Welcome back to part two of our interview with Yasheng Huang 黄亚生, the author of The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.
We cover a lot of ground in this two-hour installment. During the first hour, we discuss…
- The aspects of imperial China’s governance Mao chose to embrace, and those he chose to abandon,
- The factors enabling Mao’s radical policies compared to imperial rulers,
- Why China was able to grow so much faster than India, despite the setbacks of the Cultural Revolution,
- Statistical approaches for evaluating the effectiveness of autocratic development models,
- China’s economic reforms and rural development policies in the 1980s,
- How the events of 1989 permanently altered China’s trajectory,
- Whether the rise of Xi Jinping was inevitable,
In the second hour, we discuss...
- The Steelman case for why China needed a leader like Xi Jinping,
- What sets Xi apart from his predecessors,
- Succession challenges and the importance of term limits in authoritarian states,
- Why engagement with China failed to produce political liberalization,
- How the US could have better leveraged economic relations with China,
- Creative approaches to human rights advocacy in China.
Outro music: Nothing to My Name (一无所有) by Cui Jian (崔健) (Youtube Link)
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