chinese. And so I was really kind of perplexed. Even at one point, we were traveling south, really deep south, and there were signs where it was written in Chinese.
And then in Uyghur. And then another Arabic script. And I had to turn to people and say, why are there three languages? And they're like, oh, there's another minority group that's prevalent here. And so it's actually written in three languages in this area. And so I wanted to ask you about your experience in terms of...
What did you see in terms of where people dressed in modern clothes, jeans and T-shirts? Were they dressed in their traditional attire? Were they speaking in their local languages? Was that permitted? Did you see their local languages? And to what extent did you see that people were allowed to communicate in their own languages or utilize their own culture or express themselves as, you know, your experience? What did you see? What was your experience of seeing people using their own culture? Well,
The cultural experience of Xinjiang is so intense, actually. You go to Europe, for example, or you go to other parts of the world, and China is very unique in the sense that its tourism industry is so geared toward the domestic population, so geared toward Chinese people.
that it's almost like you're immersing yourself wherever you are in China, whatever province you are in. That is the immersion experience you're going to get. You're not going to be funneled into some kind, unless you're there for an official reason and you're going there with short time and you're not moving around wherever you are. It's really difficult to escape the immersive experience of being where people really are.
And so in Xinjiang, it's so intense a submersion of experience because all of these ethnic groups that you discussed just now, Jason, they are practicing the culture. And I mean, these are some of the oldest peoples in the world. I don't want to talk about Kazakhs. They have hundreds, thousands of years of cultural development.
And it is everywhere. And you can't get a bite to eat without the local music, the local dance. You can't go anywhere in Urumqi or when I was at Yining, you can't go anywhere without that being a part of the experience. And it's actually a big part of the tourism experience because one thing that China has done
and has focused on is when China is saying it's alleviating poverty, it always says it's alleviating poverty based on the particular circumstances and conditions of wherever poverty exists in China. One thing that Xinjiang has
that is very attractive to people coming from all over China is it has this immense diversity of ethnic groups that you won't find large populations of and concentrations of in other parts of China simply because of where Xinjiang is geographically on the map.
So people travel from all over China to see. I went to homestays in Nying. I went to a Uyghur homestay, for example, where they basically open up their home. It's almost like a cafe. And I'm going to actually release an interview at some point soon. I did with a Uyghur woman who was the owner of the home. And they put out all of the traditional foods, all of, you know, there's music, there's places where people can pray, places where people can just hang out and eat.
And that's how they make money. You know, they charge money for that and people come and they want to see how
how people live from this particular ethnic group and nationality. So that is what is so unique about China, and especially Xinjiang, is that this diversity is not simply just respected. Like, okay, you can be who you are, you can practice what you are. No, China is actually trying to utilize the circumstances and the cultural development of people toward their own
And some people in the West might say, well, isn't that cultural appropriation and exploitation? Because in the West, there is a lot of targeting certain people's cultures and nationalities and ethnicities and races in order to make money and to exploit it. No, actually, this is about putting money in people's pockets. Uyghur people's pockets, Kazakhs people putting money in their pockets based on exploitation.
how they've always lived. That's not exploitation. That is simply trying to find unique ways of raising the standard of living. So use everywhere. I mean, the language part, yes. Like in order to conduct this interview, actually, with a Uyghur woman, she would speak in Uyghur because her Mandarin wasn't great. She was an older woman, a lot more younger people speak much more fluently, but she was an older woman, seemingly in retirement age.
or toward it, and her Mandarin was just okay. So she was speaking Uyghur, then somebody who spoke Uyghur had to interpret it to Mandarin, and then they had to interpret it to me. So it was very clunky, but it just goes to show that there is a lot of
not just respect, it's everywhere. It's not just respect. Yeah, people have the ability and capacity to practice their languages and their culture. But China is actually also trying to elevate that to the level of improving the lives of ethnic groups and people. I mean, you see, I've been to Gansu province too. It's a very similar thing, Gansu province.
