Wen Tiejun, "The Modernization of the Chinese People"

Wen Tiejun, “The Modernization of the Chinese People”[1]

​Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Wen Tiejun (b. 1951), who spent much of his career at Renmin University, is a radical left-wing intellectual best known for his expertise on rural issues.  His parents were professors at Renmin University, and by his own admission, he grew up knowing very little about the “life of the people,” but eventually spent eleven years in the countryside before entering university in the late 1970s, and another eleven years in the countryside engaged in “rural reconstruction” after finishing university.  Wen’s admirers describe him as a force of nature, who toured China on a motorcycle for several months in 1994, and visited Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1991, as the Soviet world imploded—both with an eye to understanding the “people’s suffering.”  His scholarly interests extend well beyond rural issues and embrace a broad range of left-wing concerns, including American imperialism, the power of the US dollar, and sustainable development, among many others.  A good deal of his work is available in English, and can be downloaded on Wen’s webpage on the site of the Global University for Sustainability, of which Wen is a founding member.  Wen is also a dynamic speaker, as his many YouTube talks demonstrate (see here for one example).  
 
The text translated here was originally published in 2000 in Tianya/天涯, a very avant-garde journal at the time, and was republished during the recent 20th Party Congress, on October 20, 2022, by Baoma, an avowedly Marxist site, and on October 23 by the Beijing Cultural Review, which is more middle-of-the-road.  The text was surely republished because of the Party Congress and/or as a commentary on China’s current and future path, and if recycling older texts at critical moments is not unusual in China’s intellectual world (see one example here), that fact that two quite different sites recycled the same text at the same time is quite unusual.  I suspect that Wen’s text made a splash when it was originally published and continues to resonate today with a certain audience.
 
Both Baoma and Beijing Cultural Review link Wen’s text to the idea of “Chinese-style modernization 中国式现代化,” one of the themes of the recent Party Congress (although hardly a novelty).  Wen’s essay is certainly about that theme, but whether what he has to say about it accords with Xi Jinping’s notion of what “Chinese-style modernization” means is hard to tell. 
 
Wen’s central focus is on China as a rural country with extremely limited resources.  He comes very close to saying that 20th century China largely forgot those basic facts in its rush to industrialize, which always favors capital (and often foreign capital, in China’s case) at the expense of labor.  Wen does not seem to be saying “Deng Xiaoping finally got things right when he embraced markets and competition,” as do many Chinese writers, but instead remains skeptical of reform and opening because it has once again ignored Chinese farmers and focused on “opening” China’s cities to the needs of the world economy.  When China “crossed the river by feeling the stones” over the course of reform and opening, those “stones” remained basically Western concepts, in Wen’s eyes—meaning that China was attempting to copy someone else’s modernization.
 
In the twenty years and more since Wen first wrote this piece, China has of course addressed some of the problems that concerned him, notably by encouraging rapid urbanization.  In 2000, China’s rural population was 70%—at least this is the figure Wen gives in his text—while by 2022 China’s urban population has reached almost 65%, a huge change designed to increase productivity and domestic consumption.  Baoma and Beijing Cultural Review could have republished Wen’s article to celebrate China’s urbanization, but neither platform mentions it in its editorial introduction (both of which are quite vague in their own way).
 
I suspect that the editors chose to republish Wen’s essay because he talks a great deal about China’s people’s need for jobs.  As Wen himself puts it:
 
“The number one issue impacting China's economic, social and political development was, is, and forever will be the employment issue. No matter how decisions are made, decisions affecting national policy should start with this, and no concrete, lower-level policy measure should be considered in isolation from the employment issue.  No matter what system China is trending toward, this system must meet the medium- and long-term developmental needs of the Chinese people as a whole, not the short-term interests of a few large capital groups. Thus the state must keep a strict eye one the relationship between investment projects driven by foreign capital and the expansion of employment. Capital- and technology-intensive industrial projects, however efficient and modern they may be, cannot be blindly adopted if they do not increase employment. We have brought in many large-scale modern production lines, which were developed in the West where labor is in short supply, and thus can improve efficiency by saving on labor, but in China, where do we expect these people to go?  Theories that seek to increase the density of capital to promote international competitiveness and maximize the capital gains of enterprises often ignore the employment issue, which is something worth thinking about.” 
 
Employment remains a major concern in China as Xi Jinping begins his third mandate.  One reason of course is China’s “zero dynamic” pandemic management strategy, which has put an immense strain on China’s economy, and particularly on industries that provide a great deal of low-end jobs, such as delivery services and food preparation.  But overall youth unemployment in China is almost 20%, and underemployment of college educated youth is a real problem, if harder to measure.  Everyone cares about jobs in China—economists, workers, parents, and young people—and it is patently obvious to most people that the regime’s pandemic management strategy is based in politics, not economics.  Wen Tiejun also talks about the importance of small and medium enterprises, which of course might have seemed more pertinent in 2000, but which may still resonate with people out of work or looking for work, and for whom Xi Jinping’s “high tech” solutions might seem irrelevant.
 
Of course, it is crazy that in 2022, this is how major media platforms signal their government that it might want to think about the employment issue.  But isn’t this where China is heading, and has been for some time?  Anyone who has lived in China knows that Chinese people—and especially Chinese intellectuals—are deeply into politics.  What struck me over the course of the past few weeks, when the Western media ran story after story about Xi Jinping and the Party Congress, was how little those themes came up outside of major propaganda organs in China.  Chinese intellectuals are of course deeply concerned about their country’s future direction, whatever their thoughts about the current regime, but they did not put those concerns in print, because they cannot.

Translation

One
 
Over the course of modern history, both the New Culture Movement and the Cultural Revolution proposed the slogan of "criticizing Confucius." At the time of the New Culture Movement, China had been forcibly opened by the Westerners' powerful ships and guns, and facing internal turmoil and external aggression, and the intellectuals finally cried out, saying that if China wanted science and democracy, a complete rupture with Confucianism was inevitable. 
 
At the time, Hu Shi advocated "total Westernization," which was progressive when compared with the slogans of the Qing ruling class:  “Chinese learning as essence, Western learning as application,” or “learn the barbarians’ techniques in order to control the barbarians.”  But looking back from the turn of the 21st century, Hu Shi’s idea looks naive. Under the historical conditions of the time, we could only slavishly copy others, to the point of forgetting ourselves.[2]  A hundred years later, haven’t we already progressed to the point of crossing the river by feeling the stones?  A country like China with a 5,000-year cultural tradition should understand what it truly wants. In terms of the strict constraints imposed by China's national conditions, we do not have the conditions to pursue American-style modernization, so China cannot take developed Western countries as the model to pursue and finally surpass. Such a question may strike the reader as nonsensical, but does this mean that we Chinese should give up the hope of achieving modernization? 
 
