“This week we are joined by Prof Sergey Radchenko to discuss the of tumultuous relationship between the two major superpowers of the communist world during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China and the USSR.
Sergey Radchenko is the Director of Research and Professor of International Relations at the University of Cardiff. He is an expert on Sino-Soviet Relations, atomic diplomacy, and has written books on Mongolian and North Korean History. He has previously served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre (in Washington D.C.), and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai)”
I think today, during what looks like the early start of the Cold War 0.2 we tend either to exaggerate Russian-Chinese relations or collusion around the fact that after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been integrated more and more with the Chinese economy. The increasing dependency of Russia on China, after the SWIFT ban on Russian banks, has also been exaggerated. In the words of Arnaud Dubien, in spite of what governments believe it appears that “Russia Won’t be China’s vassal” (a very good article).
I think that we have to go back to the Cold War relations of the two motors of world communism: the Bolshevik Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Relations have been always changing and evolving over time – and altough friendship was always more important than enmity, one should say that from the very beginning (not covered in this podcast) there was room for a lot of misunderstandings, low points, high expectations, and a slow syncing (compounded by the all-out attack of Japan and Western imperial powers that had every interest in subverting and blocking communications and avoiding a united anti-Imperial front).
Even if letters and Telegraphs were under surveillance by the Japanese, British, Dutch, and French secret services, the two revolutionary powers of Sun Yat-sen’s Republican China and Lenin’s Soviet Union reached out to try and find a common ground in common anti-imperialist and later on anti-capitalist struggle. Some of the conflicts also arose around wordings and perceived counter-revolutionary actions (such as the invasion of Prague by Warsaw pact troops or Budapest 1956 by Soviet troops). Other arose of older wordings and perceived arrogance – such as using terms such as “infantile” or “backward” that seemed to pop up rather indiscriminately at the most inopportune moments (and that seemed to be lifted out of an imperialist and racialist vocabulary).
Advocating for a united front with the Nationalist Kuomintang (that turned out to be a major mistake), was also encouraged by the Soviets. If you want to find out more about documents that traced the evolution of the Comintern and what was to become the Third World (or the Global South today) you have to look beyond this podcast. The invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact country was another blow to the Sino-Soviet relations and also the way the Soviet Union seemed to retreat from the world revolutionary stage, while China seemed to ascend to that position. Also, there was a war Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969 that tends to be forgotten nowadays.
Very early on the young Soviet power started taking the colonial question seriously (but only as a secondary priority in the fight against the Western industrial imperialist powers) – V I Lenin’s Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions (written in 1920 on the Second Congress of the Communist International) is an important document in that sense.
What better counterpart to a decade where the rich won (2020s) and quantitative easting (short QE) seems to rule them all than to watch a documentary on how it all began. And also to understand what bugged free market libertarians like Milton Friedman’s than to watch the documentary that ‘triggered’ his response. Today we speak of ‘triggering’ in terms of what right wing is good at (Fox News etc) – and how easy it is to push their critics into ridiculous postures and very predictable behaviors, basically in what became a Pavlovian show. Who is going to make his opponent react in a knee-jerk way? And even better, who will make the other adopt one’s own tactics and meme first?
Well, before all that, we can place these two documentary series. Both very personal, with two key players. Big influencers supr in terms of statal policies and ideas. Do not get me wrong, these documentaries are about one of the most hated subjects around: economics (prove eme wrong!). Who does not hate the history of economics or the principal ideas deriving from that? A majority seems to suffer and endure under economicsl hardships even if money amd investment or financial system seem tok haunt us. What os a recession, what causes it, what are the class politics behind austerity measures? Who gets tok pay for inflation?
