The skill ceiling on political skills is very high. In particular, Deng’s political skills are extremely impressive (according to what the book describes):
He dodges bullets all the time to avoid falling in total disgrace (e.g. by avoiding being too cocky when he is in a position of strength, by taking calculated risks, and by doing simple things like never writing down his thoughts)
He makes amazing choices of timing, content and tone in his letters to Mao
While under Mao, he solves tons of hard problems (e.g. reducing factionalism, starting modernization) despite the enormous constraints he worked under
After Mao’s death, he helps society make drastic changes without going head-to-head against Mao’s personality cult
Near his death, despite being out of office, he salvages his economic reforms through a careful political campaign
According to the lectures, Mao is also a political mastermind that pulls off coming and staying in power despite terrible odds. Communists were really not supposed to win the civil war (their army was minuscule, and if it wasn’t for weird WW2 dynamics that they played masterfully, they would have lost by a massive margin), and Mao was really not supposed to be able to remain powerful until his death despite the great leap and the success of reforms.
--> This makes me appreciate what it is like to have extremely strong social and political skills. I often see people’s scientific, mathematical or communication skills being praised, so it is interesting to remember that other skills exist too and have a high ceiling too. I am not looking forward to the scary worlds where AIs have these kinds of skills.
Debates are weird when people value authority more than arguments. Deng’s faction after Mao’s death banded behind the paper Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth to justify rolling out things Mao did not approve of (e.g. markets, pay as a function of output, elite higher education, …). I think it is worth a quick skim. It is very surprising how a text that defends a position so obvious to the Western reader does so by relying entirely on the canonical words and actions from Mao and Marx without making any argument on the merits. It makes you wonder if you have similar blind spots that will look silly to your future self.
Economic growth does not prevent social unrest. Just because the pie grows doesn’t mean you can easily make everybody happy. Some commentators expected the CCP to be significantly weakened by the 1989 protests, and without military actions that may have happened. 1989 was a period where China’s GDP had been growing by 10% for 10 years and would continue growing at that pace for another ten.
(Some) revolutions are horrific. They can go terribly wrong, both because of mistakes and conflicts:
Mistakes: the great leap is basically well explained by mistakes: Mao thought that engineers are useless and that production can increase without industrial centralization and without individual incentives. It turns out he was badly wrong. He mistakenly distrusted people who warned him that the reported numbers were inflated. And so millions died. Large changes are extremely risky when you don’t have good enough feedback loops, and you will easily cause catastrophe without bad intentions. (~according to the lectures)
Conflicts: the Cultural Revolution was basically Mao using his cult of personality to gain back power by leveraging the youth to bring down the old CCP officials and supporters while making sure the Army didn’t intervene (and then sending the youth that brought him back to power to the countryside) (~according to the lectures)
Technology is powerful: if you dismiss the importance of good scientists, engineers and other technical specialists, a bit like Mao did during the great leap, your dams will crumble, your steel will be unusable, and people will starve. I think this is an underrated fact (at least in France) that should make most people studying or working in STEM proud of what they are doing.
Societies can be different. It is easy to think that your society is the only one that can exist. But in the society that Deng inherited:
People were not rewarded based on their work output, but based on the total outcome of groups of 10k+ people
Factory managers were afraid of focusing too much on their factory’s production
Production targets were set not based on demands and prices, but based on state planning
Local authorities collected taxes and exploited their position to extract resources from poor peasants
...
Governments close to you can be your worst enemies. USSR-China’s relations were often much worse than US-China ones. This was very surprising to me. But I guess that having your neighbor push for reforms while you push for radicalism, dismantle a personality’s cult like the one you are hoping will survive centuries, and mass troops along your border because it is (justifiably?) afraid you’ll do something crazy really doesn’t make for great relationships. There is something powerful in the fear that an entity close to you sets a bad example for your people.
History is hard to predict. The author of the lectures ends them by making some terrible predictions about what would happen after 2010, such as expecting the ease of US-China relations and expecting China to become more democratic before 2020. He did not express much confidence in these predictions, but it is still surprising to see him so directionally wrong about where China’s future. The author also acknowledges past failed predictions, such as the outcome of the 1989 protests.