What does China really want, and what do we, the Chinese people of this generation, really want?  This is indeed worth thinking about. Why is it that every day our public opinion blathers on about is always this or that successful person, telling us that if we are not like them, then we are wasting our lives?  It’s the same with the fat cats that we see all over the place.  Everyone is striving their hardest to be a fat cat, but most of us will never make it, and will suffer for having tried.  
 
China is not the United States. In terms of the socio-economic background in which traditional Chinese culture was grounded, the core of Confucianism was the group, and the social basis of a primitive hydraulic agricultural civilization[3] with Chinese characteristics was necessarily production carried out by the group.  This was a necessary cultural expression. Confucianism's notion of "benevolence" insists that "benevolence requires two people,"[4] not individualism or maximization of individual interests, as in Western theory. 
 
The Western culture of individualism [lit., “the culture that takes the individual as its gene”] has its roots in the primitive clan society of hunting and gathering, a way of life that can foreground the individual. This is fundamentally different from the primitive agriculture that has developed in China since the times of "Shennong tasting a hundred herbs 神农尝百草"[5] (in which people had to share the Yellow River system to irrigate their fields, and at the same time had to band together to fight floods). Later on, the primary accumulation of Western industrialization paved the way for piracy and plunder, and colonial wars, and the so-called development of the New World meant killing off most of the indigenous peoples and taking possession of their resources. As resources were depleted, the competition to develop maritime resources extended to the North and South poles. 
 
While industrialization used only traditional means to fight over traditional spaces, a new addition in recent times is the competition for symbolic resources. Some scholars point out that, broadly speaking, symbolic resources include all the norms and software systems employed in the exchange of human information, including all standards, such as the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) quality certification system, and the corresponding institutional systems, etc. Some scholars even believe that the symbolic system includes the most fundamental "discourse system." After opening up the realm of non-material resources, the control of the symbolic system moved on to the spatial system, the high-tech system, and finally the discourse system.  There are also those who argue that the current definition of the scope of intellectual property rights favors developed countries and that all symbolic systems associated with computer software are controlled by the West. The various sanctions and disputes arising from the infringement of intellectual property rights in developing countries show that the right to invent symbols, the right to create systems, and the right to control systems have become a new hegemony. 
 
China's pursuit of modernization, the core of which is industrialization, has been accompanied by painful self-criticism and an intellectual revolution aimed at Chinese identity. The New Culture Movement, which was bourgeois and revolutionary at the beginning of the 20th century, changed China's linguistic norms and modes of thinking, copied the basic logic [lit., “symbols” again] of the English language and its rules of use, and established a modern Chinese grammar and a radical cultural model that were both "anti-traditional."
 
It is no accident that the later proletarian "Cultural Revolution" also proposed to overthrow the traditional, group-based ideological system based on hydraulic agriculture. Although these two cultural changes were different in that one involved the “bourgeoisie” and the other the “proletariat,” they had one thing in common, namely, they laid the foundation for China to identify with the Western symbolic system or to submit to the hegemony of Western discourse. 
 
Of course, this does not mean that in the past, we accepted the totality of Western thought and norms uncritically.   But it is true that in the past we did not have the occasion to carry out a thorough attack on these “weapons of criticism,” which also came from the West, and for this reason, with the exception of Mao’s criticism of “rote book learning,” one of the bloody lessons of the war years, and of rectification, both of which are valuable reference points, criticism at other moments has inevitably been somewhat biased.[6]   
 
The question before us now is:  if it took us a century to learn from the West, so that we have finally staggered our way over to the river that we are crossing feeling the stones, then for what’s left of our river passage, where the “stones” we are “feeling” are the symbolic norms defined by the West, and where if we don’t follow proper standards we fall in the river, then how do we proceed?  This is why some serious intellectuals seem all the more confused in recent years. What distinguishes these more serious thinkers from those vulgar brown-nosers who flatter the powerful is that their reflection has led to greater intellectual division and reorganization.  This in turn has gradually produced groups such as the "New Left," the "Center-Left," the "New Conservatives" and the "Center-Right," all of whom split away from the Old Left that believed in Stalinism and the New Right that followed Western libertarianism.
 
Two 

The issue of "globalization" is being discussed today with great abandon. As we know from reading the newspapers, the Central Economic Conference held at the end of 1999 pointed to three major trends, namely globalization, multinational corporations, and technological progress. It is clear that we have basically identified the stones that the West has put in the river and decided these represent irreversible trends.  But we have never promised to go so far as "convergence." In the negotiations leading up to China’s entry to the WTO, some concessions were made in exchange for a ticket to globalization. But does this mean that we already know where the new century is going, this early on? To mind, if we want to understand modern problems, we have to take the past as our mirror. 
 
The twentieth century saw three completely different types of governments—the Qing dynasty, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic—but the one thing these three different governments had in common was that they all had to pursue Western-style industrialization. The Qing tried to industrialize by learning from the Great Powers, and failed; subsequently, the Republic of China began to pursue bureaucratic capital-led industrialization by following the United Kingdom and the United States, and also failed; finally, New China followed the Soviet Union, and before the smoke of the Korean War had cleared, went down the path of state-led industrialization, and this time was relatively successful in completing the task of primitive capital accumulation, although not without paying a price.  And now there are many people propose once again that we learn from the UK and the US and that “we keep reforming until we get back to pre-revolutionary times.”
 
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Manchus proposed the idea of "learning the barbarians’ techniques in order to control the barbarians," the idea being that they would reject their discourse system and learn only their “clever tricks.” But over the course of the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, China was dealt a series of blows that left her defenseless. In the First Sino-Japanese War, the war reparations received by the Japanese, including the fee paid by the Qing so that Japan would abandon Liaodong,[7] amounted to 230 million taels of silver, which was the sum of four years of China’s gross national product plus the income of the Chinese treasury for 17 years. This means that, all other things being equal, Japan immediately leapt ahead of China by four years, in addition to which the Chinese government had no income and no capacity to invest in industrialization for 17 years.  This war thus put Japan twenty years ahead of China in terms of industrialization. 
 