Maybe this will also answer some of the curiosities and questions regarding the 1970s when the great Golden Age of Capitalism in the West came to an end after a series of shocks. Several counter-measures culminating with the switch from liberal democracies where Big Government Keynesianism (both left or later on right-wing brands of Keysianism) finally gave way to the Austro-libertarian school of Economics represented by Friedman and the Chicago boys. While some may feel emboldened to say that today in the midst of the polycrisis we have a Keynesian moment coming around and neoliberalism is on the wane, I would rather say (with Quinn Slobodian and others in mind) that neoliberalism has mutated itself in the time of decoupling, de-risking and ethnopolitics. Maybe it is capitalism as usual – an upside down world that cannot get the right side up and will only get more lopsided.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was perhaps one of the most interesting characters and appreciated social scientists of his time. There are echoes of Galbraith everywhere today, even in his admonishment of militaristic Keynesianism where the military-industrial-entertainment complex simplex in Washington begins to use all the levers of power to transform its Big Tech into a national asset amd industrial policy. Frmerly free-trade radicals feeding on nationalism start to recast themselves as anti-Chinese US stalwarts. All this is put into stark contrast by a new generation of Keynesian economists (Gabriela Gabor and Isabella Weber come to mind). Forgotten lessons seems valid again. To prevent inflation after WWII JK Galbraith was recommending strategic price controls (anathema to the free market radicals!)
As John Kenneth Galbraith explained “the role of price controls” would be “strategic.” “No more than the economist ever supposed will it stop inflation” … “But it both establishes the base and gains the time for the measures that do.” 4/
John Kenneth Galbraith is a representative of classical liberalism that also enjoyed tremendous influence & honed his skills & experience being active at the center of the US establishment. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also had relations to the Global South – being an ambassador to India (the biggest democracy on Earth) during the JFK administration. At the same time, he was red-baited by his opponents and considered by conservative think tanks the man who “made socialism mainstream“. So when he is saying that the powerful US Farmer lobby is still hailing back to the physiocrat thinkers in France, he knows what he is saying from direct experience. He pokes fun at everybody, especially at the privileged members of the ‘leisure class’. He does not miss an opportunity to constantly question the very thinkers he mentions according to their own principles or tax them when they employ theories or easy justifications in their own favor.
Yeah it looks oldskool and peak boomer in a way, at the same time all episode 1 The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism is a tremendous effort to stage the history or economic ideas, the larger background, or the assumptionsof behind it all, including all the major thinkers. The stage is set by unsettling the stage – in a Brechtian manner, all the illusionist art, all the stagecraft, and the scaffolding of history is shown to be a BBC studio. He quotes John Maynard Keynes(Galbraith himself is regarded as a post-Keynesian) at the very beginning:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
What can be blander than pretending to be free of any influence or any previous antecedent thinker or just acting according to practical reason, bootstrapping yourself? Then we risk like Kant’s dove to think that we can fly faster and more frictionless if we would prefer a vacuum instead. Yet this vacuum strikes back. Many intellectuals prefer to ignore schools of thought that have spawned the economics and politics that they prefer to think is the result of practical decisions & spontaneity. On the other end, you have professional economists being absolutely adamant that you have to stick with what works. They are eminently disinterested and ignorant of the history of their trade. Well, then maybe that is why we need historians of the economy.
Other than most Galbraith recovers those very fragments from the texts cherished economists that are not usually quoted or followed. This makes us see how fragmentary and prejudiced our reading of them is. The ideas and abstractions he visits are constantly pulled from their pedestal – with historical examples that seem to show the way they were misused. If he gets us to visit Adam Smith and the writing of the Wealth of Nations, at the same time notices that Smith in his self-interest and critique of tenured academics have also chosen private tutoring as a more profitable income over his university career. Eps 1 is a journey through the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s friendship with philosopher David Hume who woke Kant fromhis dogmatic slumber! Galbraith stops at French markets to talk about the theories of the French physiocrats or observe that not even Smith’s disdain could make us dismiss the Tableau économique of Quesnay sonde the input-output analysis later developed by Russian economist Wassily Leontieff (1905-1999) or the planned economy of the Soviet Union is a direct descendent of that very table. Principles such as laissez-faire and free trade are paraded, while the importance of the division of laborgets exemplified with the help of a pin-making process.
David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) advanced a Labor Theory of Value that was also going to have a long history ahead. In this climate of the British Empire, you had the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the experiments in social responsibility atNew Lanark cotton mills in Scotland established by industrialist David Dale. Capitalist charity (which was not charity at all), since children and women became the first recruits and disciplined workers of the new era, worked just 1h less than in the other mills. Socialist Utopian experiments in collective living such as New Harmony, Indiana established by Robert Owen also get mentioned – an episode that rests in my heart because of Marguerite Young’s magnificent literary rendition of that in An Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945).
