The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann (who worked with Gurdjieff for nearly 30 years) with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and there is a French version here: (unavailable)
This documentary was posted a few months ago and it is really quite fortunate to have access to it. It follows the life of Gurdjieff much more systematically and in detail than I have been able to do in my review of Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is full of old photos and even recordings of Gurdjieff himself and some scenes with recordings of his movements/dances. It is full of quotes and extracts from his books. If you are interested in finding out more about one of the most interesting, rapscallion philosophers/characters of the 20th century please check out this documentary.
Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am
(The pantry in Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment. Photo courtesy of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York) As related in the movie such a place was also a place of meetings and counseling. Like a friend said: show your pantry to tell you who you are.
timespace coordinates: pre-1912 regions of Transcaucazia, Central Asia (Bukhara), Afghanistan, Tibet, Pakistan at the borderlands between where the European Imperial powers were clashing in what became known euphemistically as the “Great Game”
Maybe it is offputting for many to watch a movie entitled “Remarkable Men”, and indeed apart from the early love interest of Armenian-Greek mystic, philosopher and guruGeorge Ivanovich Gurdjieff(c.1867 – 29 October 1949) and a female member of his “Truth Seeker” group, there seem to be very few women in this account of the early travels of this key figure of Western esotericism and occultism. So if you can get across this glaring and painful absence, we can move further. This is an unusual biographical drama by Peter Brooks (The Mahabharata, Tierno Bokar) based on Gurdjieff’s own accounts of his early life described in coded, fantastic and allegorical-mythmaking imagery. This is Peter Brooks version of Gurdjieff’s spiritual journeys during the early part of his life – published much later in book form. As an aside the famous Peter Brooks (theatre director) himself had an influence on celebrated Romanian Theathre director Andrei Serban who attended the International Center For Theatre Research in the 1970s.
Isn't it interesting that just a few months prior, Gurdjieff in Paris settles into the Prieuré at Fontainebleau to launch his public mystery school (although shortlived as well due to a car accident in 1924 leading to the closure of the school). Dark forces got their victories.
This TW (or X) message above got me thinking about the crossovers and different backgrounds of these early founders of modern Western esoteric teaching and their mishaps, considering that some of them did introduce and adapt traditions from the Islamic East to the West (referring here to the Sufi tradition). I consider Gurdjieff an especially interesting transitional figure because he is always changing and difficult to classify. He fits perhaps best the typical charlatan and a modern mage. Obviously, he is openly a jack of all trades, curious about everything, but he is being very frank about his shifty nature. First: I never read his teaching so I am not familiar about his metaphysics beyond what this movie lets us glimpse. Let’s remember that for Gurdjieff humanity in already in a state of trance and needs to be shocked and de-blocked (practices that will later became familiar on the West Coast counterculture). This need to be awakened from such slumbering (zombie) shambling sleep-walking state is also found in recent Black Horror movies – see Jordan Peele’s exceptional Get OUT. There is even a book that digs for the links btw the coded texts of the Harlem Renaissance and Gurdjieff, more particular of Toomer a celebrated autheur going to Paris/Fointainebleu and transferring some of his ideas across the ocean. G. himself feels like a streetwise character, a farceur, living off hypnotherpy or painting and selling sparrows as canaries to tourists. I quite appreciate this image.
I was not so much interested in the veracity or accuracy of his own autobiographical accounts. But are these miraculous encounters or highly symbolic and allegorical visions so unique? I was curious about ways of imagining a (modern) invented performative tradition as invented by others (a mysterious Eastern Brotherhood – so not so much ‘cultural appropriation’ as searching legitimation for new practices selling them as primordial). What about this series of sacred dances – the“Gurdjieff movements” depicted at the end of the movie?