It's like the cradle of the Silk Road. And there's so many efforts to use those circumstances, use those conditions, ensure that people who live there benefit from that. So China, in its poverty alleviation project and its attempt to raise the standard of living of people, is really moving beyond what is, I think, hard to grasp in the Western mind because we are so obsessed and we are forced to be so obsessed
based on our own heavily divided societies, we're so obsessed on these divisions. But China is looking at these differences as possibilities to improve the lives of everybody. Because if there are a lot of Chinese people of various ethnic groups, Han or otherwise, traveling to Xinjiang, well, Xinjiang gets a lot more income. And then they, Uyghur people, whoever is Kazakhs, then they have more income. And they can travel all over China, which they do, in order to get better jobs or...
perhaps just contribute to the economies of other places in China. So that's really the idea. And you see it everywhere. I mean, it's hard to escape. Even on the, you know this, Jason, on the Chinese UN, like you just look at the money and you have several languages on all the money. So people can understand what they are.
are using even if they don't speak the best of Mandarin. So that's a given. It's something that when I first went to Xinjiang was a surprise for me as I was told that Uyghur people were being suppressed in silence and that their culture was being erased. And then, you know, you get off, you know, we had taken a train there, you get off the train and then all the signs are Uyghur, Mandarin,
together. So it's like, okay, well, that's not something you would expect if there was this suppression. That only helps people get around. And so in that respect, I think just, again, going there just proves how
ridiculous these narratives that we hear from the West truly are. I just want to point out that I noticed this everywhere I've gone. I went to Inner Mongolia, and I see signage in Mongolian and in Chinese. And then you go to Xinjiang, and you see multiple languages on signage everywhere. I'm talking elevators, restaurant menus, public signage, highways, advertisements. I
cans of soda. You go to Shizong, also known as Tibet, and you have the same thing. Everything is in Tibetan and in Han Chinese. And so everywhere you go, people's local languages and cultures are celebrated. I wanted to talk really quickly about a book I
I read in college by Wendy Brown, a UC Berkeley professor. It was called Regulating Aversion. And she points out a criticism of U.S. culture, and that is tolerance. This idea that exists in America that we should be tolerating one another. And it's celebrated in American culture. Oh, yeah, don't
forget to tolerate the other people. Really? That seems like a really horrible way to understand each other. We need to put up with these other people that are not like ourselves, our own ethnic group. Whereas in China, you get the exact opposite, where
Like you were saying, so you go to Yunnan and you can experience local cultures there where people are celebrated for their local culture. People go to Qinghai and you experience some Tibetan culture and they are celebrated. They encourage you to, oh, you should wear this hat or buy our hat. Spend money on celebrating our culture and we'll do a dance for you that you can pay for.
You go to Xinjiang, people are also celebrated for their local culture. People are looked up to, you know, when people in China encounter someone from another group, they're like, oh, tell me about it. Can you speak some for me? There's not just this idea that we need to tolerate one another like we have in the United States.
But really, there's an appreciation. It's way beyond tolerance. It's completely different. The way that different ethnic groups interact in China is much more like we're all one family. And what are you bringing? What is your culture bringing to our larger national culture and enriching our culture? How is it enriching our culture? And there's just a celebration of one another. I think that there's a lot we can learn in America about that from China.
I wanted to ask you about socialism, though, unless you wanted to comment on culture, because I think that there's a great deal that you can help people understand about China's economy. You know, you get to travel in China. You have traveled a lot in China to explore red tourism.
also. So red tourism means socialist sites. And so what is red tourism and what kind of sites are there to see? Wow, that's a good question. Well, you know, I was lucky enough to go to the other. There are two I'll highlight. So in Shanghai, of course, there's the original meeting place of the Communist Party of China in 1921. And everyone should actually see the movie 1921.
It's an entertaining movie, Chinese movie, about what led up to the first meeting of the Communist Party of China and, of course, what transpired at the climax of it, which was the French Quarter and the ouster of the day they had to run away from their meeting place and actually took a red boat. I've been to the museum and in the meeting place of the first meeting of the Communist Party of China, and
And then also I've been to, so when the original members of the Communist Party of China had to flee, they actually took a boat, which is now called the Red Boat in China. And I've been to the province where they actually sailed to and then ratified the first constitution in Zhejiang. And
That, I've been to the museum, and of course, they have a display of the boat. It's not the original boat, but it's one that has been remastered that people go to, and you can read up on the history. It's actually a beautiful part in Zhejiang.
