It's the Real News Network.
I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.
Commemorating the 200 years since the birth of Karl Marx, a large ceremony was held in
Beijing, China on Friday.
President Xi Jinping held a speech on the occasion.
He called on all party members to read Marx's works, to understand Marxism as a way of life
and spiritual pursuit, and added that Marxism remains totally correct for China today.
Two centuries on, despite huge and profound changes in human society, the name of Karl
Marx is still respected all over the world and his theory still shines with the brilliant
light of truth.
How does Marxism sit with the neoliberal ideology promoting free international trade?
Can they, in fact, coexist?
How does Xi Jinping envision his plans?
This question becomes especially pertinent now, as the U.S. has laid down a list of trade
demands with China.
It wants to cut China's trade surplus with the U.S. from $200 billion per year to $100
billion.
President Donald Trump also continues to threaten China with increased tariffs, as it was done
recently with steel.
Despite the demands by the U.S. and the Chinese response remains measured.
On to talk about all of this with me today is David Kotz.
He's a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of
"The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism."
It's a Harvard University Press publication, and the paperback edition has been issued
in 2017.
Thanks for joining us today, David.
I'm glad to be with you, Sharmini.
So, David, you were one of the privileged people who were present when Xi Jinping actually
gave that speech on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.
Give us a sense of what it felt like to be there, and of course what President Xi Jinping
actually said.
Well, it was a long speech, a bit over an hour.
It covered a lot of ground to a huge audience, it must have been several thousand people,
in the cavernous Great Hall of the People.
He touched on Karl Marx's life, on his ideas, a bit on China's history, and a bit about
China's goals of building a, not only a rich society, but a strong country, of building
a society in which there are good jobs for everyone.
Access to health care, access to education.
Those were some of the highlights of his speech, in addition to a constant emphasis on the
importance for China to read the works of Marx and to apply them to everyday life.
All right.
Now, that was what was in his speech.
What was the reaction to his speech?
You are there currently at the University of Beijing, and you're speaking to academics,
and you're speaking to students.
What are they saying about this direction and this speech by Xi Jinping?
Well, I was at a two-day conference at Peking University marking the 200th anniversary of
Marx's birth.
And virtually all the Chinese speakers at this conference cited Xi Jinping's speech,
praised it, and praised his role in China.
This was a very uniform reaction.
Usually there were not a lot of specifics.
It was a bit difficult to tell from listening to the speech exactly what it suggested would
be coming in the future in the way of policy for China.
I think there is a kind of a people waiting to see how this will be developed further
by the top leadership.
And how are academics, economists, people that you speak to, dealing with this inherent
contradiction of what Xi Jinping had said in his speech on the 200th anniversary of
the birth of Karl Marx, and what is happening in terms of the neoliberal hypercapitalist
economy of China?
Well, I actually don't think China has a neoliberal economy that could be considered hypercapitalist.
I think it has a sizable capitalist sector.
It has many large, privately owned enterprises.
It has billionaires.
But to me, neoliberal, neoliberalism means a system in which the state plays a very limited
role in regulating the economy.
It certainly does not own significant economic assets producing things.
In China there is a significant sector of state-owned enterprises, particularly in key
heavy industries.
And furthermore, the state is very active in guiding China's economy.
They follow an industrial policy in which the state attempts to guide the upgrading
of China's manufacturing sector.
Really, China's mixed system with both planning and markets, with state and private sectors,
is more similar to the forms of capitalism we saw in the West in the 25 years after World
War II, usually called regulated capitalism, than we've seen in the neoliberal era since
1980.
All right.
So recently, as I said off the top of this interview, there has been a lot of murmurings
from Washington about getting the trade deficit with China under control, in fact, cutting
it in half.
Trade negotiations are underway between a team of U.S. Trump administration folks and
Beijing.
What do you know about what's taking place, and how it's going?
Well, I don't think it's going well.
There was an American trade delegation in Beijing Thursday and Friday of last week.
They don't seem to have gotten anywhere in the negotiations with their Chinese counterparts.
From what I've read, the American delegation not only demanded a big reduction in the trade
deficit with China, but also clearly implied that China had to give up its industrial policy.
I don't think that is a demand that can be put on China.
Industrial policy has been crucial to China's rise in the global economy, and they intend
to continue to move toward the world technological frontier, and industrial policy is very helpful
for that.
Frankly, if I were negotiating with the United States delegation on this, I would recommend
that the United States adopt an industrial policy.
