meng – Radio Free

China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation

Tricontinental Asia — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:00:54 +0000

In 1954, Mao Zedong said, ‘We cannot deny that we are still unable to produce motor cars. We are still very far away from being industrialised’.

Mao was speaking to an audience of Chinese industrialists and merchants at a time when the country was desperately poor, its resources stretched by decades of Japanese invasion, civil war with the nationalist Kuomintang, and ongoing US aggression in Korea, where China had intervened in support of the forces of national liberation.

Yan Jun (China), Work hard to complete the national plan – Build a great socialist motherland, 1954

Four years later, in 1958, the first Chinese passenger automobile, Dongfeng CA71, rolled off the assembly line of the aptly named state-owned enterprise First Automobile Works in Changchun – a product of China’s first five-year plan. Dongfeng means ‘east wind’ in Mandarin, and, for China, it was a source of national pride. After a century of humiliation, the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), were able to organise themselves to produce an automotive machine. Dongfeng CA71 was a milestone in the transition from semi-feudal and semi-colonial status to modernity.

Zhang Wenrui (China),The Dongfeng sedan car, 1959.

In 2024, First Automobile Works, now known as China FAW Group, sold 3.2 million vehicles – 819 thousand of which were self-owned brands. China is now widely considered to be a leader in the transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles – around two thirds of global sales of electric vehicles are in China. The rapid development of China’s automobile sector has been spectacular, but it is part of a much broader story of China’s modernisation set in motion since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

It is not immediately clear that there is such a thing as a Chinese model for economic development, let alone a ‘Beijing consensus’. Deng Xiaoping’s famous exhortation to ‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’ – said in the context of China’s reform and opening up process – leaves a great deal of ambiguity when trying to understand how China developed in the past decades. China itself is still engaged in deep debates to clarify its modernisation process. Chinese literary critic Li Tuo, in an essay titled ‘On the Experimental Nature of Socialism and the Complexity of China’s Reform and Opening Up’, which is published in latest issue of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng, argues that before President Xi Jinping’s heralding of a ‘new era’ during the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017, the flagship success stories of the reform and opening up period focused on the successes of private entrepreneurs rather than the ambitious state-led infrastructure projects which could not simply be explained by the profit motive. In 2020, during the 20th National Congress of the CPC, President Xi intervened to offer further clarity, emphasising that, ‘Chinese modernisation is socialist modernisation pursued under the leadership of the Communist Party of China’. This statement does not provide a theory of China’s development; however, it is a significant step in explaining the political foundation and original aspiration of the modernisation process.

China’s development and the threat it poses to the Global North’s monopoly on technology has given impetus to a growing academic literature on ‘industrial policy’, which attempts to empiricise China’s economic policies. This literature does not adequately engage with President Xi’s assertion that Chinese modernisation is socialist in orientation and led by a Communist Party – instead, it tries to isolate policy from politics.

Attempts at state-led industrialisation in the Global South are not new. In both Tsarist Russia and Qing dynasty China, there were attempts to initiate modernisation from the top down. Post-independence states such as India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ghana made valiant efforts to industrialise. But such projects yielded limited results as they were unable to confront the external challenge of imperialism, and the internal social structures that militated against the development of productive forces.

Xiao Zhenya (China), Take over the brush of polemics, struggle to the end, 1975.

First, the political elites in the state, who were closely tied to the old society, often failed to do away with the parasitic classes such as the landlord, merchant, and usurer. Second, and closely related to the preceding point, the political elites of these projects grew increasingly distant from the masses, leading to bureaucratisation of the state. Third, the embryonic industrial capitalists who grew in these projects quickly consolidated into rent-seeking interest groups satisfied with consolidating domestic market share rather than competing internationally through innovation. This in turn left them, and the nation, dependent on foreign technology.