And so it's things like that. In my last trip to China, I was very fortunate to also go to in Beijing, the new Museum of the Communist Party of China. It's a massive, massive institution. I have pictures of myself. I was shocked by how big the building was in and of itself, where I just, it was like hard to get a picture because it's so big. You have to travel so far to
to get far enough away, it's almost as if our, you know, even our most advanced iPhones and smartphones are just not ready to be able to capture such huge institution. But in that building, you know, you can literally just learn the entire history of China
And that is true. And there are similar museums like that everywhere. So and that's only hitting the very surface of what red tourism is, which is simply tourism, the ability to, you know, engage with and have fun around the history of
Chinese socialism and how China's independence and its birth as the People's Republic of China is so intimately connected to it. I really want to do more Red Tourism, actually, because it's one of these things that I believe you just see as
as so valuable to Chinese people. For example, when I was at the meeting place in the museum in Shanghai, the Communist Party of China's first meeting, you know, it's like you'll capture really interesting moments of like little girls like saluting in front of it and they're paying, you know, it's there's something about something like red tourism and this idea of learning your history as a tourist activity, which is
a very important part of building continuity and ensuring that Chinese people not only know their history, but engage with it in a way where it's normalized. It's not something that is either forced upon you or the opposite, something to be ignored, which I think
I believe, is the experience in the collective West. We have so much more to hear about what our history really is. And it's all exceptionalism, Western exceptionalism, American exceptionalism. Everything has been wonderful and great. And then if something is not so great, if there's a blemish or something horrible,
horrific that has happened in the history of the United States, then it's like a mistake. And it's just something we need to acknowledge. It's not really normalized, though, right? It's not, or if it is normalized, it is normalized as something to disengage with, right? We should forget about slavery. We should forget about
the Monroe doctor. We should forget about, you know, the horrific way workers have been treated over the course of history here in the United States. We should forget about the way we expanded into Mexico and things like that because it was, you know, it's not pretty. So in China, though, it's different. People want to learn about the hardships and the sacrifices and
the true history that they have ultimately been born into when they grow up in modern China. And I think that is something that red tourism is trying to achieve. And it seems like it's only going to expand from here on out because I've been thinking a lot about this in terms of nationalism in China. There's a lot of talk in the Western media about nationalism in China, and it's viewed very crudely as almost like a China-only country.
way of looking at the world, at history as well. But the truth is, is that what China's version of nationalism is trying to do under the leadership of the Communist Party of China is build unity among one of the most diverse socially, ethnically, politically societies in the world and try to unite people around the rejuvenation of
the Chinese society, while also attempting to build out a different kind of economic model, which has not really been attempted successfully up until China has. So that's a big challenge. That's actually a big burden to carry if you think about it from the outside, like how hard that must be as a political system and economic system, and of course, for people attempting to do it.
So things like history, red tourism, all of this, there are so many qualities to it that I think serve this overall trajectory. And I hope to do more of it because it's always so interesting to see the continuity in each place. You're going to likely get a very similar depiction of this history, but you will also get a very unique, depending on where you are, history.
because of how diverse China is. You're listening to The Bridge.
Your depiction of the little girl saluting kind of reminded me of my own experience at a red tourism site in Wuhan. I just want to briefly share it. There were all these mothers with their children and they were taking turns standing in front of this very famous communist flag there at the museum. And each one was standing up there and they were going like this. And mommy was taking a picture of them. So I stood in line two with my wife and then I went up and did the same thing. And then the
What I found was really amusing is that all the children started giggling because there was like none of the adults were doing this. It was only the children and their moms taking pictures of them. So when I stood up there and did that, I think a lot of the kids thought it was like silly looking because I was basically like a giant child doing the same picture. But, you know, it's a very positive experience going to these red sites. I wanted to talk to you because you keep mentioning poverty alleviation in the first half of our interview.
And we keep also mentioning that Chinese economic system is unique. You know, a lot of people know that there have been, at least superficially, tremendous efforts to try to tackle poverty alleviation around the world and the United Nations, works in Africa and South America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, to try to work towards helping people out of poverty.
