How China Got Rich | ENDEVR Documentary

over the last 40 years china has been transformed out of all recognition the scale of its growth and the sheer speed of change is astonishing nothing like this has ever happened before but as china rises others will fall in the 21st century the balance of power in the world is changing so how did an impoverished and backward communist country become an engine of global capitalism [Music] just forty years ago china had a new leader a five foot tall chain smoking veteran of the long march with a reputation for pragmatism over ideology deng xiaoping under done china renounced class struggle and embraced the market it saw the biggest lifting of people out of poverty that has ever taken place in human history china became a global economic force predicted to become the world's biggest economy in a couple of decades but what actually happened 40 years ago and how did china do it china has 1.4 billion people a fifth of all humanity for the last two centuries they've been engaged in a long-running struggle over the different pathways to modernity [Music] china was a leading nation over 1 000 years until the early 17th century then china began to close door [Applause] we don't need these western gadgets you know we are so powerful we have everything on the earth so from there china begins decline china closed off complacent the chinese call what followed the century of humiliation and its memory has marked china to this day [Music] it suffered colonial oppression japanese invasion and then civil war 14 million chinese people died in world war ii alone and in the countryside the people were reduced to starvation [Music] from 1840 the first open world with uk the longest continued stability for china with no more than 10 years so china's modernization process was interrupted again and again and by former aggression by peasant uprising by civil wars so the communist triumph of 1949 they hoped would bring peace but soon economic disasters led to the great famine and then in the 60s the class struggles of the cultural revolution when chairman mao waged war on china's traditional culture china had struggled with modernization because previously china had tried to modernize in keeping china's old traditional way of doing things and the cultural revolution essentially was an attack on china's traditional way of doing things by the early 70s the country was traumatized and exhausted its economy in ruins the people were desperate for a new path most people would say ordinary people were fed up with this excessive radical ideological campaigns one after another so denzel ping personified this kind of demand for change dung had been a party stalwart from the time of the long march in the civil war but in the cultural revolution he was purged for criticizing mao exile to the countryside he worked as a fitter in a tractor factory dung had been in the top leadership ever since 1949 and then he spent about three years in the countryside a lot of the greatest leaders churchill de gaulle abraham lincoln they all had been in very high positions fell and then had time to think and dunk's conclusion was that rigid ideology had wrecked china's economy in the 1970s china was an agricultural country 80 percent of the people worked the land and after three decades of communism they were still poor now [Music] when i was growing up hunger always haunted me almost every day the sort of finding something to each was was always there the overriding priority was to lift the people out of poverty and in 1976 when mao died the opportunity came deng xiaoping returned from exile determined to change china's direction dung had a vision and it was that china should become more prosperous he shared mao zedong's concept that the only way for china to become more prosperous was to have stability and he believed as did now that the only way you could have stability was through one party rule by a communist party that kept all of the power in its own hands but mao's concept was not really stability it was permanent revolution and dung didn't accept that so when dun came back after mao died his vision was that get rich is glorious and that you do it in the most efficient way but to achieve that dung first needed to outflank the hard-line conservatives in the party leadership and when he came back he asked first the first step was to undo the damage caused by mao's war on the middle class at 66 when the cultural revolution broke out they closed down universities they closed down all the examinations there were a few people who received party recommendations to go to school but schools were not operating the way they should [Music] when i finished my high school i went to a factory in shanghai i did not have any hope to enter university a whole generation of china's youth had been sent to the countryside for what was called re-education through hard manual labor to learn what it was like to be a peasant i was the the probably last cohort of people from high school that you have to go to the countryside to receive re-education i was thinking of my life was just you know i stayed there for for my lifetime just gonna be in that village and then in summer 1977 dung called a conference in beijing on the future of education high education department professor liu dauyu he told me you are invited by the thing so being tomorrow in the the great hall you know in beijing i go to the the people grew up but the no people speak because at that time you know that after cultural revolution they are very fair you know people were scared yeah yeah yeah then the things are being said you can't take any opinion freely comfortably and did you speak i propose to the tension being i have an opinion i proposed 16 words for the inter of the university those 16 words would change modern china exams should start again as