Art created by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Meng Jie, a professor at the School of Marxism at Fudan University, Shanghai, has spent decades doing fieldwork on factory floors and local government offices to make sense of China’s economic system. One could say that he is trying to find a pattern to the stones that Deng Xiaoping said to feel for. His essay, ‘Industrial Policy with Chinese Characteristics: The Political Economy of China’s Intermediary Institutions’ (also in the latest issue of Wenhua Zongheng), co-written with Zhang Zibin, draws on both Marxist-Leninist theory and the literature on industrial policy to explain China’s development. The authors emphasise that ‘the CPC relied on the popular demand for independence to seize power, and that political independence was a pre-condition for establishing China’s industrial system’. They argue that it is this historical, social, and political context that helps ensure that, ‘whenever industrial development faces fundamental strategic choices, the CPC’s ideology will guide policies back toward independence’.

Li Hua (China), Roar!, 1938.

Indeed, confronted with US-led attempts to curb technological development, through the banning of Chinese telecommunications companies and the control of exports of, and investment in, semiconductors, China has responded by doubling down on efforts to build an independent industrial chain and develop ‘new quality productive forces’.

In 1933, as the CPC was embroiled in a bloody civil war with the Kuomintang, Chinese poet Lu Xun was invited to contribute to the magazine Modern Woman. He wrote an untitled poem which strongly criticised the nationalist’s repressive campaign against the Chinese people:

War and floods are nothing new in our land,
In the desolate village remains but a fisherman.
When he wakes up from his dream in the dead of night,
Where is the place to find him a decent living?

The post China’s Path from Desolation to Modernisation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Tricontinental Asia.

Democrats Propose $300 Billion Investment to Treat Housing as Human Right

Julia Conley — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:11:18 +0000

Declaring that homelessness and housing insecurity is the result of "a structural failure of a country that has refused to make safe and affordable housing a priority," U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Grace Meng on Wednesday reintroduced the Housing is a Human Right Act and called on the federal government to provide $300 billion to end the crisis facing unhoused people.

The legislation would invest more than $200 billion in affordable housing and support services, $27 billion annually for services for unhoused people, and $100 million per year for community-driven alternatives to people experiencing homelessness.

Other funds would go to support communities at heightened risk for homelessness.

"Housing is a human right, and nobody in the world should be without a place to call home, especially not in America," said Meng (D-N.Y.). "This is an issue that impacts individuals for a number of reasons and sometimes isn't fixed with just a physical roof above a person's head."

The bill was reintroduced as real estate website Realtor.com released an analysis showing that even for people who have a place to live, housing is becoming more precarious across the United States.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recommends that people spend less than 30% of their income on housing, but eight of the country's top 50 metropolitan areas now have "a rent share higher than 30% relative to the median household income," including Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego.

Even in more affordable cities renters are spending more, with the average monthly rent in Cincinnati, Ohio costing 19.4% of the average monthly income—up from 18.4% last year. In Birmingham, Alabama, renters spend an average of 22.2% of their income on housing.

"As costs have risen and the minimum wage has stagnated, it would take the average minimum wage worker more than 96 hours of work per week to afford a two-bedroom rental," noted Jayapal (D-Wash.).

The shrinking stock of affordable housing is linked to the crisis of homelessness, which more than half a million people in the U.S. experienced in 2022—up by 3% from 2020.

"The crisis of housing instability is one that can be fixed by investing in housing infrastructure and supportive services for vulnerable communities," said Jayapal.

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The legislation has been co-sponsored by Democratic lawmakers including Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, James McGovern of Massachusetts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

The $200 billion proposed investment included in the bill would go toward McKinney-Vento Emergency Solutions Grants, which fund engagement with people experiencing homelessness and improve emergency shelters; and Continuum of Care grants, which help rehouse people who have faced homelessness.

The legislation would also:

Create a new grant program to invest in humane infrastructure, providing municipalities with $6 billion a year through a flexible program that will allow them to address their most urgent housing needs to keep people in stable housing and support those experiencing homelessness;
Incentivize local investments in humane, evidence-based models to support people experiencing homelessness, including alternatives to criminalization and penalization;
Provide $10 billion for Federal Emergency Management Agency food and shelter grants while improving grants to better represent high rates of homelessness and income inequality; and
Authorize $100 million in grants to public libraries to provide assistance and tailored supports to persons experiencing homelessness.

"In the richest country in the world, it is a moral imperative that we take this issue head-on," said Jayapal. "Housing is a human right—and every person deserves to have a safe place to call home."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.