Stephen Kotkin

There's a lot of gaming of the system, and it does matter.

But in the larger picture of things, you can't create the wealth of the United States over those 150 years, that global economic dominance, and you can't strangle it in the policy realm.

You can affect it, but you can't either create or strangle it.

And so we have to understand in the communist sense that...

Incentives matter.

We know that.

And so when you create incentives for officials to increase GDP and to increase job creation, and that's how they get rewarded, you're going to get a lot of that behavior.

And the party will do that not immediately.

Remember, immediately they're kind of flat on their back, and they've had this gang of four, and Deng Xiaoping has come back from having been purged, and they're on the verge of another potential famine.

And per capita GDP under Mao is $200 during the Cultural Revolution.

$200 is the annual per capita GDP of a billion people, or slightly under.

And you think, that's insane.

That's where all the people are in poverty.

when I was saying the regime put them in poverty.

And so they're a little bit flat on their back, which creates an opening and it creates this grudging dynamic of we're going to hold power and we're going to allow the economic entrepreneurialism to take place, but we're going to control it.

Right.

We're going to control it with special economic zones.

We're not disagreeing.

I'm just trying to say that we give too much credit to the Communist Party for what's happened in China and not enough blame for what's happened in China.

And this is part of the dynamic of us seeing...