(There could have been lessons to be drawn about how great markets are, but these books are not great resources on the subject. In particular, they do not give elements to weigh the advantages of prosperity against the problems of markets (inflation, uncertainty, inequalities, changes in values, …) that caused so much turmoil under Deng and his successors. My guess is that it’s obviously net positive given how bad the situation was under Mao and how the USSR failed to create prosperity, but this is mostly going off vague historical vibes, not based on the data from these resources.)
Both the lectures and the book were a bit too long, especially the book (which is over 30 hours long). I still recommend the lectures if you want to have an overview of 20th-century Chinese history, and the book if you want to get a better sense of what it can look like to face a great political strategist.
A few thoughts from my political science classes and experience -
when people value authority more than arguments
It’s probably less about “authority”, but more about the desperate hope to reach stability, and the belief of unstable governments leading to instability, after many years of being colonized on the coasts, and war (ww 2 + civil war).
“Societies can be different”
is a way too compressed term to summarize the points you made. Some of them are political ideology issues, and others are resource issues, but not related to “culture” as could be included in “societies can be different” phrase.
Power imbalance and exploited positions:
This ultimately came from lack of resources compared with the total number of people. Unfortunately this still exist when a society is poor, or have very large economic disparity.
It would be very helpful to also take some reads at comparative governments (I enjoyed the AP classes back in high school in the US context), and other general political concepts to understand even deeper.
When it comes to blind spots, we do have areas like medicine where we don’t pay as a result of outcomes of medical treatment. That leads to silly things that when surgeons say that having 4k monitors will obviously improve the way they do surgery because it allows them to see details that they otherwise wouldn’t, without anyone running a clinical trial that shows 4k monitors to be superior, they don’t get adopted.
Evidence-based medicine is a strong dogma that prevents market economies from making the medical provider that creates the best outcomes win.
I listened to the book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China and to the lectures The Fall and Rise of China. I think it is helpful to understand this other big player a bit better, but I also found this biography and these lectures very interesting in themselves:
The skill ceiling on political skills is very high. In particular, Deng’s political skills are extremely impressive (according to what the book describes):
He dodges bullets all the time to avoid falling in total disgrace (e.g. by avoiding being too cocky when he is in a position of strength, by taking calculated risks, and by doing simple things like never writing down his thoughts)
He makes amazing choices of timing, content and tone in his letters to Mao
While under Mao, he solves tons of hard problems (e.g. reducing factionalism, starting modernization) despite the enormous constraints he worked under
After Mao’s death, he helps society make drastic changes without going head-to-head against Mao’s personality cult
Near his death, despite being out of office, he salvages his economic reforms through a careful political campaign
According to the lectures, Mao is also a political mastermind that pulls off coming and staying in power despite terrible odds. Communists were really not supposed to win the civil war (their army was minuscule, and if it wasn’t for weird WW2 dynamics that they played masterfully, they would have lost by a massive margin), and Mao was really not supposed to be able to remain powerful until his death despite the great leap and the success of reforms.
--> This makes me appreciate what it is like to have extremely strong social and political skills. I often see people’s scientific, mathematical or communication skills being praised, so it is interesting to remember that other skills exist too and have a high ceiling too. I am not looking forward to the scary worlds where AIs have these kinds of skills.
Debates are weird when people value authority more than arguments. Deng’s faction after Mao’s death banded behind the paper Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth to justify rolling out things Mao did not approve of (e.g. markets, pay as a function of output, elite higher education, …). I think it is worth a quick skim. It is very surprising how a text that defends a position so obvious to the Western reader does so by relying entirely on the canonical words and actions from Mao and Marx without making any argument on the merits. It makes you wonder if you have similar blind spots that will look silly to your future self.
Economic growth does not prevent social unrest. Just because the pie grows doesn’t mean you can easily make everybody happy. Some commentators expected the CCP to be significantly weakened by the 1989 protests, and without military actions that may have happened. 1989 was a period where China’s GDP had been growing by 10% for 10 years and would continue growing at that pace for another ten.