With some small success cases, but still poverty alleviation around the world remains a huge problem and has not been solved except for in China. In your assessment, what has made China's approach to poverty alleviation more successful than other regions around the world? Well, I was recently listening to our mutual friend and colleague Ben Norton on our mutual friend and colleague Li Jingjing's
And he said something that I think sums it up quite well, which is that his experience has been that China is by far the most sovereign country in the world. And it's this sovereignty that I think undergirds the basis of China's capacity to be able to alleviate poverty. That is the big difference because in the global south,
The dependency on the collective West, on the Western financial system, on the overall architecture that had originally put them in a position of extreme poverty through centuries of colonial and imperial exploitation, those are still firmly implanted in most parts, if not all parts of Africa, Latin America, and most of Asia.
And the numbers don't lie. The United Nations has data that shows that China makes up over the past 40 years or so, 70% of all of the world's poverty alleviation, which means basically every part of the world, including the collective West, is not alleviating poverty. And this is just something that has been observed by mainstream and non-mainstream economists, that there is this huge dip, a race to the bottom, as some have called it.
In China, that doesn't exist. Actually, in China, the curve is different. The line is different. Actually, there's been a race to the top and everybody's standard of living has improved. And so China's sovereignty undergirds this. And that sovereignty is financial sovereignty. It's political sovereignty. It's sovereignty in its...
defense system. It's an overall ability to do what China has done, which is plan its economy within the framework of the global market system. This is very unique. This is something that the Soviet Union, which China has learned many lessons from, was unable to even attempt because the Soviet Union was blockaded
from a lot of the Western financial and technological economic architecture throughout its entire existence. And that's played a huge role in its inability to maintain legitimacy and to maintain itself into the modern era. China has done what
the Soviet Union and other socialist models of economic development could only really dream of, which is it made a calculated decision, a very firm decision in the late 1970s with the opportunity of normalizing with the United States. And finally, in 1971, seven years before reform and opening up,
to be able to be recognized as the legal government of China. Yes, the United States spent 22 years keeping the People's Republic of China out of the UN system. And therefore, because the consequences of that are great, if you're not recognized as a legitimate government, that essentially means that you have sanctions across the board on you. And it is difficult to
As we have seen in a lot of history, it is difficult to go against, let's say, the United States hegemon when it says a country is not like government, is not legitimate. You start trading with that government. Well, what happens to you? This is the conundrum that a lot of sanction we just saw the consequences in Syria, the consequences of people blaming Russia and China. Why didn't they do more?
Well, if you try to enhance and increase trade and development with a sanctioned economy and a government, there are secondary consequences to that which can be enacted onto you. Not only that, but also that sanctioned economy may have actual difficulties being able to meet
a win-win bargain, a deal to be able to conduct actual business, you have to be able to conduct business and sanctions prevent that. But back to China, the ability for China to integrate itself in the world economy after normalization and opening up and reform has been a complete boon for it. Because even though standard of living and
economic conditions were actually improving under the big bad era of Mao Zedong. It was improvement within the framework of poverty, essentially, because as I said, China was not only sanctioned, there was a massive Cold War, there were attempts to isolate China. I said earlier in the program, China was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1978. It had no industry in 1978, essentially. It had very little industry. It had zero
high value added industry. Essentially, you could say it was almost 100% agrarian and rural, even in 1978, almost to a significant degree. So,
even though lives improved during the Mao era, it was improvement in conditions of want. And so opening up a reform, integrating the world economy, allowed China to say to the world, well, we have something you might want, which is labor, which is a massive market. And what we want
is we want the ability to learn and to have access to and to trade around the infrastructure that it takes to build a highly developed economy. China's goal now is to become a modern socialist country by 2050. It has had a goal to
increase the level of development, move from a low-income country to a moderate-income country, which it is essentially now, to a high-income country with socialist characteristics. So its capacity to do this, its ability to open up to the world while also maintaining sovereignty, because one big difference between China's economic development model and, let's say, most development models in the global south that are dependent
on the collective west and subjugated subordinated to it is that china can tell china has the sovereignty to tell western businesses to tell anyone who does business with china foreign direct investment that it wants a fair deal that if you're going to do business in china that there are of course going to be industries that are not going to be sold off you're not going to get rich you're not going to take anything from china that isn't within the agreement
of any kind of joint partnership. So China has been able to say, we have a big market, we have all these workers who want jobs and who will build your stuff and they'll build it fast and they'll build it well. And that was a boon for the collective West. And it became a boon for China because they were able to learn the productive processes, access the technology and
and then be able to implement it on its own. So now we've come to the point where if we just use the example, for example, of renewable energy and
even just car production. China now is number one in the world. That is ridiculous when in 1978, essentially nobody had a car. Nobody. People were still riding around in rickshaw carriages and horses. So that is an astounding achievement. Not only is China number one in the world in all automobile vehicle production, but it is also number one in the world in electric vehicle production.
