Carlos Oya

A while back, I had a great conversation with @michaeljswalker about China’s development model on his Novara Media show. My former PhD supervisor, Ha-Joon Chang, watched it and had some interesting feedback on capitalist versus communist development models in East Asia. In the conversation with Michael, I made a qualitative distinction between China (more communist-oriented) and the East Asian developmental states that boomed economically before China (more capitalist-oriented). Ha-Joon suggests that the East Asian developmental states were more inspired by communism and Marxism than Michael and I suggested. Here’s part of our conversation, which Ha-Joon has given me permission to share. HA-JOON: Hi Jostein, I’ve listened to your Novara Media podcast. Excellent. Just one thing: the relationship between (state) capitalism and communism in East Asia is rather more complicated than you and Michael suggest. First of all, many of the leaders of state capitalism were either communists when they were young or at least strongly influenced by communist ideas. The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) were ‘brothers’ with the Chinese Communist Party. The ‘Three Principles of the People’ of Dr Sun Yat-sen (founder of the KMT) clearly state that all the key industries (heavy industry, banking, infrastructure) should be state-owned, which is why Taiwan had such a high proportion of SOEs in GDP. Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and the second president of Taiwan, was very left-wing, having been trained at a party school in the Soviet Union, where he was friends with Deng Xiaoping. When he was president, he promoted more progressive policies, pursuing a more planned approach to development and becoming politically more open. Our General Park was a communist when he was younger. His brother was a well-known communist, considered one of the leaders of a major communist uprising in South Korea (then officially under US trusteeship) in 1946. Park Chung-hee himself was sentenced to death for his involvement in a communist mutiny in 1948 but saved himself by handing over a list containing the names of about 200 of his comrades. Kim Jong-pil, his nephew-in-law and for a while Park’s number two, is also said to have been a communist when he was young. Of course, when Park came to power, he and his military junta had to declare that ‘anti-communism is the first principle of our government’ so that the US would accept them, and they violently suppressed left-wing political groups in the name of anti-communism (whether or not those groups were really communist). But many of their policy ideas were strongly influenced by communist practices, if not necessarily by the theories of Karl Marx: five-year plans, the nationalisation of all banks, the New Village Movement (which adopted the Maoist idea of making peasants build local infrastructure during the fallow season), and so on. Many Japanese government officials were communists when they were young. In Japan, unlike in Korea (I don’t know about Taiwan in this respect), communism was NOT illegal, so until the 1990s the majority of economists in Japanese universities were Marxists (although most of them belonged to the Uno School, a rather scholastic version of Marxist economics). ME: So, to synthesise your thoughts here, is your argument that the developmental state paradigm was more communist- or Marxist-inspired than Michael and I acknowledged? HA-JOON: In a nutshell, yes. But the bigger point is that everyone’s policy ideas had very complex origins and interactions. ME: Okay, so how would you then defend communism and Marxism as anti-fascist ideologies, given that many have described both the KMT and General Park as fascists? HA-JOON: It depends on one’s definition of fascism. If you define it as the ideas of Mussolini and Hitler, I would say the KMT and Park were closer to communism than to fascism. If you define fascism as anti-trade-union authoritarianism, then they were more fascist than communist.