Gurdjieff was a man of his times, not in any sense exceptional. It was a time of constant traffic across disciplines, geographic and cultural borders, of strange scientific beliefs and newly discovered invisible worlds (the Old Quantum theory) that ended up with bizarre metaphysical reshuffling. Although there is a lot of talk about the unexplained, about mind-body-emotional problems and unexplained events – Gurdjieff’s life is well situated in its context, yet maybe completely unfamiliar to most of us in the early 21st c. This is not an attempt at demysticatuon, but a way to appreciate syncretic and hybrid methods and spiritual/mundane comingling at a time where Islamophobia and entrenched fundamentalism keeps bringing misery to many places of the world (thinking about Rohinja in Myanmar or the Muslim minority in India or the plight of Palestinians everywhere).
I am talking about mostly a diverse bunch of largely stateless, transnational persons – that used to travel anonymously or under pseudonyms, takeing on the new routes of transnational capital and globalization to spread ideas, search for like-minded comrades, translate revolutionary texts (including SF )avidely read mystical literature but also smuggle guns to mutineers and anti-colonialists compadres. They were also incarcerated and eventually had to pay a high prize for their conspirative activities. It was also a brutal time of accidents and disasters. Gurdjieff was just lucky enough to survive and live through some horrible car accidents. Such lives are amply described in a recent remarkable study where a series of truly remarkable men and women of which I am pretty sure you never ever heard because they are not part of the Western canon nor part of history we were tought of in schools (East bloc or West)-: Underground Asia and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper.
The “miracle” of these “remarkable” men was pulling through a time of crisis with large-scale deportations, populational exchanges and forced displacements (see 1923 Turkish Greek population exchange) culminating with the WWII 1940s and its aftermath, but also trying to find a new modern identity. While living incognito and in hiding at the very heart of European imperial centers they gathered acolytes, escaped genocides and developed ways to survive amidst repression, looming wars and often very violent nation building. They were shaped by a widespread cat-and-mouse Great Game across geographic borders, religions, cultures and classes.
How to orient yourself in such an uncertain world in tatters, how to find succor, opportunity or build friendships and instant connection across races, cultures and social classess? I think here comes the compass known as “The Enneagram” a diagram presented by Gurdjieff to the world in 1916 that was supposed to offer a way to access the inner dynamics of the universe and its harmonic order beyond an apparent order.
I am not trying to minimize the mystical or spiritual value of Gurdjieff but to recognize that these erratic searches of seeking THE meaning and transferring ‘wisdom’ across much of Asia (Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Mesopotamia, Ottoman Empire) do have a historical and geopolitical foundation and world system reasons. My reading here is that this “wisdom” should be also seen as some more banal – as a counter-espionage of sorts. It is almost a cliche (since Kipling) that the sacred men were also purveyors of strategic data as much as local lore and Orientalist know-how (in the Edward Said sense). You could always become a potential informant as well as a recruit and snitch for a foreign power. Also, they had to escape the widening and collaborative net of counter-revolutionary forces, because the French, British, and Russian Tsartist secret police were becoming more aware and more paranoid and intent on precluding any serious attempts on the part of their colonial subjects to revolt. Their future colonial prospects and intra-imperial scuffles were to be secured at any price. Suffice to say they had back then as much success as the current Homeland Security in the US and most of their actions were supported by xenophobia, racism, and jingoist sentiment to spy on suspicious ‘foreigners’.
Gurdjieff’s account of his pre-1912 years should be seen as more akin to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (published in 1901). It is not just the Imperial fantasy of impossible control, ‘native’ Informants were necessary to the imperial enterprise and information across immense swaths of territory had to be gathered. Such growing Imperial Archives grew larger and larger following the need to document and surveil subaltern populations, refugees and immigrant movements, filtering for potential terrorists and “internationalist” anarchist or socialist elements. The threat of disorder, of anti-imperial and anti-British or anti-French mutinous conspiracy that might endanger the hegemony of the Western powers was largely overblown but violent repression and exploitation left unchecked always tends to accumlate. Fragile post colonial states followed and it all morphed into something more devious and even more genocidal during the Cold War (see the Djakjarta Method and Kissinger’s role). In the wake of early 20 c anarchist bomb attacks and their attempts to topple the authoritarian ruler and monarchies all over Europe (who were largely related by blood alliances altough purported enemies during the Great Game), the various police forces established crucial data flows, exchanges, forming a worldwide dragnet of secret service and Interpol collaboration.