soon as possible they should be free fair and open to all not just the party dung agreed and the first exams took place that december of 1977. when the news announced that actually we can take the examination to get into college we're just it's so we're just so happy and it was exhilarated it's just uh you know such a life-changing you know sort of moment for us [Music] it was very tough 5.7 million candidates applying for the exam only less than five percent were admitted and ages varied from 18 to 35 you know in my class i was 20 at that time they were coal miners they were farmers they were soldiers they were workers young apprentice like me so that exam changed life for many people in a culture that had for so long believed in the value of education it was a transformational moment [Music] it was the first step in his path to power the following year 1978 he emerged as preeminent leader he wasn't fully in charge hua guafang was still officially the top leader but it was clear that he had been given the authority by his colleagues to be the dominant figure he realized that all those people who had spent their lives working for mao including himself was started in 1922 that what they had been thinking about was completely wrong and to be able to lead that kind of dramatic change to get several hundred million people to accept something quite new and quite different was absolutely necessary when i graduated from college in 1978 i could feel the strong wind of change the chinese many people like me the chinese started to face the world and rediscover the world and also to learn from the world in may 1978 dung sent a five-week fact-finding mission to europe led by gumu they were shocked by what they saw they've been taught that capitalist countries brutally exploited their workers were backward and decadent but now they saw for themselves how far communist china had fallen behind himself now went on a mission to singapore and japan dun was one of the few communist leaders in china who was exposed to the outside world he spent almost six years in france as a part work part studies student so this kind of international outlook helped him in japan dung understood the extent of china's backwardness [Music] foreign he saw the modern robots in the factory making cars he saw the most modern steel plant in the world at that time he talked to matsushta who the great electronics man and he could see the extraordinary technology and he was excited like a little kid and seeing all those things dung wanted the chinese people to see for themselves how others lived he asked specifically the essential television crew to film people's life he said please focus on how ordinary people in japan lived in singapore lived it's an eye-opening for for chinese at that time you know when the chinese source with television japanese workers have refrigerators at home you know it's awakening it's a it's a shock in 1978 there were no fridges and tvs in the chinese countryside hundreds of millions worked the land in a rigid system of collective farms huge communes on the stalinist model but it had been a total failure china was still starving this is feng young in anhui province a fifth of the county had died in the great famine in the early 1960s and here the seeds of change were beginning to sprout at the grass roots that winter of 1978 in the village of xiaogang desperate local farmers broke with the commune system of collective farming in this house on the 24th of november they secretly swore a pact to go back to family farms selling their surplus it was against the law and the penalties were severe but in this room risking their lives they put their thumbprints to what they called a life or death contract [Music] what did you what were the words that you put on the document what was the agreement you made together and were you were you scared that the the government might find out was it dangerous to to do that without [Music] so the ordinary people of china wanted change the party leadership though was still split over the course china should take between the reformers and the hardliners who feared opening up the market would betray the revolution sensing the mood in the nation that autumn deng xiaoping convened a conference about labour in beijing the big grey building on the corner is the jinji hotel it's quite difficult to find there's no sign saying it's a hotel and not everybody can book in there especially if you're a foreigner although if you look it up on tripadvisor it says that the the decor is lovely and the staff are extremely good looking and very well trained but it's owned by the people's liberation army and many important meetings of the communist party taking place there over the last few decades showing the path of china's future but none of them so important as the meeting in december 1978. [Music] 200 delegates from all over china met here in this room to discuss the economy and the commune system of agriculture still under mao's shadow they were divided about the future so maneuvering against the hard-liners dung prepared a short keynote speech that crystallized all he'd thought about in his years in the countryside the key dung said was to reject ideology from now on we must seek truth from facts we have to think about what we've done we're too poor too backward i honestly feel sorry for the people from now on he said we must embrace science and technology and open up the market to change the backward condition of our country [Music] the conservatives were shocked the reformers were excited dun concluded the time has come to liberate our minds [Music] [Applause] but that winter dung was also looking abroad the usa recognized the nationalists in taiwan not the communists on the mainland as the legitimate rulers of china but now beijing and the us were in secret negotiations stapleton roy