F W ENGDAHL—The Baoshang Bank to all appearances looked healthy. Its last financial report issued in 2017 showed a profit of $600 million for 2016, assets of near $90 billion and bad loans of less than 2%. The insolvency shock has created a growing risk crisis in China’s interbank lending markets not unlike the early stages of America’s 2007 sub-prime mortgage interbank crisis. It has forced the PBOC, the national bank, to inject billions of yuan, so far $125 billion equivalent, and to issue a guarantee of all bank deposits to contain fears of a larger systemic banking crisis. Indications are the crisis is far from over.
CHINESE WAY OF LIFE
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How the socioeconomic gains of China’s Cultural Revolution fueled their 1980s boom (6/8)
44 minutes readRAMIN MAZAHERI—Let’s not forget that the CR’s open emphasis on the rural over the urban (revolutionary in itself, and unappreciated by the USSR) was also ordered by any conception of democracy: While China was 56% urban in 2015 it was only 20% urban as late as 1980. The USSR’s emphasis on the primacy of a vanguard party over a People’s democratic dictatorship certainly did not keep socialism flag’s flying after 1991.It is no exaggeration to say that the CR brought the Industrial Revolution to rural China – it was truly that important.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Fake-leftists condemn Mao as a tyrant, yet his words were beloved by the masses because they were so empowering, clear-hearted and universal. It should be clear that his works were not memorized in a rote form as a way to pass a civil service test – they were learned by heart because they were so very intelligent yet so applicable. The reality is that during the CR decade old Chinese peasants who had just learned to read were waving the Little Red Book in the faces of shamefaced, younger Party cadres.
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Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China? (3/8)
26 minutes readRAMIN MAZAHERI—Trash Revolutions are the best… but not all Trash make great revolutionaries.This was the case in China, where by the mid-1960s many in the Chinese Communist Party lost their willingness to identify with the poor and to share in their hardships – thus, they had lost the most important two traits which had propelled them to victory.The adults in the room, unlike the hardcore capitalists eager to criticize socialist societies at the first pause for breath, understand that the mere proclamation of socialist victory does not translate into an immediate paradise of equality and opportunity. This article seeks to explain why a retrenchment of revolutionary asceticism, a second so-called “cultural” revolution, was needed in already-Red China.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—If you have heard anything on the CR – and many have not – you only heard stories from the CR’s victims. The reason for that is: if you are reading this in the West, your media has an informal ban on any pro-socialist story. Anyone who believes that unwritten censorship exists has never worked in the media. (And a pro-socialist story would, after all, empower the leftists in the West and they certainly can’t have that.)