NOW IN 22 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. CLICK ON THE LOWER LEFT HAND CORNER “TRANSLATE” TAB TO FIND YOURS!

By Jeff J. Brown

Pictured above: Mobo Gao and his latest book, “Gao Village Revisted”.

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Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

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I’m so pleased to have Mobo back on the show to discuss his latest book, “Gao Village Revisited”.

Most Westerners take for granted the privileged, middle class upbringing they have had. Pretty cushy for starters, compared to the 30,000 children who, to this day, die every 24-hour news cycle, due to a lack of clean water, shelter, medical care and adequate nutrition, caused by global capitalism, Eurangloland’s incessant wars and imperial domination of Planet Earth. For the more than three billion fellow humans who live on less than $2.50 per day https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-poverty, including 1.5 million households and 3 million children in the United States http://www.alternet.org/economy/number-americans-living-less-2-day-skyrocketing, we all represent their one-percent class. 

Mobo Gao had clean water, shelter, medical care and adequate nutrition, growing up in revolutionary China, during the 1950s-1970s. But he still lived through an upbringing that few Westerners can imagine, because he was dirt poor and isolated in a rural Chinese village, far from urban comfort. He never starved, but was often hungry. 

Ninety-nine percent of the books Westerners read about the Mao Era are written by “Scar Literature” authors. There is big money in penning books that portray New China in the worst possible light. Facts and credible research don’t matter, but here’s a cool million if you’ll write us a sordid, sensational screed about how awful and depraved the communist revolution was, 1949-1978. “We need a rewrite. Your script is not terrifying, bloody and shocking enough”! 

Be that as it may, Mobo Gao grew up and lived during the heyday of New China’s rapid development and social change, including the much-sensationalized Great Leap Forward, 1959-1961 and the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976. Unlike the money-grubbing scar literature writers, Mobo’s three books are cool, calm, collected and fact-filled, backed up with tons of statistics and real-life experiences in rural, communist China – the good and the bad. 

This is my second interview with Mobo Gao. In first one, we discussed his first two books. Today, we will be focused on his latest work, “Gao Village Revisited”. 

Welcome today to a wonderful discussion with a man who really lived Mao’s Era, from the ground up – Mobo Gao. 

Here are Mobo Gao’s three books, which Jeff read and thoroughly enjoyed: 

The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution 

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Chinas-Past-Cultural-Revolution/dp/074532780X/ 

Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China  

https://www.amazon.com/Gao-Village-Rural-Modern-China/dp/0824831926/ 

Gao Village Revisited: The Life of Rural People in Contemporary China 

https://www.amazon.com/Gao-Village-Revisited-People-Contemporary-ebook/dp/B08D6TDQXV/ 

Here is a great book Mobo co-wrote with Dongping Han and Hao Qi, which I also thoroughly enjoyed, 

Remembering Socialist China, 1949-1976 

https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Socialist-China-1949-1976-Mobo/dp/9670960002/ 

Mobo has been featured on China Rising Radio Sinoland before, 

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=mobo%20gao 

Mobo’s interview makes for a wonderful bookend with another guest I had on  my show. Dongping Han also grew up during revolutionary China and has some fascinating stories to tell, as well. Their interviews are quite different, so both make for valuable and informative listening. 

Dongping has also featured on CRRS, 

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=dongping%20 

Transcript

Jeff J. Brown (Host) – Good morning, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland on the Beaches of Normandy, I’m going seven and a half hours later to Gigantic Island, compliments of Australia, and we have on the show today a super wonderful person and a great friend, Mobo GAO. How are you doing, Mobo?

Mobo Gao (Guest) – Great

Jeff- Mobo is in Adelaide is Adelaide and that notched down at the bottom of the south side of Australia.

Mobo- Yes.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah. And it’s a very famous river that runs through. I can’t remember.

Mobo-Famous what?

Jeff- River

Mobo-: And Murray Darling.

Jeff- That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. They’ve written songs about that. It’s unbelievable. Well, you listen this is the second time, I have Mobo on the show. In the first show, we talked about, we discussed his first two books, which are The Battle for China’s Past, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and then GAO village Rural Life in modern China and today we going to be discussing his newest book, his newest work, Gao Village Revisited, the Life of Rural People Contemporary China.

And he wrote a great book called The Great Book of Dongping Han and how she which I also thoroughly enjoyed remembering socialist China in nineteen forty nine, 1976. And I do want to point out that we’re talking to someone who lived in rural China during the entire Mao Zedong era, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And it’s very important that we talk to people like Mobo because he grew up in the heyday of China’s rapid development and social change.

And unlike the money grubbing ska literature Mobo’s three books were cool, calm, collected. In fact, filled back with tons of statistics and lot real life experiences in rural communist China, the good and the bad. And today we’re going to talk about what happened after the year the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap forward in the Mao eras. So, so glad to have you on the show today, Mobo.

Mobo-: Ok. Glad to talk to you, Jeff.

Jeff- And I want to ask you, first of all your books and I have signed on, but I’m obviously a Mobo Friend and you should read all the books. But please give us a brief rundown of your upbringing where, when and how you ended up being a university professor in Australia. It’s a remarkable life story. Go ahead.

Mobo-: Well, I didn’t leave the village when I was 20 and when there was still no electricity and I went to study English at Xiamen University. And that was during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no nationwide entrance examination for such education. And the policy was supposed to be affirmative towards the marginalized, the lower class people. So it was called the workers, peasants, soldiers, students.

So it was based on documentation. There was some kind of test examination to test your basic literacy. And you’re supposed to be recommended by the grassroots organizations like the committee. So I was recommended to be one of them. And then I was selected to go to Cambridge University study English. After three years of study of English, I was asked to be a teacher at the University of English, and then there was a scholarship to study in England.

So I was, you know, there was some kind of a competition. But eventually I came out to be able to go to study in England. My studied in England, first English and then master’s degree, and then PHD. After I finished my PHD, I acquired the job in Australia that’s how I move to Australia.

Jeff- Ok.

Mobo- Yeah.

Mobo- I was working as a professor of China studies.

Jeff- All right, great. So how have you been in Australia, Mobo?

Mobo- Since 1991.

Jeff- Wow, OK. All right. Incredible. When you read about your two daughters in the third book going back to a GAO village and their impressions. And I’m sure your family has many interesting stories to talk about together. When you, you know, your book, basically your first book, Battle for China is about the Mao era. And in your book, let’s call it defense of the Mao Era, you know, good and bad.

