Month / October 2022

by Andrew

What I’ve been listening to lately

  • Evan Ziporyn – Philip Glass: Best Out of Three. Apparently this is the first recording of this 1968 work by Glass, a quite pretty piece of interlocking lines for three clarinets. I still like these earlier works by Glass the most. Ziporyn presents two versions, the second played at a tempo one-third faster than the first, and notes: “I know of very few pieces of music that can work at such markedly different speeds, and pretty much all of them are either by Philip Glass or J.S. Bach.” He has also recorded another classic minimalist work played entirely on overdubbed clarinets: Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint.
  • Lucky Thompson – Complete Parisian Small Group Sessions 1956-1959. Thompson had one of the most beautiful sounds on tenor saxophone of any jazz player, but never got recorded as much as he deserved. Somewhat like Don Byas, who was a decade older, his playing combined swing and bebop in a way that now sounds timeless. This generous 4CD package collects a bunch of otherwise obscure sessions from his sojourn in France, all of which are just classic jazz.
  • Ornette Coleman – Sound Museum: Hidden Man. Coleman famously blew up traditional jazz orchestration with his pianoless quartets of the 1960s, so it’s surprising and pleasing to hear just how good he sounds here with the traditional backing of piano, bass, drums. The difference is that by 1996, when these sessions were recorded, jazz piano playing had had a generation to absorb Coleman’s innovations: Geri Allen proves to be a perfect foil for him.
  • Wadada Leo Smith – Ten Freedom Summers. Fair warning, this massive collection is over four hours of music, and for me probably only about half of it will be a repeat listen. The combination of jazz quartet with a classical chamber ensemble is a mixed bag. Smith’s trumpet playing is gorgeous, and in his use of space and silence he is the true heir of Miles Davis. But I find it hard to love his writing for strings, although it’s clearly an important part of his art; maybe I just don’t have the background for it. Still, your mileage may wary, and the quartet tracks are undeniably brilliant.
  • Freddie Hubbard – Hub Cap. One of the absolute classic 1960s Blue Note sessions of sophisticated hard bop, which I had somehow missed hearing until recently. The lineup is fantastic, with Julian Priester and Jimmy Heath joining Hubbard in the front line, and the writing is particularly good, including Hubbard’s own arrangements and one by the great Melba Liston.
by Andrew

It only looks like ideology from the outside

Ideology seems to be everywhere in today’s China: there is a huge apparatus devoted to propagating the correct official views on the big questions of the day, from the Covid-19 pandemic to financial regulation. Given how much effort the Party and the government put into criticizing incorrect ideas and repeating correct ones, it’s natural to think that ideas are truly central to Chinese politics.

An alternative view emerges from Joseph Torigian’s recent book, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao, a detailed account of the internal battles at pivotal historical moments in two Leninist systems. Torigian suggests that what in standard historical accounts appear as epic struggles over the direction of the nation were in fact narrow arguments over specific political issues, that were driven less by differences of ideas than by maneuverings to gain personal power. It’s certainly a deflating, cynical view, but given the historical evidence he marshals, it is hard to say it is wrong.

Take for instance one of the most famous ideological statements in China’s recent history, the 1978 decision that the Communist Party should shift its focus away from class struggle and toward economic growth. Generalists like me tend to see this as a major historic turning point, when China’s leadership turned its back on Maoism and embraced pragmatism and markets. This corresponded with a change in leadership from Mao’s handpicked successor Hua Guofeng to Deng Xiaoping. But in Torigian’s account, this statement turns out not to be about “class struggle” in the general sense but only a recent internal campaign:

At the November 1978 work conference, [Hua Guofeng] did not oppose changing the party’s “key link” from “class struggle” to economics. The idea that Deng somehow triumphed over Hua on this issue is wrong. During Hua’s tenure, “class struggle” did not have the same meaning that it had during the Cultural Revolution. Then it meant the campaign to expose and criticize the Gang of Four. … At the Eleventh Party Congress in 1977, the plan of Hua and the top leadership was to finish the “ferreting-out” phase of exposing and criticizing the Gang of Four within the year or a little longer. At the Fifth National People’s Congress in February and March 1978, Hua said that the “ferreting-out” campaign was basically finished on a national scale.

Torigian agues that discussion among the top leadership on was mainly over the precise wording of how to announce the end of “class struggle” in this restricted sense, and that Hua and Deng were basically in agreement on the need to end the campaign.

Standard historical accounts present the 1978 third plenum as the culmination of an ideological struggle between Hua’s retrograde leftism and Deng’s free-thinking pragmatism. What was at stake was encapsulated by a phrase in a People’s Daily editorial in 1977 which became known as the “two whatevers”: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” The official account of this debate appeared in a note to the Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping, and it has since been followed by many scholars:

After the downfall of the Gang of Four, the Party Chairman, Hua Guofeng, who was in charge of the work of the Central Committee, clung to the erroneous notion of the “two whatevers” and reaffirmed the wrong theories, policies and slogans of the “cultural revolution”. On April 10, 1977, Deng Xiaoping wrote a letter to the Central Committee, proposing that to guide the work of the Party, it should use instead a correct understanding of Mao Zedong Thought as an integral whole. Later, he talked with Party comrades on many occasions, explaining to them that the “two whatevers” did not accord with Marxism.