was there our relations with china for 20 years were frozen in a pattern of total hostility during those 20 years the relations between china and the soviet union deteriorated and we couldn't take advantage of that and that's what this secret negotiations were all about we had to break relations with the friendly government we had to end a security treaty with a friendly government and we had to remove all of our military forces from taiwan and so president carter was given the choice did he want to only get a partial relationship with china or was he prepared to take the enormous steps necessary in order to get a full diplomatic relationship with china it was very awkward before we began the negotiations we briefed the top leadership in congress both the republican and democratic leadership in congress as to what our bottom line was in the negotiations and what they told us was you're doing the right thing but we are going to criticize you right so in other words they were supportive of what we were doing but for political reasons they were going to criticize the way it was done on the 1st of january 1979 the u.s recognized the people's republic and then in mid-january dung went to washington to meet president jimmy carter [Applause] [Music] today we take another step in the historic normalization of relations which we have begun this year [Music] the eyes of texas were on dongxiao king today as the chinese vice premiere continued his tour of this country in an eight-day trip dung visited seattle atlanta and nasa in houston he even had time to get down home at a texas rodeo but behind the fun was a cool calculating brain he needed the us to help his reform work done engagement had a number of goals some of which were self-serving on our part uh some of which had to do with changing china at which the west has been extraordinarily successful there's no question about where the lion's share of influence has flowed and much of the energy of engagement and i'm not talking about government to government but the institutions universities in some cases cities counties churches that were involved in engagement it really was about development for a lot of them about lifting people out of poverty and improving their lives as a matter of human sympathy to finance the first stage of the reform dung asked the un for help he'd already made a speech there in 1974 calling for a new economic order and china he dreamed would one day lead it the person sent to china to begin the un's aid program was a young tech consultant jack fensterstock in the summer of 1978 i was contacted by a ranking official at the u.n asking me to come to new york to discuss with them a highly secretive project and they told me that uh when i at the meeting that by the end of the year china was going to announce its opening up to the world and that it was felt that they would need some technical assistance so i was asked to lead this sort of programming mission to try to figure out what china wanted to do and how the un could help in in the area of computing which by the late 70s was clear was going to be the future the third industrial revolution they were way behind they were way behind and they realized this and the money was used for the equipment mainframes and what they call that time mini computers the training of their people better ways of storing and retrieving you know the world's science technological and industrial information we put in a rudimentary hospital information system china just had all these pieces of paper there was no way of it being organized so we set up a database system and then getting into the area of how to you know do database modeling you know econometrics models and you know all of this they took off very very quickly so in early 79 the stage was set for the reforms guangzhou on the pearl river in south china was to be the testing ground china's historic commercial capital the city had gone into a steep decline since the revolution of 1949. when you came here 40 years ago what you saw was a skyline of decaying factories with old-fashioned machinery poor infrastructure almost no cars in the streets guangzhou said a local communist party official has become the tired old man of the pearl river delta and the reason was very simple what good is production without consumers my first visit at design was 1973 and at that time i remember in guangzhou there were still dog carts there were a lot of people without clothes who were so thin that you could not you know wonder if they were going to make it on his return from the states dunn came down south to initiate the economic reforms a short drive into the pearl river delta you could look straight across to hong kong then still under british rule 40 years ago this was a vision of the promised land this strait was the gateway to a better life for thousands of poor chinese whose dreams of wealth often ended in bitter disappointment and even tragedy seven hundred thousand people mainly young men had attempted to cross over to hong kong but many of them swimming directly across a hundred and forty thousand made it most were turned back but many drowned one of the coves here became known as the cove of corpses the reasons for the migration of course were economic you could earn over there a hundred times the daily wage of a labourer here in guangzhou to change that deng xiaoping found an ally in the new boss in guangdong an old revolutionary comrade who shared his views on reform xi jong-shun the father of today's president xi jinping elementary huge deals for local industry unleashing the potential of the new economic reforms here in shenzhen then just a rocky peninsula opposite hong kong a local entrepreneur proposed a business plan involving foreign investment a no-go since 1949. he had a plan to create a breakers yard here where old chinese merchant