You know, it wasn’t perfect, but you cut through all the scary literature and tell a different side of the story about the Mao era. And then GAO Village you talk about what it was like during the Mao era and somewhat afterwards into the after that. And then this latest one, you know, like 20 years later, you were now up to like, you know, in the last five years or so, you talk about what’s happened since then.

So with Deng Xiaoping, post Mao era agriculture and market reforms, you know, collective farming and the much lauded Barefoot Doctor program disappeared. How long did the changes take place and how did rural people adapt? And please explain, because a lot of people may not know what it is, but so please explain what collectivization was during the Mao era and how that has been dismantled during the last four years, and which side is winning the production model battle these days? Go ahead.

Mobo-: That’s a very good question. Quite see take. I think that a great deal of time to try to explain or to talk about it full details but I’ll just summarize some of the way short time. One of the things about the Mao era that people the interpretation of the Mao era was done by the post Mao, the moral, political and intellectual elite. Now, because the Mao I mean, the China’s political and intellectual elite.

We’re sort of constantly, especially to the convolution topics of criticism and simple criticism, because there was whole idea of Mao to stop China moving into what he called a capitalist society. Then Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Jieshi research was number one thing to be was number two to the capitalist noticed. In other words, the leaders who would take China to into capitalism road.

So these people may not be entirely their own fault because their ideology or their way of thinking did suffer it only not one way during the revolution because they were taken out, put on stage to be criticized in public. That was planned instead to be was humiliated. And so therefore they don’t like the idea of pollution and therefore the backlash against the revolution led them to question the whole idea of Mao’s policies and the entire era of Mao so the postwar interpretation that is accepted in also inside China under the West.

It was a political a lot of people don’t realize that took it as the effect eastern. So the first Gao book was in some way to address this issue, to show that in rural China, at least the progress there was progress, socio-economic progress, and like education, health care, which was echoed by how do things look as well and also, infrastructure like irrigation reservoirs and the mechanization even and new technology fertilizers and a new kind of rice, seeds and so on and so forth.

So it was not by the late 90s and even 70s, but it was China was on the edge of takeoff, taking off and has one book by American scholar called The Green Revolution Technological Innovation Cumming up in the coming period. So, some Western scholars and Chinese themselves now start to realize that the most immediate personal interpretation of the Mao was not nuanced, was one sided. And I, of course, wrote the book for it 30 years ago, and it was published in 1999 already pointed out.

So it took a long time for people to realize it. So that’s the best thing about coverage, which tends to show that it was not as bad as people thought it was portrayed. Now how come if he was not that bad, that there was a change that was with the so-called reform and the dismantling of the collectives. Now, that is very complicated because it’s interesting because as I said in my written answer to you.

I didn’t interview GAO Village about this and talked to my brother, younger brother, who is very late, HKT ???, and who was one of the village leaders at that time, I said. How can that be a collective system of justice there? And my brothers said, we did know that the government was going to be dismantled. And the first thing what they call responsibility, responsibility since that was kind of a work assignment idea.

So say for some kind of complex work and the production company would assign somebody or of the family to finish that and then get and then you have you will be rewarded or cut into whether your complicated task, completed task. So it wasn’t ideal at the beginning was not dismantled Cumming. And that is the kind of thin end of the pitch of the wish, so we wish it was designed to be dismantled across by introducing this kind of gradual change so that people didn’t say what’s taking place.

Jeff- And so I think you said they started this responsibility system. What about 1979, 1980?

Mobo- That started in 1979 or even later in regional area. It started early in some places. So that late 70s, early 1980s while 1984, he was almost dismantled, except the few hundred who resisted very, very strongly.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah some of which are still exists today. So which is quite, quite, quite fascinating. What happened to the barefoot the incredibly lauded and emulated barefoot doctor system with the collectivization being dismantled?

Mobo- Yep. Because the whole idea of the barefoot doctor system was based on a collective system because so the doctor would see the patients whenever he is free. The quiet and the idea is that if there’s no person to see, the doctor will be like a farmer. That’s why it’s called a barefoot, because you don’t wish shoes in the field. So if you if the collective system is dismantled, then the very existence of the doctor system has had no basis.

Jeff- OK.

Mobo- So then they all become private clinics.

Jeff- Got it. Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. All right. The next question. I did, you said, we do point out you mentioned in your written answer that they fabricate stories to legitimize their anti-collective measures. And they were very successful collectives since the failed ones with many in the middle don’t have to guess is that it’s something like 30, 40, 30, would you like to say something about that?

Mobo- Yeah, this is exactly what an example to show what I said before, it was politically designed to dismantle the equipment system and conquer story was fabricated and the so-called document with the signature of its people and actually in his history museum was later a copy. Not real, not original one. In fact, the collectives they were not they didn’t have a good leadership, and if you if at recall what William H. Hinton said because he was a high profile expert in rural China till Mao and he was trusted. He worked very hard.

And he went to the countryside. He traveled all over the places and talked with peasants and so on and so forth. So he estimated that about one third of the collectives did very well successfully about once in the middle, middle and about one third might be not doing that well. So this is you know, it’s kind of three, three, three.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ok.

Mobo- Credibly. So, for this kind of collective system and also autonomy and self-independence, you really need a very good leadership or it is not going to work. We could not put themselves together, so they wanted to just be household farming. And so the Chinese leadership at that time wanted to use this to show that the dismantling of the country was voluntary by the farmers themselves to justify their political aim.

Jeff- And so, Xiaogancun said these are the declared devised regions. Is that what those words?

Mobo- Yeah, in fact Xiaogangcun never really got them out of poverty anyway, even when they dismantled collectives and they didn’t do well either. And so later, in order to prop up the story, to do some of the government and the local government and central government give them a lots of assistance. And in fact, they give the financial assistance, system assistance and also send a high level cadre to meet them. And eventually, ironically, that leads that cadre were tired of hard work and he wanted to meet collectivize.

Jeff- I think, they’re still, maybe about a hundred collectives were still in China. I remember reading an article about things which maybe 100 or 200, I can’t remember. But apparently they’re doing OK.

Mobo- Yeah.

Jeff- Well, since 1980, the battle between China’s rural privatizers and collectivists continues to rage on. In 2019, I interviewed Alex Witherspoon and John Hanchar, who were doing field surveys and visited several of the still Mao Era villages. It is really interesting, Alex told us there were laws being discussed in China’s National People’s Congress to move towards privatization. But at the same time, President Xi gave a policy speech in twenty eighteen to not force any collective to liberalize nor stop any village from going back to collectivization.