Next, in 1900, the Boxer Rebellion wound up meaning that China had to pay 450 million taels of silver to the Eight-Power Allied Forces (equivalent to about thirty years of income for the Manchu treasury). Adding the effects of the two incidents together, this put China fifty years behind Japan, which was in the early stages of industrialization.  How could China make progress in the face of pressures like these?  So at the time, intellectuals truly felt that they had no choice but to yell “Down with Confucianism!”  Prior to this, the Qing government had already proposed the abolition of the imperial examination system and the opening of new schools during the Hundred Days Reform. Thus the actual measures taken by the Qing government and the New Culture intellectual movement of the early Republican period were in fact linked and in a way "tacitly coordinated." 
 
In the past, the stability of the feudal dynasties was maintained by the examination system, and one of the very important functions of this system was to serve as a mechanism for social stability. When the path of career advancement through success in the examinations was abolished, this meant that rural intellectuals could never change their class status and peasant identity, and restless intellectuals could organically identify with rebellious peasants, like Lu Zhishen and Li Kui in the novel The Water Margin. In fact, the participation of such intellectuals was a  necessary condition for the success of a peasant revolution. The emperor could also make use of the examination to sustain the regime by putting together a corps of “street sweepers 清道夫,” made up of exceptionally hard working and devoted rural youths whose only dream, once they passed the exams, would be to sustain the “way of the saints 圣贤之道.”[8]  Some of these, armed with a magic sword given by the emperor, would go out as plain-clothes “peace-keepers," punishing corrupt officials, easing social conflicts, and maintaining social stability.[9] 
 
The shocks caused by the imperialists’ forcing China to "open five ports for commerce" (eventually even internal river ports) were equally violent. Prior to this, China's porcelain, tea, silk, etc. were exported through a single port in Kowloon, Guangdong, which required thousands of transporters and provided employment to poor or bankrupt peasants.[10] At the time, there were many gangs made up of helpless rural wanderers who were beyond the control of the traditional village clan community. A large number of landless peasants in the countryside were unskilled workers, who could still support their families as "porters," otherwise they had to steal or become bandits. The opening of many ports at once led to the unemployment of tens of millions of transport workers. This part of the lumpen proletariat was the occupation with the most propensity toward organization, and possessed as well the wherewithal to ally with rural intellectuals no longer in control of their fate, which meant that rebellions might succeed. Thus it was that a peasant revolution made possible by these conditions brought down the Manchu dynasty in the early 20th century. As for Sun Yat-sen's bourgeois-democratic revolutionary ideas, not only were they understood by very few people at the time, but they also failed in practice, leaving him no choice but to opt for the nationalist slogan of "expelling the Tartars and restoring China" as a mobilizing banner. 
 
The true situation concerning the century-old Revolution of 1911 was: one of the main forces of the revolution was made up of rural intellectuals who could no longer change their class status by following Confucius and Mencius after the abolition of the examination system, and the other force was made up of organized gangs composed of hoodlums.  Much of the Chinese army under the dynasties was also made up of hoodlums, who were also controlled by the gangs, which meant that the revolutionary forces could join up with the gangs, making use of the gangs’ nationalism and their tight feudal organizational system to spark uprisings.  No matter how democratic Sun Yat-sen's so-called democratic revolution was in theory, in practice, these were the only two forces he had available. After the revolution, the warlords seized power divided up the regions among themselves, which in turn gave the imperialist powers yet another opportunity. Thus we see that the bourgeois democratic revolution in old China, where there was almost no bourgeoisie, had no chance of succeeding, which I see as a historical tragedy. 

Three

I have had eleven years of life experience as a grassroots worker and peasant, beginning from when I was sent down to the countryside in 1968. In addition, after graduating from university, I spent another eleven years at the grassroots level working on rural reform pilot areas as part of my long experience in policy research. These two eleven year periods have really played a decisive role in the evolution of my thinking. 
 
Defining the precise frame of reference for thinking about China's modernization is a huge topic that is difficult to address in simple terms. In the academic world, the traditional Marxist theoretical system made sense in the context of [lit., was subordinated to the demands of ] the institutional development of the first thirty years of reform, and as Mao Zedong put it, "without the skin, where will the hair grow “皮之不存，毛将焉附?"[11] This theoretical system was very solid. However, the new generation of Chinese scholars has been quite influenced by Western studies and is opposed to the traditional theoretical system in many ways. It is hard to establish one’s stance when two systems oppose one another. First of all, you can't use the discourse of the opposing side to speak, but instead have to speak your piece in your own terms, otherwise your own side will of course criticize you, saying that you are not presenting yourself as you should. 
 
As for the nature of the "hair" and what "skin" it should be attached to, and whether China at present has such a "skin"…In 1988, when my thoughts were still hazy, I published a "crisis theory" in the Economic Weekly, arguing that the fluctuations in the process of China's economic development were in line with this theory, which I used to analyze the cycles of economic crises since the founding of the People’s Republic through the end of the 1980s. The Xinhua Digest reprinted my article, but it drew a lot of criticism. Beginning in 1992, I once again published articles like "State Capital Redistribution and Private Capital Re-accumulation," and "Macro Fluctuations and Development", which were also reprinted in Xinhua Digest and Strategy and Management, arguing that state capital is formed by the appropriation of labor surplus value, and that state-owned economic reform should begin thinking about property rights by restoring labor's surplus value.
 
At this point, Western theories were already completely dominant in the academic world, and some “neo-scholars 新派学人” proclaimed that there was no surplus value problem in the modern West, and since there was no surplus value, then how could Chinese workers have any?  The good thing is that I was in a position to experiment, and my friends in the theoretical community with different views opposed each other, but they were able to accept or tolerate me regardless whether they were on the left or the right. The reason for this is probably that for many years I did not take part in theoretical debates and saw myself as someone who carried out experiments. What experiments accomplish is simple, which is to extract perceptual knowledge directly from practice. Although these perceptions are different from normative research, still, "practice is the sole criterion of truth," and my views are based on deep and localized research. 
 
There are only two ways to conduct scientific research.  The first is to analyze, compare, and retest the experience of previous generations. The other is the experimental method, that is, to take certain concepts and ideas, and find out if they are right or wrong through a process of experimentation.  To date, my opinion is that, within the social sciences, law, advertising, and merchandising can use the experimental method, such as focus groups, for example, or in law you can use a one-way mirror to observe the object of the experiment.  Economics can rarely use experimental methods. The methodological breakthrough we made in our rural pilot project has been to apply the experimental method of the natural sciences to social science. We need a lot of investigation and research, starting from the redefinition of the most basic theoretical categories, gradually understanding the essential correlation between different categories, and eventually grasping the basic concepts that make up the actual situation in China. In 1986 and 1987, my colleagues and I transformed major issues of medium- and long-term rural development into different experimental projects, to be carried out in different regions. 
 