Intellectuals also played an active part in that. Orientalists were the new specialists embroiled in the Great Game since the very beginning. This was of course the time of the Western expeditions along the former Silk Road in the search for archeological loot and manuscripts. The hunt for manuscripts was done without any qualms as regards the right of Europeans to carry of ‘finds’ from non-European lands. An almost textbook example of this is the life of Hungarian-born British archeologist Aurel Stein and the major expeditions to Central Asia—in 1900–1901, 1906–1908, 1913–1916, and 1930 he undertook. From the French side – the French Sinologist and Orientalist Paul Pelliot– both famously ransacking the Dunhuang throve of manuscripts is also part of this tale. As British sinologist Arthur Waley puts it:
“The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote the British sinologist Arthur Waley. “I think the best way to understand [the feelings of the Chinese] on the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking.”
Yes, this movie is also the search for the larger meaning by a small child from the Transcaucasus region, more specifically from the small Armenian town of Gyumri – in the Russian Empire somewhere in the latter half of the 19 century (~1867). He spent his childhood in the Kars Oblast which is now part of eastern Turkey (it was later captured by the Ottoman Empire). At the time was home to an incredibly diverse mixture of multi-ethnic, multi-confessional populations with a long history of traveling holy men, bards, troubadours, mystics and what the French called “fou divin” (men of crazy holy wisdom).
As part of this winds-swept, a nearly semi-desertic area the Armenian plateau “Kars Oblast was home to Armenians, Iranians, Russians, Caucasus Greeks, Georgians, Turks, Kurds and smaller numbers of Christian communities from eastern and central Europe such as Caucasus Germans, Estonians and Russian sectarian communities like the Molokans, Doukhobors, Pryguny, and Subbotniks.”. From the first moment the scene is set, instead of a contest of arms over borders and resources, we get a group of ashugh bards, musicians, and dervishes meeting in a valley since immemorial times to musically duel with each other and try to play the high note, so that the particular acoustic environment of that valley would vibrate in tune. The winner would be chosen and get a lamb if the gathered wise holy crowd agreed. That’s one of my favorite scenes (a truly Pythagorean spectacle!). It is also the one where we can see the diversity of Afghanistan (the movie was filmed in Afghanistan before the Afghan-Soviet War). So this is the entry of young Gurdjieff into a larger and fascinating vibrational universe.
An important community that had a key influence on Gurdijeff was the Yazidis (Yazidi translates to ‘the servant of the creator’) or Yezidis who suffered so much after the rise of ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State) in the wake of the destabilization of this shatter region after the US-British invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent instability and rising sectarianism. Yazidis are this very distinct ethnic-religious group part of the Kurdish-speaking group indigenous to Kurdistan that has faced persecution by nearly everyone. Yazidi’s also have been falsely accused of “Satanism” (because of the Angel worship), but their monotheistic religion of Yazidism seems to have roots in the Western Iranian pre-Zoroastrian religion.
So this is a good occasion to see how such an unlikely quest was supported and nourished by these contacts and by several texts that became available to him from various sources (including the local Dean Borsh monophysite Armenian priest). His encounters with mystical Russian noblemen, the ending with the search for the Sarmoung Brotherhood is pretty typical (probably some monstery in Tibet). There is also great social mobility involved – moving from factory work to being a mendicant to entering Sufi circles or being employed as manual laborers in archeological digs in Egypt. In tune with an era of clandestine travelers, he is always moving incognito and always stealing or otherwise obtaining his knowledge of maps by illicit means. Typical of this era of mappings and border control it is always about hidden maps and hidden places. I think even the famous Khyber Pass gets a mention. There is also a big hint of Shambhala or Agartha.
The result of this improbable and weird early encounters with “remarkable men” in order to devise a coreoghraphy of cvasi-modernist Gurdjieff dance movements – that seem to me like early contemporary dances performed by Rudolf von Laban at the Monte Verita in the Alps.
