Transcript of the Interview with Akio Takahara China Boom Project, Asia Society 2009 Akio Takahara Professor of Public Policy Industry: Academics Akio Takahara teaches contemporary Chinese politics at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Public Policy. His first visit to China was in 1983 as a post-graduate student at the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies. In the late 1980's he lived and worked in China as a researcher at the Consultate-General of Japan in Hong Kong. Over the years, he has also held visiting positions at the Embassy of Japan in the People's Republic of China and at Harvard University. ----------------------------- Transcript Interviewee: Akio Takahara Interviewer: Orville Schell Date: May 28, 2009 Place: Fukuoka, Japan Boom_Akio Takahara_Interview-1 00:00:09 I'm Akio Takahara, I teach contemporary Chinese politics at the University of Tokyo. My first visit to China was in 1983, I was a post-graduate student at IDS University of Sussex. I've always been interested in China as a child in Japan. We read a lot of the Chinese classics, the Japanese version of them. And I was interested in development, China's a developing country. So I went to England to study, I went into China research from the viewpoint of development, what can China do to develop faster? But I did it from the political science point of view. And there in England I was doing research on the politics of wage policy in China. 1
00:01:25 Surely it didn't come to my mind that China was actually able to develop so fast. And from my political point of view, the ideological conflict was still going on. And socialism is of course much more alive than it is now. So China was really trying hard to find its own path of development and the actual development that took place, after that especially the 1992 sea change that was made began seriously to pursue the road of marketization. That really changed China dramatically and that was not imaginable in 1993. clip 1-cultural revolution 00:02:34 Actually I do think the cultural revolution, the role of the cultural revolution in making the Chinese leaders very bold in their pursuit of reform, that was quite significant. Unlike what is often said by the Chinese leaders now the ten years during the cultural revolution, actually the scale of the economy grew very fast. As far as industrial production is concerned, for instance, in the 10 years from 1965 to 1975 the annual average growth rate was over 10%. But because of the increase in population because of the lag in technological development, the standard of living of the people did not go up and technological standards were quite limited. 00:03:30 So that situation, I think really, ironically pushed the leadership very hard towards making very bold decisions and making a very big leap compared to countries like Russia and Soviet Union and the Eastern European nations at that time. China was able to move very fast, faster than those countries. clip 1.1 00:04:20 That's not what I meant and I'm not sure whether that aspect of the cultural revolution had any positive impact later, but rather the sheer increase in the number of youth who were unable to find jobs for instance, so the government had to find a way to provide jobs to these people and the only way they could find was to allow them to setup of these individual businesses and that was certainly outside the realm of the planning system. So, structurally, China was ready to grow out of the plan. I think that was the positive result as it were of the cultural revolution. clip 2-DXP 00:05:10 2
I don't think it was necessarily, did it have to be Deng Xiaopeng? I'm not sure. The orthodox story, the version that the current Chinese Communist Party is because Deng Xiaopeng won the struggle with Hua Guofeng and Hua GuoFeng was the conservative person wanting to continue the way Mao Zedong had led the nation. But I think we are beginning to see evidence, to dig out evidence that Hua Guofeng himself was not necessarily against reforms. But, looking at the way Deng Xiaopeng fought the struggle with the real conservatives, as it were, or the people who did not want marketization, as the content of reform. Maybe it was only Deng Xiaopeng who was able to win the battle with the ideological conservatives. So in that sense, Deng Xiaopeng's contribution was very large. 