Some people say that if the idea is to prove some governmental theory, then it is difficult to identify the real problems through experiments. To my mind, this depends on who is doing the experiments, the attitude of the person who is involved in the concrete details. If you are a serious scholar, you can still do a lot of science in the experiment, even while respecting the wishes of the authorities concerning the point of the analysis. I am not holding myself out as the model of a serious scholar, but I do take what I do seriously, to the point of offending a good many people and earning the occasional criticism of the leadership.  In many places, today's official culture is to "report the good news but not the bad," and according to economic “rationality,” those of us who are involved should “maximize our interests.”  However, people like me who dare to report bad news even if it makes trouble are also "maximizing our interests" in terms of our conscience. Most of the criticism I have received has also been beneficial. Looking at life from this perspective, I feel at peace.
 
The extent to which an “ism” is true or false, high or low, often can only be determined when they are investigated and experimented on as "problems." For example, many people believe that privatization is China’s only solution, and at the outset, I had the same attitude when I started my experiments.  But the result I obtained in my particular case was that the conditions are not ripe for the privatization of land, the biggest asset in China at present, and that all we can do is stabilize collective ownership.  The experiment proved that it is impossible for the government to provide social security for 900 million rural people, in which case rural farm land assumes the function of subsistence security for the farmers; the condition for the state to cede land ownership to the village community is that this collective assume the basic security of the farmers.
 
China has a large peasant population and few arable land resources per capita. Above and beyond meeting their own subsistence needs, the amount of per capita agricultural product generated by peasant families that can be put into the market as surplus is very limited. Consequently, small farmers, self-sufficient, or semi-self-sufficient actors, are not completely under the control of the market. No government in the world has the capacity to establish social security for a large number of decentralized, self-sufficient small farmers. In addition, agricultural production is very tied to nature, and the limited surplus farmers can produce must be used to prevent natural and man-made disasters, because it is not even cost-effective for insurance companies to engage in agricultural insurance. Farmers must build their own reserves and set aside grain against possible disasters, which means that the grain that enters the markets is increasingly limited.  Only when the government can solve the problems of medical care, employment, insurance, and education for farmers, as it does for city dwellers, can agriculture be completely commoditized and farmland privatized. 
 
To push the generalization a bit further, because China is a country with an extreme shortage of resources and serious overpopulation, and because the high growth achieved over the last two decades has been understood as a kind of "slipshod growth" which came with the sacrifice of resources and the environment, when the ratio between resources and population is so uneven, if a minority of people possess more resources, then the majority has less.  Privatization inevitably leads to large-scale social conflicts. In fact, neither those who possess resources nor those who do not want such conflicts, which increase the social cost of economic development (China’s violent conflicts or revolutions in the past represent just such social costs). Unless of course someone here can manage to do as Europe did, and move the conflicts somewhere else through colonial plunder. 

Four 
 
The main actors in revolutions throughout Chinese history were all peasants, and there is a common thread in what caused these revolutions, in other words, that society had a contradiction that fundamentally limited its development to a certain degree:  this was the contradiction between population and resources, which I call "a high degree tension of between people and land." Many people have looked at this and come to the same conclusion.  The large-scale wars appearing throughout China's history over thousands of years are an illustration of this. While on the surface, the war appears to have been caused by a natural disaster or an isolated event that led to a peasant uprising, in fact a serious imbalance between population and resources preceded the event, while society sought to cling to the system in which the minority commanded most of the resources. 
 
Many people will question my assertion that, at the very least, China's land holdings per capita are much higher than Japan's. In fact, it is problematic to simply see this relationship in terms of proportions. 
 
First, the ratio of Japan's population to arable land area appears to be low, but in fact this ratio is much higher than in China, because Japan developed its economy before China did, so that its agricultural population accounts for less than 10% of the total, while China is still at 70%. So if you simply compare on the basis of a country's population and arable land resources, Japan is lower than China (as are Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), but they are highly industrialized countries or regions. 
 
Second, both Japan and India have proportionally more arable land than China. Although China has a large land area, arable land is extremely limited. In terms of the ratio of agricultural labor to arable land, the average American farmer has 828 acres while the average Chinese has 4, a difference of more than 200 times, which is beyond comparison.  Although we do have advantages over some developing countries in terms of mineral and marine resources, looking only at agricultural resources, China comes up lacking. China has one of the smallest arable land areas per agricultural population in the world. 
 
People often say that if something goes wrong in China, the problem is with agriculture. The media is full of statements like this. In fact, China’s problem is peasants, and the development of the countryside, on which 900 million peasants depend. Therefore, China has no purely agricultural economic problem, and saying that “there is a problem with agriculture” is really only a comment on this situation.  I’m about to publish a book with China Economic Press which looks specifically at the issue of basic institutions in China's villages.  Some people say that rural reforms have forged ahead, and thus should take a back seat until urban problems are resolved. But the lessons we have learned over this decade concerning rural issues are clear enough, in the sense that the economy follows its own logic, and it is not a question of one part of the economy “waiting for” the other.  Once we put a stop to rural reforms, problems will mount up, and what is happening now is that the accumulated problems are making themselves known, and putting constraints on national economic development.
 
There are some new changes are taking place in rural China. The direct elections in the countryside, which the people call "random selection 海选," are deeply meaningful. Over the course of thousands of years of history, China has had a large agricultural population with low productivity.  Per capita agricultural surplus has been very limited, and has been largely absorbed by local governments, so that little of it went to the center, and even the emperors were not sure of their grain supply.  When the power of the emperor declined, unrest was inevitable.  Thus the reason for the relative lack of change over the course of the 2000 and more years since the Qin dynasty set up the basic institutions of the Chinese government, in which state power did not extend below the level of the county, was because there was no need to set up large local government institutions, which lowered the costs of governance.  Villages below the county level traditionally practiced self-governance, and problems were generally solved by "compacts between the gentry and the people," and once the problem was solved the county government was informed, a system called “the government signs off on the people’s agreements.” County officials paid no attention to matters which the gentry could handle on their own, so that as long as the people did not bring suit, the officials remained unconcerned, and only intervened when the people brought their injustices to the yamen gate. 
 