We have to relate this to other movements (such as the contemporary anthroposophic movement) but also the not-so-obvious (even if he escaped Bolshevik Russia and is by no means a Socialist) Gurdjieff practices also relate to the production of the new man and the early foundation of a worker state, prolet cult, and new avant-garde poetry. I am thinking here about the work of techno-poet and founder of the Central Institute of Labor Alexey Gastev. Gastev’s scientific approaches to work management may seem to be at opposite poles from the Gurdjieff movements, but the teaching “tree” described as being part of this “Fourth Way” body-mind-emotional teaching is similar to the teaching and motion studies of Gastev. One is supposed to be a new calibration and liberation of new worker bodies, the other is immemorial and appears derived from Babylonian times (his learning about it from the Sarmoung monastery). See and judge yourself from the description of the movie by Peter Brooks and rediscover this lost gem.
Out of respect for the majority of our (English-speaking) visitors, I tried to avoid posting Romanian language materials or RO posts. This time I am making an exception – here is a recent talk on the Romanian Youtube Channel Dezarticulat666 I was invited to participate in. They also have a Twitch channel if you practice this sport. Dezarticast has a mind-blowing diverse range of topics, generally focusing on media, environmental politics, environmental justice, labor rights, cultural labor, the so-called ‘creative industries’, openly discussing working conditions, unionization, exploitation and political economy. What I consider vital is their post-ironic, mediatic and tech-savvy approach to all of the above – I think today it is counter-productive (even suicidal) to not be able to discuss current politics, militarism, refugee crisis, populism without taking into account sucy media as comics, movies, musical videos or web03, tech solutionism or crypto scams, or radical UFOlogy, algo-empowered haterizm or meme magick.
While the discussions was free floating and provocative, sure to be controversial take on a few hot topics in today’s multipolar world, there’s a lot left out to be covered in future podcasts, with different guests & and their experiences. I feel highly indebted to A. Rautoiu for making the invitation and for editing the final material. Here is some of the things discussed:
Global Times (PRC official positions, foreign policy, analysis, etc) it might seem like opaque if one does not actually read btw the lines, yet again it is one of these rare insider perspectives. It also offers quick short 3m videos with recent news (similar to Scmp). Invaluable as to official party line I would say.
Discourse Power substack (by Tuvia Gering a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, and a Tikvah’s Krauthammer Fellow, specializing in Chinese security and foreign policy, and emergency and disaster management.). It’s about ‘discourse power’ – and how this is becoming a job advertising the capacity to read China’s entrails. I am pretty cautious of such efforts (since there’s always a bidding going on) but i appreciate the translation effort.
instead of the outdoor Kachalka working-class bodybuilders can work out in the garage
“In Russia’s north [NB city of Murmansk, Kola Peninsula], garages stretch out into endlessness. Behind rusty doors everything can be found, except cars. They are the refuge of the Russian man, the vanishing point out of bleak daily life and a signal of hope for big dreams.”(idmb)
For a short time, ARTE channel offers a shortened (51 min), I guess one could say TV version of the feature-length (1:44) documentary directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Natalija Yefimkina.
In the German text description of Natalija Yefimkina’s documentary this retreat of the Russian man into the space of the garage – exemplifies escapism both from the hard capitalist realities of the post-Soviet life functions as a sort of parallel universe, a paradisiac insular living. I want to add more to this and give it a different direction since what I feel this missed is the entire 1989 history, one that is either forgotten or misunderstood. I want to add that more importantly than the above the garage is liminal space, multiplying in btw workshop, kitchens space, bar, sauna etc – it is also a strange secular space (even if used as an ikon carving atelier and ikons commissioned by local priests as present to the factory managers). It is really an incredible window into live that live amongst some of the most incredible stark landscapes one can imagine, almost like on another planet (think of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus exoplanet).
the workshop is also a place of the bricoleur, the repairmen that fix everything
The Garage has nourished the small illicit pleasures, giving satisfaction in an improvisational way that does not depend on outside resources or commercial infrastructure (not say infrastructure of any kind other than the one remained from the Soviet investment in affordable living). The infrastructure that exists is one of mutual help, without ableism and ageism and feeling of being needed and helping others even when one is not able to help oneself.