And in that same part of your book, you talked about how the privatized models of East Asia, such as Taiwan and Japan and Korea, have not served so well. So just tell us who’s winning and what’s going to happen and how it’s going to play out, do you think, in the next five years, especially with since Xi Jinping was elected president.

Mobo- The push for a hope so at the moment. Let me start with what the current system is like. One system is that the land. I mean, agricultural land, farming land in rural China is collectively owned by a village whatever the village inherited from the past. So and then the village would then divides the land equally on a capital bases to households. And the household has to use right to produce whatever they want to sell what they want.

So the so the ownership has two layers of structure. So they collectively owned by the village. And then is that the ownership and by the US is owned by the household. Now, so that’s household funding. So that it’s been since 1984 until now still the case. Now there is this economic rations like often Yongxiang and Tongxiang and the others. Of course, they wanted to argue that and the Xiaogangcun way.

They argue that in order to be efficient, productive, productive, and the land has to be thoroughly wholesale owned privately. In other words, they want to abolish the collective ownership. Now, no Chinese leadership has dared to do that for two reasons. One is that the Chinese constitution is written in the Constitution to change the Constitution, and that comes part of China that they’re not to do that unless we change the party.

And this I described in my book, in one country, in many counties, the east, the party secretary wanted to push for this proposition. Where the People’s Congress chair didn’t want that happen because they had to resort to the Constitution and the party secretaries couldn’t do much about it. Now, the first the first reason the economic rations argue for have Wholesale privatization, the plan is that the second reason and if the farmers own that then they’re not be taken away by the developers center and the property rentals.

And then because there was for a long time, there was this issue in China, the cost to property developers to take land and all the local authorities sold cheaply. And the property developers make as much money. But that is excuse because the land to the can be used commercially, very few in comparison, only in urban centers near urban centers

Jeff- On the outside side of Beijing or the outside of Nanjing or the outside of Shanghai.

Mobo- Yeah. So the vast majority of Brazilians doesn’t have that problem. The fact is that people don’t want that anymore because there was until not 2005 and land was taxed and they couldn’t produce much to pay the tax and people wanted to give land away. So there was no such thing as property developer cropping land in the vast area of China. So the Chinese come to the Chinese authorities.

Do not you dare to do the first piece of the Constitution? Secondly, because the collective land ownership is Social Security for hundreds of million people you see you don’t see ghettos like in the Philippines or Mexico or India because. Why? Because when the people, rural people, they want to go to work in the urban centers, when they have no work, they cannot find work or are fired or dismissed.

They could always go back home, this piece of land for them at least to produce food for them so they don’t have to stay in urban China homeless and live in ghettos. So that is very important. And is the Chinese that the system it was able to provide a surplus labor for industrialization at no cost of the state at all.

Jeff- Yeah, it’s pretty impressive and of course, they’re trying to change the Constitution and allow the private ownership of dirt or land. I mean, everybody you can for those of you all don’t know, the world is different, but it in urban areas, I can buy a 70 year private. People can buy a 70 year lease for a house or an apartment or a business or whatever. So there is no private dirt in China. It’s all owned by the state, by the people, through the state and through various organizations and companies and government entities and etc.

So if they privatized that, I think it would be the end of China as we know what I think it would be an absolute catastrophe. If they allowed that to happen, it would end up being another just a continent sized. Well, first off, if they privatized the rural land, what was going to happen? They’re going to go in and regulate the big multi-billion dollar agricultural companies to go in and just buy up all that land and dispossess the people that live there.

It will probably be able to grow pineapples, you know, in Hainan. And we’re growing rice in Guangdong, you know, five thousand hectares of plantations, you know, destroying the village, the fabric of the village model of farming. And, you know, you might just be a disaster. And so I just I hope they have the courage to maybe it would be the beginning of the end of China and It would just turn into a balkanized Indonesia, to be quite honest.

Mobo- Absolutely.

Jeff- Absolutely. So let’s hope they have the courage to not change the Constitution because it will basically be the end of socialism and communism in China would be over.

Mobo- Exactly. But the issue of productivity,

Jeff- Yeah I know.

Mobo- From economic point of view, a large scale farming is more productive.

Jeff- Of course.

Mobo- So the economic rationalists want to push that. Now, the problem is that if you look at this, you mentioned about Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. They, I mean, Japan is a good example. They started with a small household farming. And then and gradually the either the farming, the farms where they had been abandoned by the people and with old people passed away, young people moved away.

So no farming at all. Or they actually have large farming, large scale farming become more productive. That looks very successful. But now both these areas, these so-called East Asian models of agriculture, the one that really become the very well known, was called a ??? in these countries, these areas become increasingly depend on import.

Jeff- Yeah.

Mobo- But that is OK for South Korea, Taiwan or even Japan, but it’s not OK for China.

Jeff- One point four billion people.

Mobo- And China can’t. China needs what they call the source of food sovereignty and food security, and they can’t depend on export. Now, OK, the thing is, although productivity wise, the current system is not higher compared with America and Japan and so on. However you need the production is higher than America. In other words, one acre of land in China you produce more than one acre of land you produce in America was entitlements more labor intensive.

And so that is how China’s food security is sustained. If you go to large scale farming, you might have less productivity, but you will lose lots, lots of food production. And already this is one of the things Xi Jinping that is very much wanting to moment soybean of course is entirely dependent on import and cotton as well, but at the moment, rice is OK, China can be self-sufficient and remain the stable food, the stable grain. So Xi Jinping and the Chinese leaderships already right that China might have already import too much.

Jeff- Well, the big win for China is soybeans. They import like seventy five million metric tons of soybeans a year because it’s a low volume, high value crop and so it uses up a lot of land. And so it’s a lot easier to buy soybeans from Brazil and from the United States and then grow corn, rice, the heavy lower cost of the heavier, lower cost, more dense, getting more tonnage per acre per hectare or so.

But I don’t think they’ll ever be able to get away from the soybean predicament but there’s a lot of soybeans for sale market and there’s even Europe pressure, I mean, there’s plenty of places that, you know, that sell plenty of countries that can sell soybeans. And so that’s basically been the politics. The policy of China is concentrate on rice, corn, barley, sorghum, the feed grains, and rice grain. And then import soybeans.

So. All right. I want to ask you, you know, it just seems to me like such an obvious thing, why don’t more villages take president Xi ques You said nobody can dare touch a collectivized village, the ones that want to stay that way cannot be attacked. And then if anybody wants to collectivize, no one can stop them if that’s what the people want to do. Why is that not happening, Mobo?

Mobo- Because there is still this push for productivity. And they were saying in our development, if not for China to catch up with Western countries to be a developed country, you need to raise productivity. And so in order to do that, they want to push for a kind of what are called ownership responsibility.