After the establishment of New China, the Communist Party, in order to extract resources from the countryside for the purposes of industrialization, strengthened its leadership in the villages, and the Party's power and authority extended to the lowest levels, which means that it was only in these past decades that the government established overall control of the countryside. But for the same reason, the cost of sustaining this political system is very high. Pilot measures to restore village autonomy throughout the country were launched in 1988, and after more than a decade of trial implementation, it may be possible to revive village autonomy and reduce the institutional costs of government control. If in the future village autonomy gradually expands to autonomy for the larger systems that govern the villages, these costs might fall even further. Of course, this has to do with how to handle the relationship with the Party.  At present there are both village rules and regulations as well as laws that come from the center, which means that village autonomy is not only a matter of respecting national laws, but might also involve village initiatives aimed at revising those laws. 

Five

What does China really want?  To put it simply, China is China, and its resource conditions have always been a hard constraint on institutional arrangements, making it objectively impossible for China to follow the Western model of industrialization, and no matter whether we follow this model to the letter or if we improvise a bit around the edges, significant losses are inevitable. The good thing is that, in the 21st century, the Chinese people have realized that they must go their own way, and now it is time to adopt a comprehensive strategy of "sustainable development."
 
The thought liberation movement in China more than two decades ago has played a significant role in the country's economic development over the past two decades. At the turn of the century, however, and especially in recent years, following a series of economic problems and the increased difficulty of reform, people finally have begun to reflect, to discuss. This is truly the most important thing to watch at the moment, and will have a significant corrective effect on the direction of China's development in the 21st century. This is especially true when we think back on the 1990s, in which serious analysis, investigation, design, and experimentation having to do with the overall system was often seriously inadequate, as illustrated by the saying "institutional reform is a basket into which you can fit anything."[12] In fact, the trends in China's socio-political and economic development are complex and policy is confusing. To think about issues like the rural economy, you need to expand your horizon and analyze some of the major events in recent history in conjunction with each other. 
 
For example, it has become customary to say that China's rapid economic development is a matter of the last two decades or so and is largely due to the opening up of the country and the massive introduction of foreign investment. The achievements are impressive, and have been recognized at home and abroad, and there is no need to brag about it. But if we look at the past fifty years, the process of "seeking industrialization" in a large peasant country like ours has actually involved the introduction of foreign investment on a large scale three times, and each time there have been achievements as well as costs. 
 
The first time was in 1952, when under the pressure of the Korean War and the international environment shaped by the Western embargo, China began large-scale imports of Soviet equipment. In fact, both the United States and the Soviet Union maintained and even accelerated the development of their traditional manufacturing industries during World War II, which left their economic structures in need of adjustment.  After the war, they had do find something to do with the surplus productive capacity stimulated by wartime demand, and consequently both “capital groups” [i.e., the US and the USSR ] took advantage of postwar divisions to control their respective spheres of influence, and by sending equipment as foreign aid instead of investing, they not only alleviated the crisis of excess traditional manufacturing capacity, but at the same time laid the financial foundation for structural adjustments of their own economies.  Objectively speaking, such actions also encouraged developing countries to copy these traditional structures as they industrialized. 
 
Thus at the time, while on the one hand we fought against outside efforts to control China politically and militarily so as to maintain our sovereignty and  independence, at the same time, to achieve this independence, we accepted the second-hand equipment, blueprints and technical standards of the heavy industries transferred to us by the Soviet Union, and inevitably copied and reproduced the Soviet-style economic management system and infrastructure on the basis of such industries. 
 
The problem remained that of the basic national contradiction caused by the excessive tensions between China’s excessive population and resources. The lesson of that period was that, following land reform, the highly fragmented rural areas with too little average surplus could not possibly adapt to such rapid national industrialization, which only led to higher transaction costs for the government and the peasants. Even if China became highly industrialized, this would not lead to urbanization. This was an institutional constraint that was decided from the very outset of China's industrialization process. This is because, in the West, the process of industrialization transformed a large number of rural dwellers into urban residents and stimulated the creation big cities, to the point of even causing labor shortages. Among East Asian countries, only Japan, which early on completed the capital accumulation necessary for industrialization, conformed to the pattern where industrialization is accompanied by urbanization. 
 
By way of contrast, China, a developing country that started industrialization only after the war, heavy industry was built chiefly for military purposes from the very beginning. This type of heavy industry favors capital over labor, resulting in an industrialization in which urbanization is retarded, leading to a system marked by a fundamental division between city and countryside.  Fifty years later, this is still the basic institutional contradiction that restricts our reform and development. In fact, the cost incurred in this first large-scale introduction of foreign investment for industrialization soon became apparent, as it led to the economic crisis in 1960 which we called "three years of natural disasters" as well as to the reform measures taken to address the crisis, which allowed the return of free markets and household agricultural production. 
 
The second time was the import of foreign investment from Japan and the West, which was criticized as the "foreign leap forward." In the early 1970s, China had basically completed the first central government-led capital accumulation for national industrialization, and had put together a preliminary national industrial structure with a full range of industries. Mao Zedong then opened the country up, rebooted diplomacy with the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and promoted initiatives such as the Canton Trade Fair so as to allow China to participate in the international exchange and division of labor in a limited way. However, since China’s annual fiscal shortfall exceeded 10 billion RMB repeatedly in the 1970s, China’s investment capacity to expand production was seriously deficient. 
 
Next came the large-scale introduction of foreign investment led by Hua Guofeng during the 1976-1978 period, bringing in more than 100 important projects and "dozens of great celebrations."  The result was a huge fiscal deficit of nearly 20 billion RMB per year in 1978 and 1979, requiring the printing of an extra 40 billion RMB. In the midst of a serious economic crisis, China’s cities were forced to "shut down and change course" in 1980, and a large number of workers were laid off, resulting in social crimes. This was followed by two "severe crackdowns" and the introduction of a nationwide institutional reform in 1982, represented by the large rural contracting. 
 
The third time was the twenty years of opening up to the outside world under Deng Xiaoping. The difference, compared to first two times, was that the basic conditions allowing the country's industrial-based national economy to enter into market exchange were already in place, thanks to the primitive capital accumulation carried out by the central government in the first thirty years of the People’s Republic. In addition, due to the economic crisis in the early 1980s, China had carried out a reform of the financial system, switching from allocations to loans [in terms of state financing of state-owned enterprises],  from profits to taxes [in terms of remittances of state-owned industries to the central authorities] and multi-level sub-contracting [for some of the production previously completed by state-owned enterprises], but the monetization of China's economy remained very low during the same period, with total national deposits amounting to only 22 billion RMB, which meant that, under the pressure of the fiscal deficit, the scale of national investment only reached about 30 billion RMB. 
 