(Some) revolutions are horrific. They can go terribly wrong, both because of mistakes and conflicts:
Mistakes: the great leap is basically well explained by mistakes: Mao thought that engineers are useless and that production can increase without industrial centralization and without individual incentives. It turns out he was badly wrong. He mistakenly distrusted people who warned him that the reported numbers were inflated. And so millions died. Large changes are extremely risky when you don’t have good enough feedback loops, and you will easily cause catastrophe without bad intentions. (~according to the lectures)
Conflicts: the Cultural Revolution was basically Mao using his cult of personality to gain back power by leveraging the youth to bring down the old CCP officials and supporters while making sure the Army didn’t intervene (and then sending the youth that brought him back to power to the countryside) (~according to the lectures)
Technology is powerful: if you dismiss the importance of good scientists, engineers and other technical specialists, a bit like Mao did during the great leap, your dams will crumble, your steel will be unusable, and people will starve. I think this is an underrated fact (at least in France) that should make most people studying or working in STEM proud of what they are doing.
Societies can be different. It is easy to think that your society is the only one that can exist. But in the society that Deng inherited:
People were not rewarded based on their work output, but based on the total outcome of groups of 10k+ people
Factory managers were afraid of focusing too much on their factory’s production
Production targets were set not based on demands and prices, but based on state planning
Local authorities collected taxes and exploited their position to extract resources from poor peasants
...
Governments close to you can be your worst enemies. USSR-China’s relations were often much worse than US-China ones. This was very surprising to me. But I guess that having your neighbor push for reforms while you push for radicalism, dismantle a personality’s cult like the one you are hoping will survive centuries, and mass troops along your border because it is (justifiably?) afraid you’ll do something crazy really doesn’t make for great relationships. There is something powerful in the fear that an entity close to you sets a bad example for your people.
History is hard to predict. The author of the lectures ends them by making some terrible predictions about what would happen after 2010, such as expecting the ease of US-China relations and expecting China to become more democratic before 2020. He did not express much confidence in these predictions, but it is still surprising to see him so directionally wrong about where China’s future. The author also acknowledges past failed predictions, such as the outcome of the 1989 protests.
(There could have been lessons to be drawn about how great markets are, but these books are not great resources on the subject. In particular, they do not give elements to weigh the advantages of prosperity against the problems of markets (inflation, uncertainty, inequalities, changes in values, …) that caused so much turmoil under Deng and his successors. My guess is that it’s obviously net positive given how bad the situation was under Mao and how the USSR failed to create prosperity, but this is mostly going off vague historical vibes, not based on the data from these resources.)
Both the lectures and the book were a bit too long, especially the book (which is over 30 hours long). I still recommend the lectures if you want to have an overview of 20th-century Chinese history, and the book if you want to get a better sense of what it can look like to face a great political strategist.
A few thoughts from my political science classes and experience -
It’s probably less about “authority”, but more about the desperate hope to reach stability, and the belief of unstable governments leading to instability, after many years of being colonized on the coasts, and war (ww 2 + civil war).
is a way too compressed term to summarize the points you made. Some of them are political ideology issues, and others are resource issues, but not related to “culture” as could be included in “societies can be different” phrase.
This ultimately came from lack of resources compared with the total number of people. Unfortunately this still exist when a society is poor, or have very large economic disparity.
It would be very helpful to also take some reads at comparative governments (I enjoyed the AP classes back in high school in the US context), and other general political concepts to understand even deeper.
When it comes to blind spots, we do have areas like medicine where we don’t pay as a result of outcomes of medical treatment. That leads to silly things that when surgeons say that having 4k monitors will obviously improve the way they do surgery because it allows them to see details that they otherwise wouldn’t, without anyone running a clinical trial that shows 4k monitors to be superior, they don’t get adopted.
Evidence-based medicine is a strong dogma that prevents market economies from making the medical provider that creates the best outcomes win.