On September 19, 1977, when talking with the leading member of the Ministry of Education, Deng said that seeking truth from facts was the quintessence of the philosophical thinking of Mao Zedong. On May 11, 1978, Guangming Ribao carried an article entitled “Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth”, which stated that the most fundamental principle of Marxism was the integration of theory with practice. This was a criticism of the principle of the “two whatevers”. It was this article that gave rise to the debate about the criterion for testing truth.

Hua Guofeng and others tried to suppress the debate, but as the majority of the central leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, were fully in favour of it and took the lead in it, it gradually spread throughout the country. The debate demolished the “Left” ideology that had long shackled people’s minds and laid the theoretical and ideological foundation for the convocation of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee.

The attempt by Party historians to paint Hua as the slavish follower of Mao always lacked a certain plausibility: after all, Hua had in 1976 led a coup against the Gang of Four, Mao’s chief hangers-on during the Cultural Revolution. Torigian’s account of this event makes clear that the arrest and trial of the Gang of Four was in fact a coup, in the sense of a violent and illegal change of government, because the arrest was not formally approved by the Party and was accomplished through the use of force. Hua’s willingness to risk instability by forcibly removing Mao’s favorites just a month after the great leader’s death reflected the urgent need he and other leaders felt to move on from the Cultural Revolution. Why, then, would he change course in 1977 and argue so forcefully that Mao’s wishes needed to be respected? Torigian says he didn’t, and it was all a misunderstanding:

New evidence shows that the origin of the “two whatevers” had nothing to do with political or economic orthodoxy. … What, then, did the “two whatevers” actually mean, and why did so many individuals in the elite misinterpret the expression? The key to understanding this puzzle is that the immediate challenge facing Hua was how to show his flexibility without raising concerns that he was moving too quickly to reject the Maoist legacy. Unfortunately for Hua, he handled this problem in a particularly clumsy way, and it was this clumsiness, as opposed to political dogmatism or opposition to Deng, that led to the “two whatevers.”

The “two whatevers” ended up in the People’s Daily not because Hua was trying to send a top-down signal of the country’s political direction, but because Hua’s speechwriters were trying to find a way to ease the concerns of the still-numerous supporters of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Obviously the expression turned out to be easily misinterpreted, and it upset Deng, for which Hua later made a self-criticism. In Torigian’s account, this sloppy drafting turned out to be a political windfall for Deng, allowing him to portray himself as being on the right side of a major ideological debate. But this ideological debate was largely an illusion, a cover for Deng’s maneuverings against Hua. In order to oust Hua, Deng went on to say a lot of things that he very clearly did not actually mean:

In August 1980, Deng famously gave a speech criticizing “feudal practices” and calling for an institutionalized political system. The speech is often interpreted as a programmatic statement in favor of “political reform.” However, this is a fundamental misreading of the speech’s origins and implications. Criticisms of feudalism and calls for political reform were not a real platform but rather an ideological justification for Hua Guofeng’s removal from the leadership. …

As Deng Liqun freely admitted, “This speech by Comrade Xiaoping in actuality was directed against Hua Guofeng; it was preparation for Hua to leave his position, to find a theoretical justification.” When a friend pointed out that this speech was a reason why many people believed that Deng Xiaoping supported real inner-party democracy and institutionalization, Zhao Ziyang discounted this analysis, saying, “At this time, Deng was primarily addressing Hua Guofeng; he was struggling against Hua Guofeng.”

Torigian’s detailed reconstructions of the politics behind ideological debates are impressive, but also somewhat depressing for those of us trying to understand China’s contemporary policymaking. Much of the evidence he uses for his revisionist account of the 1970s and early 1980s has only emerged fairly recently, and similar detailed behind-the-scenes evidence is much less available for recent decades.

After digesting his book, it’s harder to have confidence in analyses that take Chinese ideological debates and statements at face value. Most of the time, it seems, outsiders to the system do not really know the precise context for the Party’s various political slogans and the internal uses to which they are being put. What looks like a struggle over ideology on the outside may just be a plain old power struggle.

by Andrew

Watching the gap between rhetoric and reality

One of Xi Jinping’s accomplishments as China’s leader has been to narrow the gap between political rhetoric and policy reality. During the tenure of his predecessor Hu Jintao, this gap was so wide as to be a standing joke: various government promises of reform were repeatedly followed by little or no action. Important economic-policy decisions seemed to be driven less by declared priorities and more by expediency and interest-group bargaining. Perhaps in reaction, Xi has focused on making China’s governing apparatus more disciplined, more effective and less corrupt. He has recast the administrative structure to ensure that there is more coherence between his own top-level pronouncements and the actions of lower-level officials.