As a result, on the one hand we saw a race among all regions to promote the rapid growth of local resource development via foreign investment, while on the other, the central government promoted the monetization of the economy and capitalization of resources by increasing the money supply, thus appropriating the gains from economic growth. This is the miracle of twenty years of high speed development that we so fondly talk about now. The achievements and costs of this instance are well understood, or are gradually being understood. The only thing that should be emphasized is that, with the exception of the rural reform, which was a product of the economic crisis of the late 1970s, the institutional changes in our cities in the past two decades should be called the "opening” reforms, because it was the demand to open up to the outside world that drove the reform of the urban economy.
  
These three massive imports of foreign capital basically replicated the backward structure of traditional manufacturing that that was being phased out the US and Soviet capital blocs. This is similar to the situation in most developing countries, the difference being that China's population increased by 1.5 times over the same period, which only made the resource constraints of the system all the more severe. I have already mentioned this in various discussions of the East Asian financial crisis at home and abroad, arguing that the "financial crisis" was in fact an external manifestation of the problem of East Asian countries and regions having replicated the traditional economic structure of the West. 

Six

In 1996, I already issued a warning about a coming financial crisis, in the context of a conversation with an American scholar that was published in the November issue of Strategy and Management, entitled "The Global Crisis of International Finance Capital and China's Reform."  Sure enough, less than a year later there was a financial crisis that spread from East Asia to the rest of the world. Later, I wrote that the most important root cause of the crisis was not the lack of measures to guard against risk, but was instead the inevitable result of industrialization in East Asian having copied and replicated traditional structures.
 
I believe that China is facing three major "structural" problems following reform and opening. 
 
The first major problem is the structure of employment. Agriculture accounts for less than 30% of GDP, but the proportion of the rural work force still accounts for about 50%. This makes it impossible to raise agricultural labor productivity and farmers' incomes, and conflicts between the overburdened farmers and local governments are likely. On the other hand, the shortage of rural resources pushes the migrants out, and it is impossible to maintain the stability of society as a whole when a large number of workers have to migrate to find work for years on end. China’s "fifth crime wave," which has lasted for nearly a decade, cannot be said to be unrelated to the high pressure from the countryside. This de facto political pressure in turn rebounds on economic policies, forcing the country to pay attention to maintaining high growth rates, and to invest government financial resources in the absence of demand coming from society.  You have to be careful in adjusting the basic infrastructure, because if hundreds of millions of migrant workers are on the losing end there may be big trouble. 
 
The second big problem is the industrial structure affected by the urban-rural dichotomy, which even foreigners are coming to understand as "big China, small market." This refers to the fact that only 30% of the 1.2 billion Chinese people, those living in the cities, are market-oriented consumers; the other 70% of the peasant population is still living a subsistence or semi-subsistence lifestyle, which has little to do with market consumption. In the absence of a sizeable urban population, there is no sizeable consumption, which means that the basic ingredients are lacking for the development of tertiary industries [i.e., service industries]. The reason why I put these two structures together is that I see an obvious logical relationship between them. Even in developed regions, the share of the tertiary sector is not going up, which in turn restricts the increase of employment (because the tertiary sector is the most capable of absorbing those looking for work). 
 
The third major problem is the structure of the regions, including urban-rural differences and differences between and among regions; after more than 20 years of reform and opening, not only has there been no fundamental change in the binary structure of the urban-rural antagonism, the originally proposed "gradient theory 梯度理论" whereby the development of the east would drive that of the center and ultimately that of the west is also not working, because the central part has fallen to the level of the west, and only the east has surged forward, leading to serious east-west differences. The eastern region is densely populated, capital-intensive, and short of resources, so that its "export-oriented" economy has to rely on "big imports and big exports." People produce and in order to export and then consume imported products. And if the economy is overly dependent on overseas markets, it is also politically vulnerable. 
 
These three structural contradictions are the legacy of the twentieth century, so what should China do in the twenty-first century? Most scholars now seem to be very "realistic" and few are willing to discuss "grand narratives" like this one, preferring to prattle on about concepts such as whether we should privatize, whether we should draw on the American model or the Japanese model, etc.
 
I don't want to blame scholars for following the crowd. This is originally a matter of one’s employment, and in spite of modern history’s having taught us that miracle cures don’t work, it is not surprising that the majority of the academic community still has a tendency to seek after profit.[13] At present, scholars are either attached to the old left and prefer the old, pre-reform and opening model, or they have become attached to the new right, which is part of the new bourgeoisie, and of course they have to discuss issues and influence decisions on behalf of the interest groups they are attached to. How will the Chinese nation survive in the 21st century? How should we develop? What are the problems facing the next century?  Different interest groups of course have different blueprints. 

Seven
 
The number one issue impacting China's economic, social and political development was, is, and forever will be the employment issue. No matter how decisions are made, decisions affecting national policy should start with this, and no concrete, lower-level policy measure should be considered in isolation from the employment issue.  No matter what system China is trending toward, this system must meet the medium and long-term developmental needs of the Chinese people as a whole, not the short-term interests of a few large capital groups. Thus the state must keep a strict eye one the relationship between investment projects driven by foreign capital and the expansion of employment. Capital- and technology-intensive industrial projects, however efficient and modern they may be, cannot be blindly adopted if they do not increase employment. We have brought in many large-scale modern production lines, which were developed in the West where labor is in short supply, and thus can improve efficiency by saving on labor, but in China, where do we expect these people to go?  Theories that seek to increase the density of capital to promote international competitiveness and maximize the capital gains of enterprises often ignore the employment issue, which is something worth thinking about. 
 
A prime example of this are those developed regions in China that engage in capital-intensive agriculture, which looks great on television, with all the huge tractors and harvesters driving around the fields, but what use is this to the average Chinese micro-farmer with only 0.4 hectares of arable land?  Are we in China or not? The spread of misinformation does a great deal of damage. A similar criticism applies to capital construction projects over the years: in the 1990s China carried out a great deal of capital construction, but did the investment in these projects take into account the hundreds of millions of low-skilled rural laborers who are unemployed or underemployed? For example, what approach should be used when building highways, railroads, dams and other large-scale capital construction? Should we simply use the best technology available?[14]  Okay, so these big machines from elsewhere get here, they are super high quality, they’re fast, and they do the job well, but the money goes to the people who sold us the machines.  If we use labor-intensive inputs, the money is converted into labor income, which is converted into consumption, consumption drives light industrial production, and here we have domestic demand expanding.  Maybe we’re not speeding past Britain and the US, maybe the projects get done a bit more slowly, but we have to think about employment.
 