So at the moment, what they’re trying to do is they want to do a lot of provinces and local authorities encourage the entrepreneurs, the so-called entrepreneurs. They give them subsidies for them to what you called purchase use rights of the farmers and then say, 100 households encourage you sell your land to one person and the enabling five hundred households. You also sell your legs use to decide

Jeff- Not to sell the dirt, but sell the rights to the users rights, not sells dirt.

Mobo- Sells the right not the collective rights, but to say 30 years. So this entrepreneur, OK, who is supposed to have money and expertise then we would start to farm this in these two villages together and say pretty good. Who soybean. Just one crop, and that’s supposed to be efficient, supposed to be productive. And they were encouraged to do that, but so far it’s not been successful. Let’s be forthright and many people ended in failure. The some success stories, but not many.

Jeff- Ok, well, and would also that too. If somebody comes in and creates a five hundred hectare, thousand hectare soybean farm on all that collective, on all the land that they patch together, what are they doing? What are the people that live there are going to do? I mean, it should just be like a huge disruption to their way of life that has essentially been going on for 5000 years. And as you know, other than that, it’s socialism and communism.

But since nineteen forty nine. But it just I just I don’t know, I just don’t it just doesn’t seem to me that China is cut out for that kind of thing. I mean, I have seen some huge, you know, areas that I can Guilin and Heilongjiang where there are lots of corn is going off into the infinity. I don’t know how those were being down. There was a collective or what, but I have seen that.

Mobo- Because the first of all, you point to the fact that there’s differences in a large plane level land, but then there’s mechanization, which the south terrace mechanization is better suited to machineries and that kind of things. Now, that’s the interesting point that you get out there.

But the second point is in these places and they I mean, it was a long time ago, they already rationalized it, although the farmers, they own the use lights. They have the old you know, they have foundries, they know where they are and how much bled that hole but they agreed to Farm together.

Jeff- Ok, that’s probably what it is. Go ahead.

Mobo- Then you receive the output according to the size of your land you have.

Jeff- Ok. Got it. Yeah. I mean, for those of you who don’t know Chinese geography that well. was Beijing on the Northeast and then above that is the Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang is the massive province that borders eastern Russia and then Jilin borders North Korea and Liaoning, as is the peninsula sticks down towards Japan. So its way up in the north and the weather is more like, you know, Canada and northern United States.

It’s a very cold continental climate in the winter. So our role is very interesting. When we lived in China, 1992, 1997, there were already millions of rural people flooding around the country and flooding into the big cities today, mostly in construction. And we have thousands sleeping on the streets right outside of our house every night, all up and down the streets. And they were actually were very civil.

They were pulled up to the very night is inside to see I mean, if that had been in the United States or the riots but these people were very disciplined, very nice. Anyway after 1978, so they came back in 2010 until 2019 and were in China because we didn’t see the streets that. But there were still a lot of workers.

After 1978, how long did it take for this floating population to begin to grow? And even today, it is still estimated at two to three hundred million rural folk working away from home. And you worried about this a lot in Europe in your last book, Gao Village Revisited How People would leave the Village and find and oftentimes find tremendous success in faraway provinces. Tell us about that.

Mobo- Yeah, basically, virtually all the young people would have would leave the villages. So it’s about 25 to 30 percent of the population of village.

Jeff- Incredible.

Mobo- An hour away from the hometown. And they used to all my great work in southeast southern coast, like Guangdong, Shanghai and some salt. Now they most get it because the development has spread to inland as well as western, north, west, southwest regions, Hainan Island and Guizhou.

Jeff- Xi’an.

Mobo- And Yunnan. So, so, so Yunnan, of course. And therefore the but also even in some like urban centers like a county or provincial center like the town, for instance. So these people, these places started to develop as well. And therefore lots of migrant workers didn’t have to travel that far out like they used to.

Jeff- Yeah, it’s pretty it’s pretty amazing and as you said, it’s thanks it’s thanks to people that like who are from Gao village and the million other villages all over China, it’s thanks to them that they provided the know how and the backbone and the hard work to make it possible for China to have its incredible economic success in the last 40 years. It’s just unbelievable. So thank a Chinese migrant worker for everything that you have.

Mobo- I’m one of them.

Jeff- Here you go. That’s right. All right.

Mobo- I work in Australia.

Jeff- The question I get is that China’s agricultural sector cannot survive without lots of government subsidies, price supports and tax abatements. You mentioned that the WTO, the World Trade Organization, so that China could join this international trade body. At the same time, it is well known that the OPED countries, basically the wealthy countries of the West, the OECD countries, are also heavily subsidized for farmers and producers.

And in the U.S., most of those taxpayers billions go to Fortune 500 transnational behemoths like Cargill and ADM and Del Monte and Dole and Pioneer and Monsanto and others, whereas in France, where most of the agriculture is still small scale.

They help the family farmers who are widely supported by urbanites as well. Chinese subsidies, I think, seem to go little guy too. What is the latest on Chinese Ag subsidies, Price supports, the tax abatements? What do the farmers think about? Will China ever be able to maintain a productive agricultural sector and feed its growing population without them? Take it away.

Mobo- Yeah. Interesting, when China was trying to get into WTO and you went to court, it was and the premier was Zhu Zhongji made a lots of concessions when he went to visit the United States of America and met President Bill Clinton. And he was expecting to sign the agreement so that China could get into a deal and there are so many concessions. But Bill Clinton wanted to extract them all.

So eventually he left the United States without signing and then the United States kept pushing and then started negotiations soon again. And eventually they reached agreement. So China cutting now. These are concessions are so dramatic and so extensive that the Chinese authorities dare not to publish it in Chinese.

Jeff- I didn’t know that. I don’t know what incredible. So amounts of oversight treaty after World War One.

Mobo- So one of the some of the concessions is on the agricultural of China. But then was so such a I mean, it’s only still developing countries that China was so poor and so such a developing country and the Chinese market. So what did China do to make concessions? So what concession is to cap these the price of Chinese subsidies and so that cap rates by per year 2005 was already reached, China couldn’t go further.

And so this is there was a crisis in my first book, there was a crisis in China, and although in the early 80s, up to 85, there was an increase of income, there was an increase of food production. And the rural people help you. And, of course, the economic rationalists and the post Mao, political elites were all claiming all this is because of the reform, because it’s because this is a dismantling of the communist system, of the collective system. And the Chinese peasants are liberated, which is bullshit. And we the income of the rural people increased in the early 1980s because they increased the price of a lot of commodities.