And Elon Musk is in the news all the time now. And Elon Musk and his corporation Tesla is a case in point here because Tesla was once in the world, like the only big company, big electric vehicle producer. And then you had European companies now compete. And then you have China. Well,
Well, Elon Musk has big investments in China. And even Elon Musk was saying that the United States needs to put tariffs on these electric vehicles because it's going to hurt him because China just does it better. But how did China end up doing that? Did they steal Elon Musk Tesla's ideas? No, they entered into the arrangement. They produced the cars and then they learned how to produce the cars themselves. And then a company corporation like BYD did it themselves and did it better.
And that, and then sold better cars. And they were able to do this because the government supports industry. This is always what drives me just off the wall. As you hear in the Western mainstream media, I'm sure you've seen this, Jason. They'll say, Janet Yellen says it every other week.
China does unfair subsidies to its industries, which is so unfair. Literally the entire history of capitalist production has been underwritten by government subsidies. How in the
You just look at the earliest periods that there was a lot of government support for the earliest periods of capitalist membership, but not even getting into this. But at the height of U.S. industrial production during World War II, that was completely underwritten by the U.S. government. The U.S.
capitalist economy would not have recovered from the Great Depression if the United States government did not pour enormous sums of money into its military production, which then had a ripple effect across Europe.
all of U.S. production. And that is what led to a boom in industrial jobs. And that is what led to this famed golden age of middle class livelihoods for a certain section of workers, which ended when, guess what? The government stopped doing this. And companies said, it's actually cheaper to exploit you harder and to get rid of these jobs and go to cheaper places than
because the government is cutting back on everything except for tax breaks. So that is the story of the United States. But in China, China sees industrial development and the development of the livelihoods of workers, as well as the development of the overall manufacturing sector in China is so important that, yes, the government supports this.
But that is not at the cost of innovation because guess what? BYD, that's a company. They produce cars for profit and they do it very, very, very well. And they are now the champion of the new energy vehicle industry worldwide. So China has been able to accomplish poverty alleviation in part because of all of these macro economic advantages that
China's sovereignty has underwritten and made possible. Now, one last point, because a lot of people might look at this as purely an economic development, but the truth is that China's ability to alleviate poverty is very much a political policy. It is a policy of the Chinese government
which is led by the Communist Party of China. And during the final stages of the battle against extreme poverty, which was won during COVID-19, mind you, something that is just unheard of, given that the entire world economy was on fire and crashed, given that extreme poverty everywhere else during the COVID-19 pandemic went up astronomically. In China, they finished the
extreme poverty portion of the poverty alleviation program. And I believe it was around November 2020. So this is
is a policy of the party, the Communist Party of China. And thousands of party members have actually sacrificed everything for this, including their lives, in order to go to the most remote areas of China, to serve them, to live there, to be among them, and to bring the technical, the economic,
the resources, all of that, the know-how necessary to raise people's standard of living and do it on the basis of, it's not handouts. It's not just, you know, in the United States is a very neoliberal mindset of, oh, you're just giving things to poor people. No, actually China's philosophy, well, China is not neoliberal. They don't have any problem with, you know, people getting what they need in
In order to have an economy that is both robust and innovative and all of this, poverty alleviation is actually about helping people help themselves. So party members go there, they bring their knowledge, they bring their expertise, they bring resources, and then they were helping and they still are helping people in the most remote areas be able to develop
economies for themselves and to be able to live and make, participate in businesses, form their own businesses, advance the tools that they use for their farms or whatever they're doing, you know, whether they're making clothes, e-commerce is a huge thing now, streaming, right? Like can we bring their brain streaming services to the, and content creation to the most rural areas and selling the fruits. I learned that in
uh, horror ghosts in the, the, uh, dry port, they call it a big thing is all the fruits that come in from Kazakhstan and everywhere. And, you know, how do you sell those? Well, you stream and you make e-commerce and you, uh, help people get out of poverty through these kinds of business ventures. So this is how poverty is very truncated and, uh,
only surface level, can't get too much deeper explanation for how China was able to do it. It goes all the way from macroeconomic policy to the people being served by a party who sees poverty alleviation as not simply just good for the Chinese economy, but actually a duty in order to serve and better the lives of Chinese people. And it will continue on
The battle against extreme poverty was won, but now they're looking at relative poverty. Now they're looking toward modern socialism, which is where there is no kinds of poverty. There is no, well, okay, you can meet your basic needs, but you can't live well. That is going to end in the next 25 years or so. And...