What does China really want? In my view China is looking for a path that will lead to jobs. What “ism” does China really want?  In my view it’s “employment-ism.” Only when there are jobs will consumption rise, only with consumption will we have domestic demand, and only then will China know a healthy development. 
  
To solve this first major contradiction, we need to develop small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).   This is because SMEs absorb the most labor, and because more than 80% of new jobs are in SMEs. The development of SMEs should have been a major national policy, but does our government—at any level—really have policies on this front?  It is only in the last couple of years that people started systematically putting forward proposals for developing SMEs, and newspapers and magazines also began to discuss them. Before that, except for some preferential policies for township and village enterprises (TVEs) in the 1980s, there was not very much. The preferential policies for TVEs were cancelled in the 1990s, and there was no commercial bank or capital market serving the needs of SMEs. Our policy has recently been tilted towards high-tech. I’m not against high-tech, in fact we should do high-tech, because we can’t lag too far behind the rest of the world, and the state should use its financial power to support high-tech, but high-tech should not be completely captured by commercialization and the markets.   At the same time, international experience has proved that the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into real productive forces also requires the development of SMEs, which means that should China should establish the necessary financial tools and capital markets to serve the development of SMEs. In other words, it should open up private competition and open up regional capital markets and other similar institutional arrangements. To develop SMEs is to develop high technology. Both of these things should serve the number one national policy of promoting employment.
 
The second major structural contradiction that has to be resolved is to gradually allow free movement between urban and rural areas. If we allowed those migrant workers and their dependents now working cities to become part of the urban population, urban consumers, wouldn't this expand the market?  We could take it one step at a time and first open up small and medium-sized towns with a population of less than 300,000. A large number of county-level towns in China currently have a population of 30,000-50,000, which could easily be increased to the level of 100,000-300,000 people. According to international experience, once a city reaches a population of 300,000, there can be a reasonable balance between its infrastructure investment costs and the taxes it takes in, while below this level there tends to be waste. There are more than 2,700 such counties and cities in China, which is a huge development space. 

However, freeing up the movement between urban and rural areas cannot be just a slogan, but would require a series of supporting policies. First of all, we need to solve the hukou problem. At present, rural people wanting to acquire an urban residency permit have to give up their farm land 承包责任田and their residence plot 宅基地 in their home areas. But the farmers who do this and move to the city enjoy none of the social protections of the urban population, so if they run into problems and lose their livelihood they wind up in ghettos or in gangs.  So migrant workers who acquire urban residency permits need a certain social security system.  The land on which the state currently has a monopoly should not become the subject of speculation, facilitating corruption and enriching the lucky few, but instead should be securitized, turning it into a state-established social security fund for farmers. In this way, the livelihoods of the farmers who move to the city will be secured by the state even after they abandon their land. We are talking about huge numbers here, because the state expropriates about three million mu of land every year, which comes to 300 billion RMB at an average price of 100,000 RMB per mu. And until now, these billions have basically wound up in the pockets of “rent-seekers” here and there, resulting in corruption and excessive profits for developers, with the knock-on effect of being unable to sell houses in the cities.[15]  

We usually say that houses don’t sell because the prices are too high and people’s income is too low, at least this is what the newspapers say, but this is not the case. This is because two-thirds of the price of housing is unreasonable. Part of it is the price of land: the state says the land is state-owned and is not for sale, but developers have to buy 50-70 years of development rights, which is equivalent to paying the price of land. If the land was securitized and turned into a fund as mentioned earlier, the problem of the price of land being added to the price of the house would no longer exist. At present, it makes no sense for consumers to buy a house where they own the house but not the land.  The second reason why the house prices are very high is that in any given community, the land occupied by facilities such as the post office, the electric company, the water company, and even elementary schools, kindergartens, stores, banks, etc. has already been paid for by the consumer, and yet the consumer has to pay again when using these services. 

In fact, these facilities are all owned by the relevant departments, such as post and telecommunications, electricity, etc., i.e., state-owned companies, which is equivalent to depriving the buyers of this part of the property. Is this right? If you subtract this unreasonable two-thirds of the house price, how would the house not sell? Therefore, in order to open up urban and rural areas, policy must change, and the first policy change must be to de-monopolize. This directly affects the interests of the government agencies holding the monopolies, which does lead to a series of problems, such as infrastructure investment in towns below the county level, the governments of small towns, social guarantees in new cities, and public utility construction expenditures…These problems are laid out in front of us, waiting for solution.
  
The third major contradiction is the difference between eastern and western China.  The central government has already made the development of the west a national strategy, and what is important is how to learn from the lessons of the east, how to accelerate the construction of capital markets in the west, how to deal with land issues 带动国土整治, how to solve the problem of the imbalance between resources and population.  To my mind, there are four issues that are essential to the development of the west:  water, roads, people, and land. When we were in school, we learned that China has an economic and geographical dividing line called the called "Aihui-Tengchong line 瑷辉腾冲线,", which is a straight line stretching from Aihui in Heilongjiang to Tengchong in Yunnan.  Seventy percent of China's population lives to the east of this line, where there are only 30% of China’s resources.  And while the west has better resources than the east, there is a huge scarcity of capital. 

How can we stimulate the 70-80% of excess capital in the east to flow to the west?  If Chinese capital markets are state-owned, if China’s financial instruments are "national" and not owned by some plutocratic monopoly, then we should request the state monopoly that controls this part of the financial or state capital to take the lead and move this capital to the west, in the interests of the Chinese people, after which, private capital will follow.  The private sector is not without money at the moment—in Wenzhou alone there is more than twenty billion dollars of capital with no place to go, so they compete to pay high prices to get US dollars so that they can immigrate to Europe or the US.  Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian all do the same thing.  Last year alone, more than 30 billion RMB of capital flowed out illegally. 
 
And there are some people involved in western development who are accustomed to the traditional system and the old ways of planning, and are thinking only of capital intensive programs like roads and railroads. Just think—in the context of western development, it would be entirely possible to mobilize labor from densely populated provinces with difficult man-land ratios and resource shortages (such as Henan Province, which has a population of more than 90 million) to go to the west, stipulating that all infrastructure construction projects invested and launched by the state must promote labor employment, implement “jobs for relief 以工代赈,”[16] and provide laborers with food and necessary daily necessities, including light industrial goods in excess supply, such as cloth and grain, which can be shipped to the west. 