That would probably be the best way to improve the U.S. economy's position in the world,
if the government more actively encouraged the upgrading and improvement of the American
economy.
Some real infrastructure investment, and so forth.
And there such discussions taking place, or is that being put forward by the Chinese delegation?
Well, I don't know what the Chinese delegation put forward.
I've read, these were secret negotiations.
You can read claims about who said what.
It's hard to know.
But it does seem clear that the Chinese are not capitulating to what are very extreme
demands by the United States delegation of China.
And apparently they're suggesting, they're willing to make it easier to sell American
cars to China, perhaps ease some other barriers to exporting and selling in China.
But they're, they're not willing to just cave in to these rather extreme U.S. demands under
the threat of big tariffs.
David, you were speaking about China, the role of the state of China in terms of industrial
policy, and perhaps other ways in which it regulates the market, and so forth.
Give us a sense of how much of the sector is actually, how much of the economy, is actually
regulated by the state, and what percentage of it is under state purview, as well as what
sectors are being regulated.
I can't give you a simple percentage.
I think what is really crucial to this dispute is China's recently-adopted plan, Made In
China 2025, that has really gotten the Trump administration angry.
And in the American media there have been, there's been a constant drumbeat of claims
that what China is planning to do is to try to dominate the world in all of the key industries
of the near future.
Artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, advanced medical devices, and so forth.
That's the claim, that they have a plan to dominate the world.
And it sounds pretty scary.
So I thought I'd treat this Made In China 2025 document.
I read an English translation of it.
The word 'dominate' did not appear.
It was a plan that called for the government to provide various kinds of support in the
way of financing , and advice to help China's industries upgrade, improve their technology,
improve the quality of products.
A lot of talk about improving environmental sustainability, with the aim of reaching the
level of a developed economy, which they're not yet, and having world class technology.
I don't see why Americans should consider that a threat to us.
David, the 2025 Made In China plan that you read.
Give us a sense of what it contains, and of course, how that is going to impact the trade
negotiations that are going on.
I really don't have any spies in the U.S. delegation.
But my reading of the aim of the Trump administration is to try to get China to stop trying to become
the economic equal of the United States, and the other leading Western economies.
I think the plan is clear to keep China in an intermediate stage, something which is
not realistic.
China is the fastest-developing economy, major economy in the world.
And I don't think there's any way that the United States government could stop them from
pursuing a stronger economy.
Nor should our government be doing that, mind you.
And what is the Chinese approach to these discussions, in terms, in terms of the negotiations?
Their approach, as I have read about it, is to give up the idea that one country can only
gain at the expense of another to adopt what they call a win-win view of world trade and
investment, and to negotiate and cooperate, to try to find mutual understanding about
the economic interactions between the U.S. and China.
I think it's a reasonable negotiating position.
I think one has to keep in mind that these days American industry is quite integrated
with industry in many parts of the world, including China.
You know, about half of the Chinese imports into the U.S. actually represent value added
outside of China.
So goods are produced in Japan and other countries around the world, South Korea.
They're exported to China, where they're processed further.
And then they're sold in the U.S.
This is the famous global production chain system.
There are problems with this system for the welfare of working people.
But that's our current system.
And that's why American business is not happy with Trump's threat of tariffs, which would
really disrupt their activities.
David, if you read the mainstream press these days, particularly the New York Times, all
it is doing is talking about this trade war that's taking place between the United States
and China.
And yet it doesn't really talk about the geopolitical context in which these trade negotiations
are taking place.
The U.S. seems to be in a big effort here to isolate China.
But when you actually look around at other nation states and Europe as a whole, they
have no interest in isolating China.
How is this playing out?
Well, I'm afraid the Trump administration's trade policy is not isolating China, it's
isolating the United States.
The British, the Germans, the French don't agree with this trade war strategy of trying
to pressure China into acceding to a long list of demands.
The main U.S. allies favor negotiations to try to get China to be more open to imports
from the West and to certain kinds of investment which have not been open.
There's a lot of pressure from the West for China to open its financial markets, which
are not very open.
But the Trump administration, isolated from its allies, I don't see how they'll have the
leverage to have any effect China's policies beyond minor concessions.
All right.
David, I will leave you for now, but we look forward to having you back on the Real News
once you get back to your home base at UMass.
OK.
Nice to talk with you.
And thank you for joining us here on the Real News Network.
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