vessels and there were lots of them would be broke into pieces and sold a scrap metal to hong kong merchants the other side of the water to feed the construction boom over there now of course there there was no space for such an enterprise but there was here so on the 31st of january 1979 barely a month since the plenum meeting in the jinji hotel in beijing the deal was signed the first foreign investment contract in the history of the people's republic of china dung had warned xi that central government had no money to give him but they devised a plan to try to free the economy through local enterprise they called it a special economic zone this was totally typical of deng xiaoping's approach they set up these four experimental zones near hong kong and macau and they permitted market forces to operate in those zones but not elsewhere in the country and when the zones were wildly successful in large measure because hong kong took advantage of the cheap labor available on the mainland and moved their production facilities into these special zones and this then became the model for the entire country in a system stifled by bureaucracy and ideology dung's idea was to give more freedom to local initiative i think this is really the key test something at the local level see if it works if it works expand it on a regional level if there's push back pull it back and re-tool it and expand it again thousands of small businesses were now allowed to spring up everywhere across china the first on the coast of jejung at wenzhou which had always been less controlled by beijing because of its location you can see how wenzhou's been shaped by geography hemmed in by the mountains cut off from the interior it's always been an outward looking place from the sung dynasty onwards its merchants have sailed down the river up the coast to the yangtze delta cities down to the pearl river and on to vietnam so when the great opening up happened 40 years ago this city with its clan based businesses was ideally situated to take advantage of the new opportunities and when joe was the first city in china to establish a system of small private enterprise wenzhou would be the birthplace of china's private economy a hundred and thirty thousand small businesses from noodle bars to china's first private airline and the first private business certificate in 1979 was issued to a young woman selling knitting in the street she's still here so how did you get into buttons then how did the button story come because for something foreign so china embarked on an economic and social experiment mixing the communist command economy with the energy of capitalist xiaoping took a position of absolute pragmatism and the view was it doesn't matter if it's socialism or market as long as it works and this idea of combining both at that time was something that international economists western economists imf world bank did not accept but that's what they did the communist party could push through big construction projects quickly providing the infrastructure for growth but they also needed to liberate talents lower down the chain of command as deng xiaoping put it to democratize economic production the big thing that we realized is that they had to somehow release sort of penta productive forces and since the biggest component of productive forces is the human capital element they spent a lot of effort on this so they changed from one man rule into collective leadership no longer could decisions just be made up at the top so they gave people downstream the responsibility and the authority to make decisions so motivated and talented middle people were really important in this the most important these were the real people who got everything done and to train the managers of the future chinese students were sent to foreign universities without party control in the next twenty years over two hundred thousand studied in the us alone i remember i think it's brucing national security advisor to to jimmy carter asked them you know how many students you want to send to the united states and then said how many you can receive yeah for us no limit it's a lot of courage because that living standard between china and the west was so different you know china was much lower and many were concerned that students may not choose to return to china and then said at internal party meetings if one out of ten can return to china this policy will be a victory for us but success in the universities depended on standards in schools and a major feature of the reform process was a huge investment in primary and secondary education especially for women i remember when i was in the middle school in my class there were lots of students from the countryside from nearby villages and there were very few girls and even the few in our class they were constantly urged by their parents to quit study and go home but all these have changed as the society has progressed now you see in the countryside boys girls are in schools and they can decide their own future by the early 80s the signs of reform were everywhere from the schools to the cars on the streets where once there were only bicycles and a huge demographic change began a key feature of china's modernization process has been urbanization the rural population of china has been moving into the cities at a rapid pace now to understand china's rapid economic growth the productivity of a rural worker who moves into a city and gets a factory job increases about 20 times with a fast growing middle class production had to keep pace with consumer demand and though big centrally controlled factories dominated tens of thousands of small enterprises accounted for a growing percentage of national output in construction materials and clothes and leather this shoe factory in wenzhou was a typical early eighties success story [Music] so in