Jeff- Of commodities. OK.

Mobo- Yes, yes. Commodities. And they could afford to do that because they changed the development strategy during Mao. They had to invest in vast socio-economic problems like education, health care, like a defense industry, like heavy industry, like rockets, like satellites. They had to do that because it was encircled by hostile forces. So once the relationship between what was the United States reflects is hostility towards China. You can shift the development strategy.

And that’s what actually happened. It’s not because with the collective system anyway. So after that, after 1985, the input of agriculture, the price cut up. And therefore, agriculture becomes stagnant and low income became stagnant and plus the tax deficit and there were all sorts of grievances. And as I said in the first coverage book, the whenever I went back to coverage, he was complain, he was complain and to complain and complain.

And of course, they thought I could help. I of course, I couldn’t help them. And so life was very, very hard. Now you have to say a credit to Hu Jintao, one of the things that was done during his leadership was the abolition of agricultural tax and that was the first time in Two and a half thousand years recorded history, now the rural people will get a tax.

Jeff- That’s pretty amazing.

Yeah, that was relief that was relief and release for rural people. Now and at the moment, it’s an issue that they can’t the Chinese actually track record of Chinese being the WTO rules are actually very good. So the moment the Chinese cannot subsidize the food in a way, they used to do because it was capped. And as I said to you in my written Rollins’s, they now started subsidizing the agricultural inputs with chemical fertilizers.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mobo- And if I give you this much money, can you reduce the price?

Jeff- Yeah, I say, OK,

Mobo- So that is a way of avoiding the WTO rules.

Jeff- That funny. That’s a smart. I love your stories like the, quote, little incident, and I hope people do buy your book and read it, it’s really a lot of fun. The little incident and how no lawyers were needed to come to an amicable settlement. I wrote about this, too, in the China trilogy and even one of the part and one of the parties.

I was either wrong I was wronged on several occasions over the years and that instantaneous local justice and it works in court right there on the street, on the road, in the park. It works incredibly well, is much quicker and more open than in the litigious West. Yeah, most foreigners have been brainwashed. The Chinese justice is corrupt. How do you respond to ill-informed propaganda like this?

Mobo- Yep, that’s interesting. I start with a story of an Australian student. We said students of Chinese to Chinese study. And a number of years ago, there’s one student among the group who lost his passport. Now, you can’t get into the country without a passport, right? So this student was in deep trouble and the family was worried. And so what did Chinese what do we did?

I mean, I was in the water, my colleagues, is to talk to this the university that we are sending to the university use this leverage to try to talk to the customers, to say, look, this student from Australia alone, family worried without a passport. What can do? So the customers because in order to accommodate students to make students less miserable, allowed him to enter China. Right. Interesting in the discussion.

And some of them at least say, oh, the Chinese system is corrupt. In Australia, rule is rule and without passport, nobody can enter it. He can’t just negotiate to let a student in. You see, this is the thing, this is shows the attitude and the idea of so from the Chinese point of view, we did everything possible

Jeff- yeah, yeah, shows some flexibility and some creativity and so imagination.

Mobo- Lots of hospitality. You know, we know who you are. A student from the Australian point of view of the Chinese must ride with the customs. Let me just put it, the Chinese didn’t do that. They just talk about mediated and let it happen. But this is an illustration of how the so-called rule of law by the Western countries always accusing. The Chinese don’t have rule of law and corruption and everything else.

So from the Chinese point of view, there is, you know, whatever rules you have is to serve Humanity. We are humans. Right? So in other words, we don’t have to OK the rules, but you can break them. If we without break them, I mean, it’s just too rigid. So the extent I is the same thing, because if you go through a legal process and it just serves nobody in any good except the lawyers now.

Jeff- Absolutely. They will always point out and I wrote about this quite a bit. Chinese governance is based on ethics, which is basically the golden rule, you know, and then Western governance is based on morals. So the problem with morals is, is that my morals can definitely be different than yours. And so we’re going to disagree and we’re going to fight. And so in China, it’s basically do unto others what you would want them to do unto you.

That’s Chinese government’s going back three thousand years and so that’s why they have this kind of support, this subtle flexibility to try to solve solutions right there, all the spot in which I actually had the pleasure of experiencing myself several times. So. All right, you wrote about a number of instances of petty and not so petty corruption at the local level, both in business and government, in your accounts for up to about 2015, 2016.

Since 2012, President Xi Jinping has fought tirelessly against corruption at all levels as much as Mao Zedong battled it. But she seems to have had more success. Is this true? And if so, how has she succeeded where Mao seemed to struggle or just now have more success than we realize? And also, has corruption been reduced even more since you wrote Gal Village Revisited.

Mobo- Ok. Let’s look at the extent of the anecdotal evidence, anecdotal evidence is that much or not, many of the local corruption practices have been stopped. Let’s say, for instance, to renew a license to get into university examination and to apply for a business license. And lots of them now, they are very routine. They’re online. They are streamlined. There’s no way you can drive anymore, used to be private everything is family and what people see most, of course, lots of problems are behind the doors.

But what people saw most in those days is the banquet’s, you know, millions, billions, billions of dollars money was wasted on banquets and drinks and all these dinners and all these people damage people’s health and waste of money, you know, the waste of food and so on. And that has really stopped.

Jeff- That’s good. Yeah, that’s a good one. Also, to be fair to China. All my research and writing has shown that the worst corruption of the world is by far in Eurangloland. And that includes, you know, Naito the five eyes, which includes Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, Israel. So, I mean, it’s not just a Sino-problem. It’s in the corruption and corruption is everywhere.

And of course and all you have to do is just look at the NATO and the Defense Department budgets in the West and to see know we’re not talking about a pricey dinner. We’re talking about trillions of dollars being extremely wasted and going into the back pockets. I remember there was that picture of pallets of hundred dollar bills. I mean, pallets of hundred dollar bills being sent to Iraq during the invasion and occupation.

No one ever knows what happened to that money. It just disappeared. So, this is an interesting question, because you talked about this in your book, Gao Village Revisited, that you say China is at least world GDP is underreported. Actually, you’re not alone. Knowledgeable entities like the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in the USA and the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research NBER have said the same thing, usually Tianjin figure 15 percent too low. In other words, the Chinese economy is 15 percent bigger than it actually is.

If that’s the case, then China’s GDP is already bigger than the U.S. is not only a purchasing power parity, which has been a  PPP terms, which has been true since twenty fourteen. But it would also be the case in the more widely reported exchange rate terms. Tell us why you think this is true for world China and is an even bigger now five years after writing your book.

