Stephen Kotkin

Deng Xiaoping never takes down the political system or the ideology.

And so you still have today the communist monopoly.

Communism can fail at everything.

It can starve the people.

It can kill the people.

It only has to do one thing to survive, suppress political alternatives.

So during that resistance, peasant resistance to Stalin in the collectivization episode that you referenced earlier, there's no political alternative.

There's no other place for them to go and say, we don't like the injustices of the czarist regime and we don't like what communism is doing.

Therefore, there's something else that we can go to that's an alternative.

Communism has suppressed all the alternatives.

So it's either return to czarism or keep communism.

And so in the Chinese case, you have something quite similar.

They allow economic liberalization.

in part because they have no choice, but they don't allow political liberalization.

And so they're able to quote reform by enabling the people to generate wealth, jobs, prosperity through market behavior.

And it's mostly the peasant class in China, which then leads to family owned businesses, which then leads to larger businesses.

And so society, not the party creates the miracle in China and the party tightens its grip.

Because the ideology of the party is when the socioeconomic base has a lot of market in it, it's a threat to the party's rule.

So the party has to be even more vigilant against the capitalists in the society.

And it turns out that you get to Jiang Zemin, who is Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successor.