just four years china's agriculture education and industry were reformed private business allowed to flourish they even opened a stock exchange the energies of the chinese people were being liberated you're talking about social transformation economic transformation psychology changing all of these things have moved at such a huge pace it's often baffles people here not to say foreign observers who are trying to catch up and understand what's happening but deng xiaoping's concept of political reform was still only within one party rule he embraced only economic liberalization he rejects political liberalization or globalization the western style he said we must be very cautious on the political front [Music] i call his political reform is rationalization not democratization chinese discourse of modernization since 1978 has been distinct from what we call modernity in the west china has never claimed interest in liberal ideas and values it has claimed that it is pursuing modernization by which it means economic and technological well-being economically this meant seeking new relationships and trade deals around the world but politically the absolute power of the communist party was reaffirmed dumb was a pragmatist his famous quote you know is it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white if it catches rats it's a good cat and he was experimental in looking for the best way to accomplish something but the real changes to socialism in china occurred after done so after decades of struggle china's path to modernization had been set at the beginning china's low production costs offered huge opportunities to the outside world what was happening was the valve was opening i worked on a lot of the early inbound investments i did the very first deal for exxon mobil for roche pharmaceutical for buyer chemical i negotiated ericsson's first joint venture here and with its fast expanding urban workforce china's gdp would increase nearly 70 times in 40 years the reform and openness policies have been wildly successful in modernizing chinese society and its economy but china has what i call a pre-modern political system it's based on this concept that power should be concentrated in the hands of the rulers and all modern political systems are based on the concept of power corrupts and therefore it needs to be checked and balanced and that the just powers of governance are derived from the consent of the government so there needs to be some sort of legitimization process china does not accept those modern concepts and so the contradiction between the way that china is being ruled and the nature of the society that has been transformed through the success of the reform and openness policies is a fundamental contradiction in china but 40 years on that's not a contradiction to the chinese government who proclaim their marriage of one party rule and capitalist enterprise as the chinese way and their economy is changing now big chinese companies have seized their chance in a global environment so 1999 the the time when alibaba was founded the name let's always link to the story open sesame so open sesame that means like how we can help the small and middle-sized enterprises to do the business open the treasure across the whole world exactly okay maybe like people have not realized i bought from day one is a kind of globalization of the symbol because the first website of alibaba is in english [Music] so as companies like alibaba reach out to the world economic liberation has enabled the growth of a huge chinese middle class with its own tastes and desires china's middle class it's about 400 million it's bigger than the population of the united states getting bigger and these are people who are early adapters of technology who value education extremely highly and will suffer for it individually and as family there are also people who believe in increasing their national prestige the rate of accumulation of wealth of course is slowing but it's still fairly high and not only are they early adapters of technologies but they are adapting technologies and developing new products new markets in a still relatively unregulated market where they don't face the kinds of consumer product protections that a lot of countries in the west and many in the east have so they're moving forward very quickly and that lack of regulation has helped china catch up very fast with western technology often playing fast and loose with intellectual property i don't buy into this that everything has been copied what they did was called learning by doing and what they did was they imported know-how and technology they weren't so interested in the how of it the theory of it let's put it to work let's start putting people to work let's start heading to the economy and we have time you know later on to figure all this out but they started their own programs they don't want to be dependent anymore on outside people for technology a key example is china's high-speed train workshops chinese how big is the the network now is it is the network expanding every year army that's incredible 25 000 kilometers of high-speed network looking at the future the network is still expanding how do you see the future and now the chinese government is pursuing globalization through their belt and road initiative linking up the trade of asia europe and beyond by land and sea searching for new markets and raw materials it's an infrastructure project of extraordinary scale and ambition right back in the middle ages chinese junks and arab dolls carried the produce of china tea and silk and especially ceramics to the persian gulf and the west and now they're doing it again from these container ports of ships are flooding across the world and wherever you live whether you're in the states or africa or asia there'll be something here that ends up on