Mobo- Yeah, I do think there are a lot of things about GDP we have to be cautious about. And you know, I’m not economic specialist tonight, but from what I know is that GDP is calculated at least one of things on transaction, right? So if you buy one hundred dollars a share today and you sell one it tomorrow and then that’s two hundred dollars GDP calculated. But in terms of value for society, there was nothing there’s nothing there.

So GDP and also one of the things that people western and the Chinese economic rationalists or and anti-Mao people talk about how GDP was so low in China and it’s still the Yunnan from Mao, that there were things that were not calculated in any case, like, for instance, I said in my Coverage press coverage book that the private plots primarily, you know, the villages, they take the collective Cumming don’t produce vegetables for consumption.

They produce grain because vegetable is just produced by the farmers themselves on the he private plots that’s at least 10 to 15 percent of all of the economy so has never been calculated in the book for instance. And the same, even now, for instance, if you look at the villages, there rural economy, if you produce how much? OK, if you if I say how much you can calculate the economy of rural China or coverage by looking at how much land is used and what it was produced, then what’s the price for the instance? But that’s the in the book. But it was not in the book. This is again, what they produce for their own consumption.

Jeff- Yes,

Mobo- So, and also, if you look at, for instance, as I described in the second coverage book, if you look at these houses, the village built it and some of them are just spectacular inside and outside. And they you wonder, how do these poor people build these house. How to manage it, and that’s it, that’s never accounted for, they don’t borrow money. They don’t want banks. Nobody will. They’re not in debt. There’s no mortgage

Jeff- Yeah, so they can’t serve no one, no one. There’s no record of it.

Mobo- You know, that the value of these houses is never calculated.

Jeff- That’s incredible. I was surprised to learn about the huge difference in retirement and medical Social Security between rural and urban people. It sure seems like the country folk are getting a raw deal that has this disparity been reduced in the last five years. And what about Baba Beijing name for China’s government leadership. What about Baba Beijing’s plans to deal with it in the future?

Mobo- Yeah, OK. There are always two systems in China, and then I used to called two China, so the rural China, urban China. The urban China was built on the, you know, Soviet model and socialist model and working class is the leading class and respected and highly paid. And so, you know, basically the welfare system provides with free medical care, free education, free nursery, and also the unit working provides hospitals, canteens, even today. And if you go to Qinghai University, you go to have lunch there, you pay Ten Yuan.

Jeff- Yeah, but about a dollar fifty. Yeah.

Mobo- You buy this huge lunch. Seriously, full course lunch. And if you the migrant workers, they have to pay ten dollars for one bowls of noodle, Telemann for one, bowls of noodle, and in Qinghai University you pay Italian for a full course dinner lunch. So there is a hugely subsidized. So even today, there is a difference there. So the rural people, because I suppose in a way it’s quite reasonable that they were given the land is your land and you produce food for yourself and you’re producing for everything for yourself.

So the state doesn’t provide for you because you are given the land, whereas the workers were not given anything. What, they were just earning salary. So, there was no welfare for the rural people except what called the, I think you mentioned above that to guarantee a house of these disabled people without children, elderly, and they can’t produce things and they the government to give them some subsidies to survive. So that kind of things. So now that lasted until the dismantling of the collective system.

And even then, of course, the migrant workers, as you say, hundreds of million people every continent on the move to urban centers, if they can find work, the work and for the kind of work they move back or move somewhere else and so forth. And some, of course, are temporary, as you can see them sleeping in the street as well. Anyway, um, the Falko ??? system is what that’s divided the urban world, China. The urban people, and also the vested interests.

It elite policymakers, because it’s the rural people are vastly underrepresented in the people’s Congress in the party, in everything, as they didn’t have a voice. I mean, they still don’t have much voice. So then they don’t want to abolish the legal system because if the police enforce them, if the workers from rural China were treated equally, then they would have this welfare system. And they don’t want to give it to them now.

Jeff- Yeah.

Mobo- So the time is coming to do realize that now and they can’t, uh, totally not listen to the urban center either. They can’t just say, oh, let’s open it. That might create lots of problems.

Jeff- Yeah. Well, there are massive migrations and we just be like social unrest.

Mobo- That’s right.

Jeff- It’s a tough situation.

Mobo- So we started to allocate some funding to set up a rural social health care system. OK, so you start to pay, say, eight hundred yuan a month.

Jeff- Or maybe you wrote about that in Gillette military visit

Mobo- Hundred Yuan a months, and then when you were sick, a serious operation, then you didn’t have to be pay.

Jeff- Almost like a mutual a nonprofit mutual insurance policy that’s very popular here in France by the way, there’s a lot of nonprofit mutual insurance companies.

Mobo- So they get the villagers to contribute some and the rest is pocket from the state.

Jeff- All right. That’s good to hear. Other sticky issue out in the rural areas. I traveled all over China in nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety seven and working in agriculture, I saw lots of rural areas. The pollution, as you wrote, was appalling. It’s just unbelievable. You said the farmers were starting to get sensitized to the dangers of water, air, land and chemical pollution.

I noticed a huge environmental improvement when we returned to live and work in China again, 2010 to 2019. This is a positive trend, continuing, stalling or regressing. You know, President Xi takes pride in being a “blue skies, clear waters and green mountains”.  Visionary, tell us what’s if it getting better going nowhere or going backwards.

Mobo- Ok, it’s a long way to go. It’s a long, long way to go. But there is some improvement. We start from the service, the superficial like that rubbish collectors that didn’t used to be in rural villages to these kind of characters. You have rubbish collectors who pick up things for recycle, but not rubbish collectors to tidy up to clean the things. And now they have that they have a designated person from each in each village to collect the rubbish.

Jeff- You wrote about that. The poorest guy, the poorest guy in the GAO village.

Mobo- Yeah, that’s right. And then they put it into a place and they have truck to take these rubbish away. And where they probably stuck in a place like we do in the West, but at least they don’t scattered all over the place superficially for this, like a plastic bags and that kind of things like potholes and things like that. So that is being collected. That’s being collected.

Jeff- But I probably create a landfill someplace. So they probably I don’t know, they probably have to come up with a landfill someplace. I mean, Beijing has these massive landfills outside the sixth ring road. You know, it’s just.

Mobo- Yeah, so but the other thing it did is, of course, to stop the importing of rubbish from the West.

Jeff- Yeah, I’ve written about I’ve written a couple of articles about that. It’s unbelievable.

Mobo-. You’re polluting as well.