To take just one, highly consequential, example: after Xi declared a “battle” against financial risk in 2017, the annual growth of banking-system assets slowed sharply to 7-10% in his second term from the 15-17% of his first term. The shift was a dramatic contrast to the repeated failure of the Hu administration to rein in the credit boom they had unleashed in the response to the 2008 global financial crisis. In the initial stages of Xi’s financial-risk campaign, there was a lot of skepticism that Chinese regulators would ever meaningfully control the growth of debt. Now, the crackdown on debt has gone so far that it has triggered major financial problems at property developers, with huge knock-on effects on the real economy. If anything, the problem is that regulators have been too zealous in implementing Xi’s top-level priorities, and haven’t done enough bargaining with affected interest groups.

The size of the gap between rhetoric and implementation is therefore an important indicator of Xi’s power, one that he himself is focused on (he has given many speeches criticizing officials for passivity or inaction). In the runup to October’s Party Congress, which is all but certain to cement a third term for Xi as Party chief and all-round supremo, there has been a lot of fantasizing about scenarios in which his power would be more limited. These range from him being deposed in a coup to having to share power with supposed “reformers.” None of these are particularly realistic: despite plenty of grumbling, there’s no evidence of any organized or effective internal political opposition. The Party Congress is most likely to feature high-level rhetorical affirmation of Xi’s signature goals, and a new leadership lineup that is dominated, though perhaps not completely, by Xi loyalists.

But, as Jude Blanchette suggests in a typically thoughtful recent piece, it will be worth watching for any sign that the gap between rhetoric and reality is widening back to a historically more normal size:

Prognosticating on China’s future has always been an invitation to be proven wrong. But the most sensible starting position is that Xi is not going anywhere, and for all the apparent setbacks China is now facing—many of which can be directly tied to actions taken by Beijing in recent years—the discrepancy between public frustration and an organized leadership challenge remains significant.

This opens up a third path for Xi somewhere between unchallenged dominance (which he may well lose if problems continue to mount) and full-on leadership change (which he is unlikely to have to confront): Xi as a bruised autocrat with China as a diminished global power. In this scenario, Xi is able to retain his grip on power, but without the elan and appeal that seemed to follow him over the 18th and 19th Party Congresses. His major policy pronouncements would receive a polite reception, and then be ignored summarily or (purposefully) misconstrued. Policy paralysis and policy dislocation would typify the rollout and implementation, or lack thereof, of new government regulatory efforts.

The excerpt is from CPC Futures, a useful, and free, recent volume from the East Asian Institute in Singapore that compiles several pieces explaining political and economic trends under Xi.

Currently, the best candidate for a Xi policy pronouncement that fails to get translated into reality is the slogan “common prosperity,” which summarizes a general desire to narrow income and wealth inequality. Xi rolled out the slogan with much fanfare in 2021, writing it into the five-year plan and devoting a high-level meeting in August to its discussion. At the time, the term was associated with the crackdowns on internet platforms and real-estate developers, the sectors responsible for creating most of China’s billionaires. But by early 2022, the slogan seemed to be a lower priority in official propaganda, with Premier Li Keqiang mentioning it only once in his annual government work report in March (see my previous post What happened to common prosperity?).

A quick search in Baidu Index, the Chinese equivalent of Google Trends, quantitatively confirms these impressions. The screenshot below is an index of how often the term “common prosperity” appears in news reports: there’s a huge spike around Xi’s meeting in August 2021, which then rather quickly falls back to previous levels.

It’s understandable that such a longer-term aspirational goal would be less urgent at the moment, given the serious shorter-term challenges the government has had to deal with this year. But it’s still notable how little substantive progress the working machinery of the government has made on it: there is no sign, for instance, of a promised “action plan” for common prosperity. The slogan has certainly not vanished from official discourse, and given Xi’s firm control over the propaganda and ideology apparatus, it is highly unlikely that there would be any formal retreat from common prosperity. The Politburo meeting in August specifically mentioned that the Party Congress would cover how to achieve common prosperity, so the term seems likely to feature prominently in Xi’s speech setting out his agenda for the next five years.

The question is what ends up happening in practical terms as a result of this declared priority. It is possible, for example, to imagine a scenario in which Chinese officials and scholars spend months discussing and debating how to deliver common prosperity per Xi’s instructions, and then, at the end of an exhaustive exploration of possible options, decide that the best course is to make some modest adjustments to existing policies (such as more funding for regional development initiatives in lagging areas). Any signs of officials slow-walking Xi’s priorities, or talking them to death, would be indeed be a significant change from the current rush to show eager participation in his campaigns.