00:06:30 Let me see, I think if we use a general term, deregulation, to a certain extent, like they began to implement price reform. Though that came slowly. And decentralization mainly in those days to the localities and not necessarily to the enterprises, but the enterprises also compared to the previous period had more autonomy comparatively. So and we can say that happened in a more deeper way in the countryside, the people's communes were broken up. And the peasant households now were responsible for the performance that they made. So this unleashing of people's initiatives, individual initiatives that certainly played a big role. clip 3-Japan's role 00:07:35 And also, the opening up aspect. Opening up first and relying on the overseas Chinese and there was a great amount of help from the Japanese. In the 80's I think these two factors as far as the opening up of the economy was concerned, were very important. clip 3.2 00:08:00 First Japan was seen as a model of modernization. Deng Xiaopeng visited Japan first in 1978 and many many public leaders followed and they were greatly interested in the way that Japanese businesses were run, the Japanese industrial policies. Sometime after that, Japan became the model of China. So that was one way. And the second way is, from the late 1970s the Japanese government decided to provide ODA to China, and China accepted it, as far as Japanese government was concerned they did not want China to go back to the Cultural revolution days and they thought that by supporting the reform and opening policies, by supporting China's economic growth, they were actually supporting the politicians, the people in China, the Chinese leaders who were trying to push forward the direction of China into further reforms and opening, the Japanese businesses, thirdly, also played a large role because many of the Japanese business leaders at that time, had personal experiences with China before and during the war and a lot of the Japanese leaders felt remorse about the Japanese deeds during and before the war and they wanted 3
to compensate for the fact that that has also played a big role in Japan's cooperation with China. 00:10:10 That's quite true, perhaps part of the reason is because it wasn't really reported in China, what the Japanese or the Japanese politicians really thought about China or Chinese growth and secondly, at that time, the Chinese were less confident then, or not so confident then that they can one day grow up and maintain its autonomy against big economic powers like Japan or the United States. So when they saw that Japanese products were becoming dominant in certain parts of the market. So I can understand it but if the Japanese had done the PR work better than things may have been different than what actually happened. 00:11:27 Then I was in Tokyo, I wasn't quite sure but from July 1989 I worked in Hong Kong as a researcher for several years at the consulate general of Japan, and I was watching China very carefully and I did sense that things were going the other way around. People who were against the idea of marketization did have the upper hand in making economic policy decisions. I could see that so when I went back to Japan in June 1991, then there was this sudden tour by Deng Xiaopeng, I thought that DXP was forced to make that attempt on his side to reverse the tide. clip 2.2 00:12:32 It's hard to make an assessment of these historical incidents, people seem to talk about the French Revolution, but I think that DXP move in 1992, which did result in increasing the pace of China's growth and increasing the pace of marketization, has brought certain dividends to the Chinese people, but there are of course the bright side and darker side of anything and some people might argue that it was the beginning of a lot of problems like increasing income gaps or the degradation of the environment and so on, but I tend to think that up to now many Chinese are actually grateful that DXP made that move and turned the tide back again towards reform. 00:14:20 One is further marketization, further deregulation and the loosening up of people's greed. People were allowed to be greedy. People felt free to pursue their own material benefits, and that's given a lot of force in society. Two, maybe relatedly the Chinese Party have been very flexible about their ideology, it's actually redefined its ideology, it's redefined socialism. So this flexibility I think can be counted as another factor. And last but not least, the introduction of foreign capital and foreign technology I think these three factors can be cited as big ones. 4
00:15:57 For instance foreign interest in China is big, its large potential as a huge market and the level of and the amount of surface labor for instance, the market the labor power, these are so attractive that whenever a foreign firm negotiated with the Chinese authorities, the Chinese authorities could win very good conditions compared to the other developing nations. So this geographical factor I think is a very important one. ---------------- Akio Takahara Bio: Akio Takahara teaches contemporary Chinese politics at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Public Policy. His first visit to China was in 1983 as a post-graduate student at the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies. In the late 1980's he lived and worked in China as a researcher at the Consultate-General of Japan in Hong Kong. Over the years, he has also held visiting positions at the Embassy of Japan in the People's Republic of China and at Harvard University. (Source: http://www.pp.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/faculty/professors/akiotakahara.htm) *The full-length video of this interview is available in the online repository of Rutgers University Libraries: http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu 5