Jeff- Yeah, absolutely. A lot of a lot of dangerous stuff, electronics and chemicals.

Mobo- Yeah, the other thing is that it is to clean up the air because that is obvious and the affects people as well. So they wanted to clean up there. Yeah, they did. That succeeded somewhat. OK, Now, I think the air quality has improved even Beijing has improved.

Jeff- Oh yeah. For sure. My daughter was just she just graduated from Beijing Normal University in twenty-twenty. They’re from 2010 until twenty sixteen and then went down to Shenzhen and. Oh yeah it’s been compared to the nineteen nineties. There is no comparison. I mean, we used to just, you can see the buildings across the street in Beijing in the nineties. It was just horrific. Oh no, no, it’s much, much, much better now. And Shenzhen is like San Francisco. I mean it’s pretty impressive. The pollution there is just almost no air pollution at all.

Mobo- But also they have worked a bit quite a bit, too, to stop the industrial pollution.

Jeff- Yeah.

Mobo- The private small ones, low tech once they actually face them out now.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah.

Mobo- That that was effective as well, and like even private mining coal and dumping everything everywhere, and they act together to stop that.

Jeff- And Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi.

Mobo- That they’ve worked up quite a bit to stop that. I think is some effect on that holiday. But also the thing that I mentioned specifically in the second coverage is that this is very important, that the people are made aware that pollution is an issue, that it was never an issue globally, just never thought it was an issue. Now, they were made Aware.

Jeff- They were sensitized to the effects.

Mobo- That’s right.

Jeff- Yeah.

Mobo- That to the effect also because the economy was in the life was Spartan and he was for survival. And when you just work for survival food care for the environment, for instance. Right?

Jeff- Yeah, I absolutely

Mobo- So that about that. Now, finally, this is the thing they have not come attempts to what to do, is the chemicals in farming.

Jeff- The problem all over the world now is just the pollution and we’ll look at the Gulf of Mexico, all the fluid coming down the Mississippi River, and there is a massive dead zone out in the Gulf of Mexico where the phosphates, and the nitrates are poisoning the waters. I mean, there’s, you know, algae blooms and, you know, oil refineries on the Texas, Texas, Arkansas border. You know, you drive up that valley, you’ll get cancer and the people there will have cancer. It’s just not just China, it’s a huge problem all over the world. It’s just probably better propagandized in the West than it is in China. But it’s a massive problem.

Mobo- A massive problem. Yeah, it’s a massive problem.

Jeff- Much has been made of Baba Beijing investing over one hundred billion dollars across the countryside to eliminate extreme poverty in the last five years and succeed in 2020. My wife and I saw very poor rural villages. This was poor when we moved back to where we saw in the 1990s, of course, but in towns from 2010, we saw poor rural villages that probably were on that list in places like you Xiamen and Fujian is it all hype? Are those villages still there? Or has the Mao era goal to provide clothing, food, shelter, medical care and burials as has that all has that is that now been taken care of at least for in eliminating extreme poverty?

Mobo- I actually forgot to actually describe in detail the two families. One is the poorest family, Lati, and the other one is the cousin’s marriage of cousins produce the result of which was a couple of disabled children and not actually are involved in both cases to account for them to get some help. And eventually poor fruit. So two disabled had something like I think it was two hundred a month’s help from the state and he got his poor family subsidies as well.

So there were problems even before this was announced about the reading beginning of the poverty thing. Now, when you talk about the remote areas like the in nine months of Xi’an Shaanxi where the you know, there was the land was not fertile, was mountainous, it got reach by transport, you can’t sell anything that kind of things. Some of them could move to migrate. They didn’t move the whole thing of whole village out of some other places.

And that’s been done I know that. Whether people are happy with that, I don’t know. I mean, people usually would like to have, you know, home village, you would like to stay there or whatever. And he’s their culture, you see, attend to their life. But whether this kind of dramatic way of doing it is good, that’s debatable. I don’t know. But the other there are issues like weather, what it mean by poverty and how do you mean that poverty is gone?

And of course, as I described in the second coverage book, according to the Chinese definition of poverty, there was no poverty in China in GAO village. Everybody was above that, even including the two families that we are unfortunate, as I described it, and they was not that, I mean, to be fair, and if you think of this real poor families that we’ve seen in Africa, in the Gulf countries are doing very well, really.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah. Everything is relative.

Mobo- So now with some of these remote areas and some of that what they did, I don’t know. I haven’t done any research. And there is discussion that whether it is sustainable, even if it is temporarily that the issue seems to be resolved. But will they go back to poverty a couple of years? Is a sustainable way of life? And that is issue.

Jeff- Yeah. Well, that will be the next book. What would have happened if Hua Guofeng had continued to lead China after nineteen seventy eight? And for those of you who don’t know Hua Guofeng, He was the designated leader to take over as president party secretary of China after Mao died after 1970 and Deng drastic reforms had not been implemented, I read that the Cultural Revolution were quite stable after the first tumultuous year and economic growth and development were doing very well.

Also, the Mao era was already starting in a number of market and policy reforms to continue improving the economy and raising materialize of the people. What would china trying to be today, if all of this had continued? Would China be a colossal continent sized North Korea or something altogether different?

Mobo- Well, if we are. Well, let’s try it.

Jeff- yeah Hua Guofeng was left to continue and allow Mao past and Deng was did not implement his drastic reforms. What do you think would have happened?

You mean, Hua Guofeng?

Jeff- No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Yeah, exactly, I’m sorry. Hua Guofeng. Yeah, exactly, I’m sorry.

Mobo- Yeah, Hua Guofeng allowed to continue to lead instead of shopping, this stuff is important. Of course, this is very hypothetical. We never know. And also Guofeng had a change because of circumstances but many people, rural people that I know, they would say if Guofeng to lead China along the way or that there might be some changes there of the Maoist policies and there would be better off Rural people.

Jeff- And what do you think, what do villagers say about it? What do they think would have happened if it had continued?

Mobo- Well, there was the kind of material life they enjoy now there will enjoy under Guofeng leadership as well. And what is better is that it will be better social justice will be less corruption will be people would be nicer to each other.

Jeff- Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were there in the 90s man. It was crazy. I mean it was Wild East buckle but I mean it was dog eat dog. It was not a relaxing place to live and work like crazy.

Mobo- People were saying North Korea. But China would not be like North Korea, even during the, Mao enjoy life and will called Nixon visit China. And then China was ready to have a relationship with the United States of America in the early 1970s. And then Guofeng was of course when he was in power, he had used to already import it once. He was accused of being a small, great leap forward because he spent so much money on foreign currency to import chemical plant.