when it snows it snows and nearly everyone has its own chimney peeking out
These are the efforts of a different kind of survivalist than the Western (or US Hollywood movie cinematic or YT channel) preppers, the preppers that prepare in the US against the destruction of their way of living or live under the scare of Big Government or even (ridiculous!) fear of exactly some form of Red Scare(Red Storm 2019 is very real for the crazed alt right), socialist takeover (?!) and now they see themselves vindicated by atomic attack threats. These are not the libertarian gun activist that bunker up, stockpile provisions and hamster guns. These ex-Soviet survivors in Russia (and all over the east, be it Romania or Ukraine) are the survivors of a world in perpetual “transition” a transition they are not in control of. The broken or at least ruined and traumatised bodies and hands of men that have survived both the extractive industries and the sell-out of these industries to bigger conglomerates and monopoly consolidation.
cars are nearby but there a lot of singing and get together in front of the garage
We see in them in a sense a versus to the more familiar Midwestern US working class from the “rust belt”, on the other side of the planet, the Trump voters and “basket of deplorables”. Languishing in this ex-Soviet post-workerist milieu of great polar mining towns, are people who made it through the biggest expropriation and wealth transfer in recent history (similar to the enclosure of the commons or colonial exploitation). When we look into these pauperized yet lively garages we actually see the outgrowth of a harsh reality that came out of 1990s shock therapy and the disappearance of both the Soviet Union, public places and public services.
I don’t want to riff idyllically on the anti-consumerist ethos here as if it is a life choice here – it is not, and it is like this out of necessity or out of desperation or skepticism, or need for having something to do during the long arctic nights, yet it is always there. It is not just escapism but also a permanent shelter. I have been discussing with Julia my partner – and who she felt this group of elderly men from Murmansk is so much different than the Piemont Italian truffle hunters (of roughly the same age group) or what unites them (if).
Both of them somehow suffer under increasing commercialism, the disappearance of what they are best at doing, yet there is also a huge gap btw them. This one is a very funny yet also very desperate, self-deprecating, bleak, darkly humorous, and utterly absurd universe – though the more previous the fragile friendship that seems to exist on the borders of the world, at the end of post-industrial civilization, on the brink of junkyards and garbage dumps.
the garage rows in the long polar night
These cobbled up mutual social webs of inter-dependencies (as in repairing, soldering, and mending) – are marked by impossible projects, deaths and illness under harsh conditions. Yes, this may be a self-made world of decrepit individualism & vodka consumerism (even pole dancing – in one scene), yet they exist in the face of stark post-1989 inequalities, were playing with the idea of suicide or death (no matter how terminal might seem), offers some form of respite.
there is a lot of customization and there is a lot of diversity and variety of these parallel worlds
I also enjoyed their insider discussions and self-deprecating thoughts – their own self-reflexive positioning about their own ‘garage’ existence and artistic marginality or even about a Putin picture or foreign cars and brands. All these constitute materials and facets of a material culture that is very much alive. I like the way they distinguish the Russian or ex-Soviet garage life from the garage mythology of the US Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (be it Steven Jobs, Bill Gates or Google founders).
three friends discussing inside a garage
There is no start-up from the garage into the unlimited growth, growing out of the garage into the corporation, but a rather what I would call a start-down, the looking down the hole, the certitude that you can dig only below your garage not up, since it is just a step from garage people to mole people (like in one of the protagonists that dug up single-handedly 5 levels under his garage and left this bizarre subterranean space to his grandson).
I think Natalija Yefimkina manage to open up these garage doors with incredible sincerity, in a serene, humorous way, a caring and non-judgmental way, the same way these people have invited her (and the film crew) into their shelter livelihoods.