Let this part of the labor force head west to build roads, open ditches, plant trees and grass, and improve the ecological environment. By means of the “jobs for relief” policy, the population of densely populated and resource-poor provinces will move to the west, the idea being that you will settle where you work, and will be allotted one piece of land if you stay one year, two if you two, and ten mu if you stay three.  Could it be that no one will go?  It won’t work to rely on the modern Western market economy to invest development; China can only use the Chinese way. If the government sets up the proper mechanism, then infrastructure development will first solve the water problem, maybe starting with a canal, or irrigating a piece of land—if we keep at it for thirty years, we can solve the problem of the survival of hundreds of millions of immigrants, which will be a great achievement. 
 
There are many lessons from past migration efforts. Some people say that when farmers go back to their villages, it is a mindset issue, that they love the land and hate to leave, but in fact this is not the case. When they farm in their home regions, farmers don’t have to pay, but when they migrate to farm, they have to pay for water and electricity, as well as all sorts of heavy taxes and levies, and the farmers who have just arrived have no access to credit, which would help them pay. So I say the strategy of developing the west is a good one, but only by being realistic and pragmatic and paying attention to the grass roots will it provide solid results. Otherwise, western development will suffer through the “bubble economy,” as the coastal areas did, and China may once again lose out on a historic opportunity, and once again suffer a hard blow. 
 
As I come to the end of my thoughts, I remembered a story that is sad and funny at the same time. In the early years of the Republic, the idea of "learning from Europe and the United States" came to mean promoting the Western system of traffic management, and foreign students 洋学生 [probably Chinese students in “Western” schools] would go out on the streets with bamboo sticks, driving peasants to the right side of the street in the same way they would drive livestock. One hundred years later, if you go to small and medium-sized cities or towns below the county level, everyday people are still carrying their loads, walking “against traffic,” and the video of the person knocked into the air by a car while walking across a big-city highway is shocking.  It is true that we have made great economic progress in the past 100 years, but that was achieved under the social conditions of the urban-rural binary, and it came at a huge price. In the field of ideology and culture, we have just only passed stage of slavish imitation of the West, which means that we progressed to the point of learning to "cross the river by feeling the stones." 


Notes

[1]温铁军, “中国的人民的现代化,” originally published in Tianya/天涯 in 2000.3, reprinted on the online platforms of Baoma/保马 and Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横 on October 20 and October 23, 2022, respectively.

[2]Translator’s note:  Wen uses the expression Handan xuebu/邯郸学步, from a story found in the Zhuangzi, according to which a young man heard that people in Handan walked in a way that was quite elegant.  He went to the city to learn the walk, and not only did not master it, but forgot his original way of walking.

[3]Translator’s note:  原始灌溉农业文明, and yes, it sounds pretty awful in Chinese, too.  I assume this reflects the influence of Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988), who wrote about “hydraulic civilizations,” although he argued that control of water was the basis for “Oriental despotism,” an argument that Wen is not making at all.

[4]Translator’s note:  仁者，二人也.  This is a play on words, or rather a play on characters, because the character for benevolence, ren/仁, is made up of the two characters for person/ren/人, and two/二.

[5]Translator’s note:  Shennong—“Divine farmer”—is a mythic character in Chinese history who supposedly invented the practice of agriculture, although his “tasting one hundred herbs” had more to do with his invention of Chinese herbal medicine.

[6]Translator’s note:  The concept of “weapons of criticism” comes from Marx, who famously said “The weapon of criticism cannot…replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force.”  In fact, Wen uses both “weapons of criticism” and “criticism of the weapon” in his text, but I could find no way to make this work in translation.  As far as I can tell, in general Chinese usage, “weapon of criticism” in Chinese means, broadly, “critical discourse”—the power of the pen—and “criticism of the weapon” means “armed force”—the power of the gun.  Mao’s “Oppose Book Worship” was written in 1930 to denounce dogmatism in the Red Army, and rectification was, of course, a tool honed during the Yan’an period to weed out doubters and critics and forge a united party.  Wen seems to be situating himself on the side of Mao and rectification.

[7]Translator’s note:  Japan had seized the Liaodong peninsula during the war, but was subsequently forced by Western powers to return it to China out of respect for Russian interests and the general balance of power in the region.

[8]Translator’s note:  Wen actually refers to young students who torture themselves in various ways to remain awake so they can continue to study:  piercing their skin to the bone 锥刺骨, hanging from the rafter by their hair发悬梁，studying by the light of fireflies collected in a sack, 囊萤凿壁, and studying by the cold window for ten years十年寒窗, all of which are apparently found in the ancient text The Annals of the Warring States.

[9]Translator’s note:  I find this paragraph a bit baffling.  Wen seems to be talking about populist support of the imperial regime, or perhaps imperial manipulation of populist forces, but I cannot tell if he is being tongue-in-cheek or “militant.” 

[10]Translator’s note:  Unless I have seriously misread something, Wen is simply wrong here.  The phrase “五口通商/opening five ports to commerce” refers to the Nanjing Treaty, signed in 1842 at the end of the first Opium War, when trade was carried out through Canton/Guangzhou, and not Kowloon, which would not be developed for some decades.

[11]Translator’s note:  Mao Zedong did not invent this saying, which means that once the preconditions for a certain thing no longer exist, the thing disappears as well, perhaps like landlines and telephone books.

[12]Translator’s note:  In Chinese, 体制改革是个筐，什么都能往里装.  An online search of the term turns up only a blog post from January, 2011, which Wen could not have been referring to in 2000…Perhaps both Wen and the blog post are referring to something that left a slight Internet footprint.  There has of course been much talk of “system reform” or “institutional reform” over the course of reform and opening, and it is not hard to imagine somewhat making a derisive comment like this.

[13]Translator’s note:  Wen actually says that the lesson of modern history is that “blood-soaked steamed bread” cannot cure Hua Xiaoshuan, the young  boy in Lu Xun’s short story, “Medicine,” who, suffering from consumption, dies after eating a miracle cure in the form of a blood-soaked steamed bread (the blood being that of a would-be revolutionary). 

[14]Translator’s note:  BOT, in English, in Wen’s text.  When you google “bot” in 2022, you of course find references to those automated trolls we all know too well.  I suspect this meant something like “best of technology” at the time.

[15]Translator’s note:  I assume the logic here is that if migrants had been able to sell their land before moving to the cities, they might have been able to buy a house there, or at least make a down payment.  Instead, the state confiscates the land and “leases” it to developers.

[16]Translator’s note:  This policy is something like “workfare,” the ideas being to replace cash payments with work for people in need.