Jeff- And fertilizer plants.

Mobo- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ten of them. And that’s what helped let agriculture. So, he was not a person who wants to close China enemy and who want to the whole side of the West. I don’t think so.

Jeff- You know, that’s why he reached out. He was reaching out to the United States and Europe back in the nineteen thirties, know trying to build bridges with them all the way up until the 40s and 50s, you know.

Mobo- He visit the United States of America, want to swim in the Mississippi.

Jeff- Yeah, but they wouldn’t give him that PR opportunity. Tell us about China’s new left, which he represented and they never published Wall Street Journal interview and that you added at the end of your book as an informative appendix. It’s easy to see why they buried it. And it’s just you have some really interesting quotes about how a Chinese man, a Chinese woman, does not have to carry on the numerous time bag to walk the talk.

A Chinese man does not have to drive a Porsche to demonstrate his existence. Perhaps to advocate these kinds of ideas is not Chinese nationalism, but arguments for common sense, decency and human existence. And then another really intriguing quote is I do find that many of the ideas, some of which were advocated in some practice during the Cultural Revolution, the largest Maoist, but actually post-modern, the not only Chinese, but universal.

This is something that is very hard to understand, not only for hard core anti-communist cold warriors, but also the Eurocentric humanists of the Enlightenment tradition that has been looking for an alternative but has not gone very far. And the last one that really intrigued me was that I hear what you to just say something about those. But that’s also a really good

Mobo- Yeah, well, I think people label me as one of the new left, but of course the most famous one is Wong Kar-wai of Qinghai University and new left and Taipei Taiwan again of Qinghai University Hangzhou Zhejiang of Hong Kong Chinese University of Hong Kong. I don’t usually like with any political factions, but I do think the idea of New Left actually is more in line with Western enlightenment and individual values than the economic rationalists in China today.

Jeff- Yeah.

Mobo- You know, the betterment of humanity is not just, you know, superficial things. We know that like that you need basic things like shelter, Warmth and the clothes and food and once studies is satisfied, lots of money that possession of things do not make the necessary happy or happier.

So, it’s all these Western luxury goods and also this perception that is hyped up by capitalism with propaganda and brainwashing and consumerism, commercialism. So all of these it’s something that we, the Chinese New Left does not like, which is, I suppose, the same with lots of Western is the only thing. The difference is that wasn’t is have a patronizing attitudes towards China. Even the right and the left wins.

Jeff- Big Time

Mobo- That’s what we don’t like.

Jeff- Yeah. Well, very patronizing.

Mobo- Yeah.

Jeff- Well, let’s say this has been a wonderful conversation. Any closing comments and you have more writing and research projects in the pipeline Mobo.

Mobo- Well, this is interesting because some One the one hand, I very disillusioned with Western Academia and the scholarship. Because of the Ugly turn against the China were they left or right scholars? I think it is racist, but they don’t want to say it

Jeff- Because it’s racist. The yellow peril

Mobo- And therefore there because I used to have, you know, very romantic idea of Western scholarship of pursuing the truth. And now I’m disillusioned with rap. But on the other hand, I still want to contribute to the well-being of people. And therefore, I would like to have like in Australia, for instance. It’s interesting because it seems to me to be absurd, this country, Australia, who benefit most from China’s development and so it jumps jumping up and down against China, which is just baffling why I don’t so I’m trying to understand it.

I’m trying to get some couple of people to organize a workshop to entitled Different Histories Shared Future to see if we can get together. Some ideas that we can work, we should work together instead of going getting into this Cold War. Even you know that they’re coming up with China. It’s just amazing how things could go. I mean, just a few years ago was such a rosy picture and just suddenly just so nasty.

Jeff- Yeah, I agree, but unfortunately, that seems to be the modus operandi of Empire, I think that was probably true with the Romans and it sure was true with the British Empire and definitely with the American empire. They just they just have lizard brains. They just reptile brains. They have no game plan other than just domination and control and exploitation and war. It’s a disease. It’s a disease in the West. It’s just it’s just the way the West has been for three thousand years. And it’s changed.

Mobo- I mean, there was a Chinese aggressive, especially under the Xi Jinping. Well, I haven’t seen anything the Xi Jinping is really aggressive so far. I mean, the jury’s still out. If you look at Deng Xiaoping for instance, that Deng Xiaoping was responsible for the Tiananmen events. Right? Moving tanks into the streets to cut down only own people. It was Deng Xiaoping not Xi Jinping or Mao Zedong. And he was Xi Jinping who launched the war.

Jeff- In Vietnam,

Mobo- 1979. But everybody loved Deng Xiaoping.

Jeff- Well, now Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, you know, it was just exactly.

Mobo- There all hope that Xi Jinping is what, what did he do?

Jeff- Yeah, he’s made China bigger, stronger, faster and more advanced and more peaceful. And that’s why the West can’t stand him. So, well listen Mobo, this has been a really wonderful. Thank you very, very much. I never aim this. I have no idea, I’m going to find this video because I’ve never used before. I guess it’s going its recording. I guess it’s going to when I have to stop, but it’s going to download someplace.

Mobo- Yeah. You see the recording quality’s good. Good.

Jeff- And anyway, love to have you on the show again. We’ve had today but Mobo GAO, Adelaide, Australia. We talked about his last book, GAO’s village revisited me and this is the second time he’s been on China Rising Radio Sinoland. I will put all the links for his four books on the interview page. I encourage you to read his latest work. It’s the real China. It’s not scar literature. You know, the Dikotter and John Halliday and Jung Chang, et al.

It’s not all that, you know, Mao’s “Private Doctor” and all these other screeds, you know, to trash and destroy Mao’s image and China’s image and socialism image and communism image. Mobo, lived there. He was there so he knows what talking about. So I really am Korean. And now he’s got he gets to compare because in Australia so he’s got. He can do some decent comparisons. So thank you so much for being on the show, Mobo. As soon as I get this up, I’ll let you know about it. OK.

Mobo- Ok, thank you.

Jeff- And we’ll stay in touch anyway. We’ve become really good friends over the years, so it’s I’m sure we’ll be in touch. So thank you so much. Bye, bye.

Mobo- Bye, bye.

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Why and How China works: With a Mirror to Our Own History

44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass

China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIG Red Book on China: Chinese History, Culture and Revolution

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in deniner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

Wechat group: search the phone number +8619806711824 or my ID, Mr_Professor_Brown, friend request and ask Jeff to join the China Rising Radio Sinoland Wechat group. He will add you as a member, so you can join in the ongoing discussion.

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