Early eviction and land-grabbing in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’ also get staged under the Highlander Clearances, where Scottish tenants were pushed out of homes to make room for more profitable (and aesthetically pleasing) sheep. The Irish Famine – and its Malthusian instrumentalization by the British State, as well as the migratory working class trails across the Atlantic, are important references. For Galbraith, it is also an example of how easy it is to abstract from the misery of others and decide to ignore their plight when one life and calculates remotely at a safe distance from their troubles. Or ordering bombs to drop on unknown others from above. The Irish had to pay with their lives and with their wheat to the landlords while the Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn. The Hamlet of Marie Antoinette that somehow modeled pastoral life of the education of princely offspring also gets mentioned.
Eps 2 Manner and Morals of High Capitalism – makes pretty obvious how Social Darwinism became the secular religion of the rich industrialists and robber barons (today’s oligarchs and Big Tech billionaires) of the Gilded Age. Put simply Social Darwinists embraced both racism and laissez-faire capitalism. The survival of the fittest dogma fitted their own socially privileged positions and even if they were not biologists, they used a biological language and twisted Darwin’s idea of natural selection to position themselves as the finest and most adaptable representatives of the species. The popularity of Herbert Spencer in the US is proportionate with the amount of capital accumulation and ruthlessness of the American ruling class. Carnegie and Rockefeller become thus prime representatives of this ideological thinking. Galbraith presents a bizarre series of such US apostles of Darwinism that were sometimes even predecessors of the pro-capitalist Prosperity Gospel. One of them is laissez-faire advocate and clergyman William Graham Sumner. Galbraith also illustrates the thin line separating the capitalist from the criminal, the hoodlum and rascal in the 19th century by recounting in detail the Eerie War – a bloody conflict between US financiers to control the Eerie Railway Company in an effort to corner the market. This is not very far from the current crypto kings. Galbraith also remarks something interesting – that the poor have always been a preferred subject of sociological research, with investigators going to the slums to study their existence, mores and sexual life, while the rich have not attracted this selfsame attention at the time. That was to be the task of Thorstein Veblen -that did exactly some reverse safari on them, depicting the rich as no more than Big Man, and explaining their luxurious living and excess in terms that are still familiar to us today: conspicuous consumption (think Trump, think Berlusconi, space billionaires and basically every other fat cat). There’s one of the most sympathetic views of Marx and that chapter also makes it even more clear than the internecine wars of western liberalism would make neoliberalism or even current secessionist anarcho-capitalists completly at odds with what went on for much of the post war period in the western world. There’s a lot to be desired in the series perhaps none more than the chapter on colonialism – and the anti colonial, transatlantic slavery trade, and all the current struggles and long shadow of colonialism that still ontinues to this day.
I am very happy I managed to see this movie. It has been a quest to find a subtitled copy and serendipity helped. Finally found a platform with new Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, HK, Indian etc. dramas to watch online. To watch a movie like this today can instantly mark one as a victim of Chinese propaganda or as completely disconnected from the world we live in. Well, think it is quite the other way around – in order to try and understand how connected we are and how we got here or how our world is at least partially the result of these vicissitudes of CCP having steered the worlds most populous country trough troubled waters. Watching 1921 from where one stands today puts in perspective the Western worlds trouble with China today, so one should give it a try.
There are several ways in which we might categorize bulk responses from a liberal democratic West to Chinese news outlets, CCP official documents, speeches, official spoke persons or historical dramas such as 1921: 1) they are lying 2) they are saying something else 3) they are trying to brainwash me or themselves 4) it is really hard or impossible to understand what they are actually saying 5) i do not care what they are saying since it is all authoritarian junk and propaganda anyway 6) i told you so it is the Yellow Peril. I am trying to steer clear of all of those knee-jerk responses and pitfalls. Essential to this is taking recent Chinese movies such as 1921 at least as seriously or earnestly as the ones who produced, played in them and contributed to them in any form. I think 1921 is important in how it stands within the legacy of “red modernism“, since we just found out that ‘the end of history’ did not happen in 1989. What is the place of socialist realist art or socialist state controlled + privately sponsored art of cinema nowadays and what is its relation with Hollywood Marvel capitalist superhero blockbusters? What about the older discussions about how and if the historical avant-garde’s art education ideals clashed or survived and coexisted (got repackaged?) within more poppy expressions or it they just got in line with what was (later) conceived as subservient propagandistic socialist-realist artistic expressions (an important counter-example constitutes the late oeuvre of Hungarian-Romanian artist Matthis Teutsch uncovered by artist/researcher Miklos Szilard)?