your table and with growing economic power comes increasing political and cultural influence the balance of power in the world is shifting very quickly china is very adept at spreading its practices or getting acceptance for its practices through money through the markets and this is not a nefarious plot this is happening in the broad light of day and largely with the complicity of american corporations that want to sell into china but it has an impact here and i think that the most telling example is hollywood hollywood's profit model is the blockbuster china has the world's highest box office if you want to be a blockbuster you therefore must play in china china censors films heavily the result is that american filmmakers hollywood and these are the people who would claim to be the architects of soft power and the celebrants of the human spirit human freedom they won't greenlight a script that can't show in china so we have handed to them a direct channel for influencing what we see here at the multiplex money talks they china will become the taste makers to the world both at the supply and the demand side because they have the numbers [Music] but china's influence will go beyond economics and culture its sheer size means that it will join the us as a leader in a.i too ai will be the next phase of their superpower rivalry [Music] the ai is the fourth industrial revolution the initial steam engine industrial revolution electricity uh the digital revolution of the 90s and now ai the oil that makes the ai machine run is data and china will have more data because of its people and because it is able to direct and use their data as they wish so china may be very well positioned to be one of the two leaders in artificial intelligence to pursue that goal china is now encouraging big business to work with new tech universities many run by foreign educated scientists who've come home this area is one of the most economically developed area in china nowadays and by combining hong kong and macau the central government has a plan to develop the whole pro data area into one of the biggest bay areas in the world to become competitive as compared to tokyo bay and san francisco bay and already chinese corporations like tencent alibaba and huawei are spreading their influence around the globe challenging the supremacy of u.s corporations but they're also positioning themselves to take the lead in the greatest problem facing the world today climate change having inflicted huge damage on their own environment china signed up to the paris climate agreement and they're now massively investing in green technology which they see as another growth opportunity economically and politically especially as the us has walked away from the paris accords china will lead on environment it will be the global leader in the fight against climate change it's also going to be one of the global leaders if not the leader on technology it's already the largest investor in ai ai is not just about robots serving you coffee it's about all the technology required for environment this involves massive data to manage water hydro solar all of these systems because this will create all kinds of jobs this is not the environment preventing growth the next growth opportunity is in fixing the environment that long-term vision on the face of it looks unstoppable but commentators in the west think that china's unwillingness to embrace western-style democracy might impede the country's progress in the future china is not necessarily committed to the idea that electoral democracy can provide stability in china but people like it when the party no longer tells them where they can go where they can work where they can study what they can read where they can travel all those freedoms emerged in china over the last 40 years [Music] but the danger is if you're open to the outside world it's hard to maintain ideological conformity on the part of your population china wants to become a world leader in artificial intelligence in robotics in a whole bunch of areas that require educated workforce require highly educated people and if china closes itself off from the outside world in order to maintain ideological conformity they cannot sustain the same pattern of rapid growth how things will work out in the future no one can tell western commentators have repeatedly predicted that china's mix of capitalism and one-party rule was bound to fail [Music] so far they've been proved wrong when china started its reform four decades ago china's per capita gdp was lower than tanzania kenya with the level of malawi now china is the second largest economy by official exchange rate and largest economy by ppp purchasing power parity and obvious china done something right this old idea that a consumerist middle class would become an advocate for democracy tends to presume that these people are locked in place but if you look at the way that people live in beijing in shanghai in shenzhen they go down to thailand a few times a year they go to the paris the french open they go to turks and caicos they can import dairy from new zealand they can go to special hospitals for the rich their children are at school in the uk in canada in the us the system the party has brought them to this it has brought them this abundance these opportunities so i think that the day of reckoning and that's a western way of speaking not a chinese way of speaking is probably a lot further off than we think [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ENDEVR

Views: 479,515

Rating: 4.7898688 out of 5

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, china, how china got rich, china documentary, china business, capitalism, socialism, china economy, chinese history, Deng Xiaoping

Id: IAYRd8IqAxg

Length: 56min 57sec (3417 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021