If, of course, if we get there, because one of the reasons why the United States is so mad at China is not simply because it's a rival, it's an autocracy, all these talking points, lies, or even that it is some kind of geopolitical juggernauts challenging the United States.
Now, the real reason why the United States as an empire does not want to see China rise like it is, is because China offers this example to people in the modern era, which not only will entice the global south, but I believe will entice the people in the collective west who are seeing their conditions drop and decline and are really concerned
yearning for what it might be like if their lives improved. So if you see that, it
in other places, well, you might get some ideas yourself. This actually was a big part of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was developing in its own way, when it was going from a completely war-torn society to one of the, you know, industrial challenger militarily and economically, and people's lives were improving during the mid-20th century. A big...
point of emphasis for U.S. elites was to try to instill anti-communism in workers because they were worried that if workers didn't get what they wanted in the United States, they would look at the Soviet Union and say, well, maybe workers are doing better there. And
One of the interesting things was during the New Deal and all of these policies, social welfare policies that workers were able to win, they were won in part because the United States didn't want to see workers say, well, if the United States is not going to give us this, like this political and economic system.
Maybe we want a different system. And while the Soviet Union, of course, wasn't perfect, had a lot of problems. This is like the Soviet Union was this prime example. It had a lot of issues it had to deal with. The point is that when any alternative springs up, the United States has this long history of wanting to prevent any involvement with it or any kind of inspiration from it.
Now, China has perhaps the most successful model of what it calls socialism. People debate this. Is it socialism? Whatever. Well, China calls it socialism. It's socialism with Chinese characteristics. So let's call it socialism. It's successful nonetheless. It's doing the job. It's improving people's lives.
And it's doing so on the basis of developing one of the most modern, innovative, and advanced economies we've ever seen. So in that sense, it's incredibly successful. And the United States is very worried that because it's on the other, it's going the other way. The elites know this. They might be making a lot of money, but guess what?
Look what happened to the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Like, yeah, you can make a lot of money, but people are suffering and people are very mad. So they don't want to see those angry people say, hmm, is there something better than this?
Do we have to live like this? And if they see Chinese people, which they eventually will, this is inescapable. You cannot hide the fact that Chinese people are, you know, seeing 10% pay increases every single year that, you know, their pay rises way above inflation. They're enjoying electric vehicles, 90% homeownership rates, high speed rail, etc.
China is overtaking the United States in all these advanced technologies. You can't hide that forever. And the United States isn't even trying because they keep bashing China, the elites, the propaganda, corporate media. They keep bashing China. And it's almost one of these things where, man, you know, American people, they're very susceptible to not...
knowing what's going on. Very isolated people. They don't travel very often. They don't have a lot of money to travel. Some Americans have a lot of arrogance and they don't believe certain parts of the world are worthwhile. China has been one of those parts of the world where a lot of people in the United States have been taught that it's inferior. So...
It's the United States which may end up educating people about China because they keep talking about how bad it is every single day. And soon people, and I think it's already happening, people are going to wonder, well,
What is it really all about? I see it with the Europeans. I mean, I see it all over YouTube now. I made a couple of videos about my travels and I get a lot of videos sent to me ever since China lifted a lot of these visa restrictions and now is visa free for so many dozens and dozens of countries. A lot of Westerners going to China, they're posting about it and they're not posting badly about it. It's not something you can keep a secret. So the United States is hoping to use this next
five or so years. It has a timetable, five to ten years, to do anything it can to arrest China's development and stop this, but it's not going to work. That was a very thorough answer, and brilliant, and I have so many more questions, so hopefully you will agree to come back on the show in a few months. Sure, yes, let's do it. All right, thank you so much for your time, Danny Haifeng. Thank you. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.