It is clear that nobody, at our particular historical juncture, in the 20s of 21st century is able to produce a movie like this or approach this particular history of communism or Comintern with something amounting to style. I do not think this is a product of propaganda in the usual sense (official parroting stale uninteresting statements). If you insist on the propaganda value of such a movie (beyond it being a mere fun historical drama), why not regard it as a contemporary form of stylish ‘pop-aganda’, that has more to do with K-dramas or J-dramas, C-bands or ‘young adult’ cultural productions?
1921 uses freely both the rich pictorial and iconographic history of Chinese Communist painting, poster and graphic art as well as the current wave of dramas and streaming services. In seeing these aesthetic overlaps or different vibes, I am not trying to diminish in any way the originality or the aim of this vibrant yet heavily controlled production. At the moment of this writing the CCP is not only the oldest, still surviving example of a ‘vanguard party’ in the world that surely has transformed over the years, but also serves as a strong, still-standing example or existing offshoot of that relevant revolutionary period, embodying its dreams, anxieties, constraints, trials, failures and plans that sprung up right after the successful Bolshevik October Revolution. Of course this does not make them founder saints nor wash countless (later) rectification campaigns or excuse Mao’s ‘war against nature‘. This movie is a total oddball in today’s capitalist realist world, but one that is also interested in making this content available in tune with today’s changing taste, keeping it real & intriguing, emotional and sexy enough to watch for 2 whole h. When there is so much clamor about strawmen like Cultural Marxism or the whole paranoia about the PC, it would be good to actually forget all that for a second and watch 1921.
A few observations (please forgive me for not going into detail or getting stuck in debates about historical or ideological arguments and finer points):
-this struggle for founding the Chinese Communist party (like other various parties across Asia) is the culmination of a hide-and-seek with the European (and Japanese) Imperial powers. This is only the result of a long Asian (in this case Chinese) anti-Imperialis struggle that was already globalized, reaching from the heart of Empires (London, Paris) to Shanghai, Penang and Singapore. Asian revolutionaries dotted the urban centers as exiles, and they actively plotted and tried to subvert and leverage the overwhelming advantages of the West like in Tim Harper’s excellent book – using shadowy networks, printing presses (see below) and false identities to be able to stay one step ahead and avoid being crushed under the Imperial boot
-the movie is not just about the CCP youthful rise or the many (hard to keep track of) historical figures and contributors to its cause, but the Chinese people’s continuous struggle for national self-determination, against a backdrop of foreign power’s aggression and multiple competing interests that kept China under-developed, divided and in the grip of warlordism, basically a semi-colonial region in a permanent dependency limbo (important to understand that the later recognition of China as a state and the diplomatic taw – is linked with the US/West’s support of China’s only after the Sino-Soviet Split)
-remarkable is the “Internationale” song that is hummed and reappears, a sort of internationalist leitmotiv background that puts the whole small, incipient party 1st congress in a larger, global or historical context (that is unavoidably & always connected to larger struggles or aims)
-in its initial stages the CCP functions mostly on a pattern established by the patriotic ‘secret society’ model with the difference that it didn’t have the clout or influence or resources to match and somehow (because of its ideological support for worker strikes & unions) found itself in direct conflict with both foreign interests in China + ‘Green Gang’ crime syndicate type of secret society that was well connected with the police & KMT officials. Of course there was also another important element –Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement– a series of travel and work programs were organized between 1912 and 1927 largely by a group of Chinese anarchists who had come to Paris and wanted to introduce French science and social idealism to China (among the beneficiaries of such programs where Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai)
-the movie presents what AN Whitehead would likely call ‘an adventure of ideas (even if after reading his Aims of Education essays I am not sure he appreciated revolutionary thoughts themselves, though in practice he supported everything new, interesting and ‘kicking), in this case, the evolution of Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist), particularly after the May Fourth Movement ideas (one of the movie’s examples being classroom ‘class struggle’ lessons) outside of their actual place of initial elaboration (Western Europe), diffusion and further elaboration under different socio-historical circumstances