Out of the Present is one of the most mind-boggling examples of documentary making (in my experience) to come out of what the Germans call “Wende”, the 1989 turn, or what in Romania is known as the – “tranzitie” – the protracted transition of the early 1990s after the Romanian Revolution. The Romanian 1989 Revolution is left as the only – brutal, bloody revolution. Yet we have another example maybe even more emblematic – because it had much more wider repercussions. The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt also known as the August coup – is often depicted as the fight btw the reformists and the old guard soviet apparatchiks, with the reformist faction run by Boris Eltsin winning. Well, the result was the total collapse of the Communist Party and the immediate collapse of the Soviet State. In fact, in retrospect, this could be read as actually the first important step in the shock therapy economic measures – that have afflicted Russia, but all the other countries of the east bloc as well – be it Romania, Bulgaria (maybe not so much Poland and the Baltic nation-states). Another exception is CPR – China being one of those rare, maybe only countries that got forewarned and beforehand refused any structural liberalization of its core industries preferring instead a gradual liberalization from the margins, a dual pricing system and many other things which none of the previous examples followed (including Romania and Russia). In fact one can say that without first the annihilation of the party and the state, all the other – price liberalization etc privatization of industries, even the rise of the oligarchs and Putin – would have not been possible.
Andrei Ujică is one of the most accurate analyzers of mediatic sociological political mutations – and he helped Harun Farocki make the Videograms of a Revolution documentary in 1992 practically the best documentation we have about the first televised revolution – about the various framings, affective overflow and post-spectacle operations taking place on TV, with actual theatre actors becoming revolutionaries and so on. They were both digging into hours and hours of TV materials to be able to offer this comprehensive study of broadcasted images and audio-visualization of politics.
Out of Present is something else – it presents the Soviet Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev leaving Earth and CCCP for a space mission on MIR to return and reenter Earth in a new country called Russia. It is for me one of the most stark example of space dilation that does not take just its relativistic time consequences to their limit but also the subjective experience of somebody who is caught on orbit, who is dependent on a sort of terrestrial life support system that was on the verge of collapse, an infrastructure that brought Gagarin first in orbit, the first human to leave terrestrial space. It spans the entire collapse of the Soviet Union but from a cosmic perspective of sorts and during the routine of one of the most enduring dreams of humanity, the one that links communism with the exploration of outer space. There is much to be teased out of this documentary so I leave it up to the viewers. This documentary was included in the New Temporealities show at the Scena 9 BRD residency in Bucharest this year. Below is my text on it – for the room 7 of the exhibition where the movie was screened.
07 Out of the Present into Space
What happens when time plays tricks on you up there, when you rely on and depend on once-functioning life support systems, guided systems that put the first humans in orbit around the Earth? What happens when you depend more than ever on a space exploration infrastructure that sent you there, but which for the moment remains suspended? Abandonment is the occasion to get out of a continuous present, dislocated from that home that is no longer on Earth, the place where even the system that sent you towards the stars will soon cease to exist.
This portal, which measures the drift out of time and into unknown space, is discontinuous. Just as time becomes difficult to measure, suddenly there is a place where worlds are suspended, and far too quickly destructured and atomized. Many SF comics and cover artists felt the need to abandon drawing when they encountered the prowess of CGI post-production, because they felt 3D modeling was already fulfilling their purpose, delimiting all possible actions in advance.
The exit from the present takes place when everything is spatialized, leaving room for movement through the frozen time of others, even through the unimaginable speed of some spaceships flying over a fiery exoplanetary landscape far from here and now. Entering in instantaneous and short-term memory, images are no longer subjected to linear succession. The fast pursuit is no longer a pursuit but a suspension in between. It’s ready to happen, and yet it doesn’t happen.
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Modes of Market Creation and Price Regulation
1. China’s Tradition of Bureaucratic Market Participation: Guanzi and the Salt and Iron Debate
2. From Market to War Economy and Back: American Price Control during World War II and Its Aftermath
3. Re-creating the Economy through State Commerce: Price Stabilization and the Communist Revolution
Part II: China’s Market Reform Debate
4. The Starting Point: Price Control in the Maoist Economy and the Urge for Reform
5. Rehabilitating the Market in Theory and Practice: Chinese Economists, the World Bank, and Eastern European Émigrés
6. Market Creation versus Price Liberalisation: Rural Reform, Young Intellectuals and the Dual-Track Price System
7. Debunking Shock Therapy: The Clash of Two Market Reform Paradigms
8. Escaping Shock Therapy: Causes and Consequences of the 1988 Inflation
TimeSpace Warps 