-remarkable is also the fragment when the foundation of the party sounds like establishing a successful ‘firm’ – yeah you heard me right, and this is not cynical, it’s also this business (?!) acumen in view of future profitable investment returns, and this has something peculiarly SF (not in the usual sense of superlative tech but in the sense of counter intuitive, not according to immediate facts), something quite speculative in it (that more or less led to today’s quantum entanglement space-based communication & Moon exploration program?!), the CCP being at that time mostly a ‘pipe dream dreamed up by a bunch of certainly at the time – pretty powerless youthful minority group – with a strong feeling that history was on their side
-1921 is mainly a history happening inside big urban centers (Beijing and Shanghai), inside reading groups or study groups, foreign language schools, of modernizing translation efforts and printing presses, a history that plays on largely inside (under the noses of) the French Concession in Shanghai and largely underground, small scale and always at risk at being found out, stopped in its tracks and quickly disbanded/eliminated (important to mention that the peasant question is brought only one time and only by Mao particularly) and you can always feel that it’s largely about young metropolitan Chinese literati
-we see here the very beginning of something in nuce – full of preparative phases and incipient stages, a very early start-up that is not yet steeled up or fully organized (or militarized), not yet having suffered the tremendous losses of the Long March and massacres under Chiang Kai Shek’s White Terror of 1927 , far from ready to win in the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 (all this later history is compressed in the last 10 minutes or so of the movie in an B & W explosive, harsh, heroic + dramatic collage that includes the famous 1949 declaration in Tiananmen Square by Mao)
-another interesting effect is its decision to cast boy band members or Chinese rappers celebs in such important historical roles, this brings us back to the whole ‘auratic’ survival aspect of today’s media celebs (discussed by Shaviro elsewhere as in the aura of ‘cinema stars’ in the age of mechanical reproduction cum démocratisation and as a response to W Benjamin’s key text)
-liked the iconic reinterpretation of the Pacific WWII flag photo of the US victory with the red flag instead of the stars & stripes, this might inflame many since a lot of critics try to depict today’s China as just another US, not as an alternative model
-really enjoyed the role of Japan – or let’s say the conflicting role of the Japanese, the freshly modernized Imperial power of the Far East playing this double role, of translating the Communist Manifesto and harboring ‘dangerous’ Chinese emigres, but also with secret police infiltrating and hunting down both its own Japanese citizens and Chinese anarchists (also considering Mao’s stint with anarchist thinking in his 20s) or socialists
-significant is how much political learning, teaching and practicing foreign languages (English, French, Russian) was part of this active transfer of radical ideas and how this was part of a longer modernizing effort that was very much part of China’s young literati intellectuals and students lives at the end of 19th c and early 20th
-really loved the great cameos of young (jokingly and affectionately called ‘small’) Deng (D Xiaoping being arguably the toughest of Mao’s 1st generation revolutionary peers, surviving all purges & perils) in a printing house basement in Paris ready for Bastille Day & spreading pro-Chinese manifestos or the Mao scene when he’s running at night being really pissed off after being kept outside the gates of the asshole french party people. It’s a scene almost emblematic – of RPC quest for international recognition and/or “Beijing Consensus”, craving inclusion while always being shoved around & emboldened to reinvent these organizations & forums that kept China on the outside
-a culture of lively debate was at the center of the establishment of the first Congress, but essentials are already there (dictatorship of the proletariat) – still, a lot of discussions are about how to adapt Marxist ideas or Bolshevic experiences to the local conditions, or what was the actual time scale of transformations or if one had to wait till the proper conditions (a key point) came about, yet this also tells us precious little about the future transformation of a revolutionary party into a ruling party. The movie also brings forth the way the Comintern (especially through the difficult role of Dutch internationalist communist Henk Sneevliet who was basically, according to Tim Harper, on the most important Western Chinese mission since Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci) started linking up the various revolutionary cells around the world
(Shared universe)In October 2023, Matthew Vaughn announced his plans to create a larger spy-themed universe through his Marv Studios, with that universe being interconnected and comprising the Kingsman franchise, the Argylle films, and an unnamed third franchise. His intention was to have the new upcoming films in each series culminate in a crossover in the future. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 